Interview with Robert A.W. Briggs

 ROBERT A.W. BRIGGS

"My name is Geoff Ellett and on this date, the 26th of February, 1980, I have the pleasure of interviewing Robert Briggs and he is going to tell us about events and experiences in the County of Strathcona in the early pioneer days. This interview is recorded under the auspices of the Senior Citizen's Advisory Committee of the County and its sub-committee for Oral Pioneer History."

"I am Robert Briggs and I will give you some of the pioneer history of the Briggs family. My grandfather, Thomas Briggs was born on August 21, 1836, at Headhouse Farm, near Whitby, Yorkshire, and married Isabella Jane Coverdale in 1856. They later farmed the Headhouse Farm where my father, Charles, was born in 1863, the youngest of their four children; the others being Herbert, Jane-Ann and Andrew.

They decided to immigrate to Canada and sailed from Liverpool, May 11, 1871, on the mail steamship, Astoria of the Allan Lines that used both steam and sail. They landed at Quebec City on May 22, a voyage of eleven days, at three o'clock in the afternoon and left the same evening on railway cars and arrived in Chicago on the evening of May 26. From Chicago they must have taken a lake boat to Owen Sound, Ontario. They located at Hepworth, near Wiarton, a small stopping place eleven miles from Owen Sound. Here they lived for seven years. Their log house was two-storey and they looked after the post office and a small store in one end of the house. One interesting fact about their trip to Canada, was that they converted all their money into gold coins, had two leather belts made into which they slipped the coins and wore the belts under their clothes.

The country around Wiarton was very heavily timbered with hardwood forests and there was a fair amount of lumbering being done. At the end of seven years my grandparents returned to England with the two youngest boys, stayed one year and they returned to America. This time stopping for part of a year near Detroit, Michigan, and then went farther west to Lincoln, Nebraska. There the four of them all worked on farms until they got established on a rented farm. They rented this farm around twenty years with the main crops being corn and prairie hay. They bought and fattened Texas cattle most of the winters.

My father was married to Mary Sommers in 1895 in Lincoln, Nebraska. Her father, Ulrich Sommers had immigrated to America from Berne, Switzerland, in 1849. In 1900, my grandfather came to Edmonton to look over the country. It must have looked favorable to him because in 1901, my grandfather and his son, Charles -my father ­with a family of three arrived in Edmonton on the twenty-fourth of May. They traveled in a settler's car with just a few household effects. They stayed in the Immigration Hall a few blocks from the C.P.R. Strathcona Station. My father and grandfather did a lot of walking in the next few weeks looking for any suitable farms to buy or lease and evidently got lost a few times. So, my mother and three children stayed in Immigration Hall until a farm was found. They were able to buy 430 acres on the north half of Sec. 13-52-24 W4 which an English family by the name of Rose were wanting to sell and move back to England. This man later visited us on our farm in 1928 when he came out to visit his daughter living at Irma.

My dad, not having enough money, was able to secure a loan through the pioneer law firm of Rutherford and Jamieson from the Lister Bros. In the first few years their nearest neighbors in any direction were a mile away as this farm had, at first, been established by Torn Stanton who built a small frame barn and lived in a loft over the cattle and horses stabled below. The house was frame with two bedrooms in the top storey and an attached log kitchen. The other buildings were of log construction. Needing more buildings and being short of money, my father, along with the neighbors living south of us, Herman Graunke, Simon and George Place, and their father, they traveled west to the Saskatchewan River and up to Big Island, where the Stewart sawmill was operating. Here they cut and hauled logs to the sawmill and after a week of cutting they would haul loads of lumber down the river to Edmonton for the company or loads for themselves. The Place family had worked in lumber woods in Wisconsin before corning to Alberta and were experienced woodsmen. Incidentally, Mr. Place was one of the first councillors in the Local Improvement Area and when criticized by others for fixing up a mud hole in his road to Strathcona promptly replied that,'It was a pretty poor pig that wouldn't root in front of his own door first'

Another incident which he used to recall was that he had left in the forenoon without leaving any wood cut for Mrs. Place to cook dinner. When he returned for dinner he found that she had pushed a long pole into the kitchen window with the end feeding directly into the firebox of the kitchen stove. Quite an emphatic reminder that he had neglected to do his chores!!

With hard work the number of acres of cultivated land expanded each year and they often hired a man to help out. There was considerable upland and slough hay to put up each year and all the grain was stacked each fall. There were several steam operated threshing machines in the area, east and south of Edmonton from 1895 on and each one seemed to have an area staked out on a gentleman's agreement basis and they pretty well took care of all the farms in that area. Up until, probably 1919, Shottes, Fuhrop and Jantz in that order took care of our threshing with their steam outfits and all this was stack threshing up until that time. We always had to provide fuel for the steam engine consisting of a cord or two of dry wood and possibly a wagon box load of coal, which was hauled from the Clover Bar mines. Any of the coal left-over was used in the house. Wood for the steam engine was cut in four foot lengths and was either cut smaller for house use or left piled for the next year. Steam threshing time was always fascinating for me as a boy. Sometimes we could hear as many as four outfits threshing as sound carried far in the still fall air. There was always some rivalry between the outfits and the engineers usually tooted the steam engine whistle as soon as they had steam up in the morning; to let everyone know that they were ready to thresh! And during the day you could always hear the whistles giving the various signals -so many toots to warn the waterman that they were running low on water as he had to go to any water source he could get to, either sloughs or creeks, to fill up his water tank. Other signals were for fuel or the need of a grain wagon with empty sacks as all the grain was sacked at the machine, either in the wagon boxes or on the ground. And the farmer had to take care of the grain and this made it necessary to exchange help with neighbors.

The threshing crews all knew throughout the years where they would get the best meals and the places to spread out their bedrolls. It must have been quite a chore for my mother at threshing time getting all the food prepared for the family and all the crew which could vary anywhere from ten to fourteen men. It must have taken a lot of preparation ahead of time as they never knew for what meal a threshing crew would arrive. The result was the threshers would often be fed very freshly killed beef. I know of one neighbor lady who always baked dozens of pies ahead of time. Dried peaches and apples were always available and kept on hand in those early years.

Some of the first threshing machines in the area were hand-fed machines with a straw carrier at the rear. These were run by horsepower using six to eight horses or a portable steam engine. Then came the larger separators with automatic feeders and straw blowers and operated by a steam tractor. As kids we had to watch out for some of the separator men as they would often grab your cap, throw it in the rear of the separator and out it would go with the straw and, of course, you had to climb up in the loose straw to find it .

My parents must have had a difficult time the first year on the Strathcona farm. It rained a lot during the summer -1901 was evidently a very wet year. Mosquitoes were bad, the well was no good so they had to water the stock at nearby sloughs and haul water in barrels to supply the house.

Our house was rather small for the family since the first year included my parents, three children, my grandfather and a nephew of seventeen years. The eldest son of six years died in January 1902 of typhoid fever -quite a loss for the family. He is buried in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery south of the city. There were very few people at the funeral service, only one or two neighbors. They knew very few people -it was very cold and some neighbors were probably afraid of contracting the fever. It was a very trying time for my mother, away from her own relatives, and in a new and different country. The first child born in the family always seems a little more special so this made it a bit more of a tragedy. My grandmother passed away in 1893 and was buried in Lincoln, Nebraska, and about two years after they came to Edmonton my grandfather remarried and built another house to live in on the same farm.

The schools have always been a very important part of every pioneer district and the East Edmonton School District was no exception. Our home was one and a half miles from the school and to give some of the historical details of the East Edmonton School District as given to me by W.F. Hawkins who had the original debenture issue as he was a member of the board that applied to Regina for permission to build the school along with two other early settlers, pioneer settlers, in the area, W.H. Stevens and James Inkster. The East Edmonton School District was organized by charter in 1889. The first school was built in 1892 and named by the pioneers of the district. The significance of the name being 'east of Edmonton'. The boundaries of the original district were; north boundary, North Saskatchewan river; eastern boundary, two miles east of the line between ranges 23 and 24 -now 34th street -the southern boundary, north boundary of the Papachase Indian Reserve and the western boundary was Mill Creek.

When the Calgary-Edmonton railway reached Edmonton in 1891, a G.R.F. Kirkpatrick opened a branch of the Imperial Bank in Edmonton and lent the East Edmonton School District $600.00 on the number one debenture for building and furnishing a school which was built in 1892 in the geographical center of the district, SW 26-52-24 W 4. The builder of this first school was Kenneth McLeod. The boundaries of the school district were severely curtailed in later years on the north, east and west but the southern boundary remained the same. This school was used as a school until around 1909 or '10 and then moved by teams of horses a half mile south where, with additions, served as a residence for the John Lang family. It was replaced by a new and larger school with a belfry and a bell in it. Unluckily a faulty furnace caused this building to burn down around 1912. This caused a problem for the school board. They had to provide a school as it was in the late winter. There was a fair sized school barn so they decided to use it as a school. The one window in it needed replacing and, as the story goes, there was nothing to measure it with. Coming to the rescue one trustee, Rice Sheppard promptly put his foot up by the window saying that his foot was exactly one foot long and that settled the issue! The walls were lined up and a stove put in and the children were soon back to school -probably to their dismay! A new school was built that summer.

Shortly after the tum of the century many large coal mines were gradually built up along the river-Keith & Fulton, Great West, Black Diamond, Byers, and a few others. A small settlement of miner's houses appeared and there was a need for another school. The board decided to move the East Edmonton School south on the Wye Road on the NW 1/4 ofsection 24, Range 24, West 4 M. and another school was built on the Baseline on the comer of whatis now 34th Street, and the Baseline road. It was usually referred to as the Baseline School or East Edmonton North. About 1917 there was need for a larger school on the Baseline. A two-room brick school was built and the old small frame school was moved the two miles south and put near the East Edmonton Wye Road School. I will refer to the small school building again.

The East Edmonton School District continued to have the four school rooms for many years. The board of trustees, always three in number, had their work cut out for them with the renovations, hiring teachers, arranging boarding places and many other duties. The odd year with attendance fluctuating the East Edmonton-Wye Road was cut back to one teacher. fm not sure of the date but about 1930 the larger East Edmonton-Wye Road school burned to the ground and was replaced by quite a modern two-room stucco school. At this time the old small school -always referred to as the little school -was sold to the Fultonvale School District east on the Cooking Lake Trail and saw use there for a number of years. The East Edmonton School ­Baseline was used until the late fifties and the Wye Road School until about 1965.

I have said little about the trustees. To be elected to the school board was always regarded as important and most annual meetings were very well attended and many of them, the trustees, were really dedicated to selecting the best teachers obtainable and providing for the necessary repairs and programs and sports equipment at the schools.

The names of the trustees that I can recall would be James Inkster, Rice Shepherd, William Stevens, W.F. Hawkins, Harry Fulton, Dan Fulton, D.W. Warner, Charles Briggs, Fred Herbert, Dave Christie, W.B. Chamberlain, Metcalfe, William Lang, Jim Anderson and my brother Ralph Briggs in later years. I was a member of the last school board when the school was closed down and that area taken over by the Edmonton Public School Board about 1965. I might say here, that the Edmonton School Board -for reasons unknown -had a beautiful useful, well-built three room building, complete with all facilities, demolished. Certainly a loss to any district in the city. East Edmonton School District was truly fortunate in that one of the early settlers, Edward Gee, took on the job of school; secretary around 1905 and did an excellent job until about 1930 when R.P. Gibb took on the job. The school served the district in many ways. The election polls were always in the school, political meetings, church services, social gatherings, dances .... one school board in the 1920's must have been all Methodists because they allowed no dances in the school. School desks probably did take a beating when they were stacked up after a concert or a box social in order to clear the space for dancing. Anyway, that particular school board relented enough to allow dancing but with the restriction that the dances close at 12:00 o' clock. ..YUKK! In our district the dances usually, either did close at 1:30 or 2:00 o'clock. Anyway, the unfortunate janitor was given orders to blow out the coal oil lamps at 12:00 o'clock. This he proceeded to do and almost caused a riot! The result of this episode was immediate action on the part of an already active young people's club to spark all the interested families in the district into the consideration of building a community hall.

This interesting turn of events in the district I will come back to later.

Our East Edmonton School District never did have a church as one focal point. The religions of the early settlers were as varied as their nationalities or places of origin. In the early years they had the school, ministers from Edmonton representing the Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian took turns providing church services and there were usually fairly well attended. There were no Catholic families in the area until after the First World War. About 1912 the Avonmore Presbyterian Church built a mission hall on the comer of the Davies farm and was called Davies Mission. This was on the comer of what is now 50th Street and 76th Avenue. The student minister, a Mr. Evers, conducted services there along with the Sunday School. I know I went there in 1913, '14 and possibly '15. It was later moved into the city and formed an extension to the Avonmore Church now located on 79th Street and 81st A venue. It was there in the Davies Mission that I saw my first picture slides -it was called a 'magic lantern show'.

Many of the district families did attend churches, perhaps irregularly, due to roads and weather, either in the City, or in later years, the Salisbury Church. We attended the Avonmore Church intermittently throughout the years and it was the ministers from that church who performed the wedding ceremonies for three members of our family.

To get back to the Briggs family. When I was born in 1909 I completed the family of five, then living, children, consisting of Ralph, Isabella, Ada, George and myself. When Ralph first started school at, probably six years of age, he may have been taken occasionally in the bad weather, but usually he had to walk. The first mile was all by himself and it was pretty tough to break a trail in the snow. The road south ended at our farm and was that way for many years. At a very young age of eleven or twelve he took over the janitor duties at the school going extra early to get the fire going and warm the school. He was probably paid the princely sum of about twenty-five cents a week!

The names of some of the early teachers were Dan Currie, James Adam -who, later, became a professor in English and later in Engineering at the University of Alberta from its founding until his retirement after 1930. Mrs. George Sheppy a lady teacher boarded, complete with her organ, at my grandfather's house. Some others were Mr. Rideout and Miss Johnston. Some of the teachers boarded at homes in the districts, others lived in the city and came out every day by horse and buggy, walked, or, as roads improved, by car. Some of them batched in teacherages -two of which were some distance from the schools and arranged for but not paid for by the school board.

My father, Charles Briggs, must have always had an eye and a liking for good horses. I can recall my mother mentioning, on their Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary, that Charles had taken her home from their wedding in a buggy to which were hitched two of the most beautiful cream colored horses, the likes of which she had never seen again after they had sold them to move to Alberta. So, in their first years in Strathcona he again secured some good looking mares and raised some nice horses. We still have a green ribbon on which the gold lettering reads, 'First Provincial Fair, Edmonton, 1906 ­1bird Prize'. This fair was held down in the river flats. The family had driven into the fair for the day and entered the team of horses in one of the classes. They probably looked pretty good because in all the years of his life, on his farm, f m sure that a horse was never harnessed until after it had been thoroughly curried and brushed. The work horses in the field or off the road were brushed down if sweaty or dusty.

My family visited fairly often the Brewer family who lived one mile west as the trail leading into the city passed by their farm. This man Brewer seemed to have an ongoing competition throughout the years with another neighbor. When the visitor was leaving he would usually manage to take something belonging to his host, quite often a better buggy whip -always present in the cutter or buggy -or it could be a fork from the manure site or barn. I wonder if they finally ended up even? Anyway, the Brewer family moved out to near Pigeon Lake west of Wetaskiwin. Our parents with three children drove out there in the middle of the winter with the team and sleigh to visit them for a few days. It would have to be a round trip of well over one hundred miles.

In 1912 my father bought a team of black drivers, about four years old, from a neighbor, Joe Bishop. Itis a matter of record that Joe Bishop, perhaps more than once, had driven this team to a homestead near Viking, that he was proving up on. This trip in a buggy loaded with supplies and two people was probably done in a day and the distance would be around seventy miles over rough roads, some smooth trails and the many hills through the Cooking Lake and Beaver Hills country. This team was used on our farm for riding, driving, single or double, for a number of years and a fair amount of field work for the next twenty years. For many years they were kept shod with steel shoes the year around. Here I would say that Joe Bishop was an excellent horseman and throughout the years raised many race horses and drivers but never another black team like he sold to us! In 1923 my father bought a team of purebred Oydesdale mares. From these, many colts were raised until in 1930 to 1945 they were using about fourteen horses in field work and almost all were Clydes that we had raised from colts. Starting in 1930 due to low prices for farm produce many farmers stopped using tractors for field work and the demand for horses increased. There were good stallions available in our area. By that time we had more mares to breed and some Clyde stallions were shipped in from Salmon Arm, B.C. and they had one traveling in our area, stopping at our place about every week during the breeding season. In 1935 or 1936 a group of interested breeders, including Toane Bros., Billy Buchan, Charles Ellett, the Briggs and others, formed a stallion club to make sure a stallion was in the area. This club bought a very good blue roan Clyde stallion from Salmon Arm, B.C This horse was used for many years and finally, when the club was through with him he was bought by Ralph Briggs to use on the farm.

The horse population increased rapidly in the course of the next few years, also more farmers were acquiring tractors so there was surplus of good horses. A committee was formed to arrange a horse sale at the Exhibition Grounds. Some of the members were Cyrus Wilkinson, Clover Bar; Clayton McGhan, Cliff Toane, Ralph Briggs, and a few others. I can remember acting as a clerk at the first sale. In 1935 we entered some of our Oyde horses in the Edmonton Spring Horse show. We won a few ribbons and it was quite an experience showing the horses.

During the period of 1929 until 1942, thirteen plowing matches were arranged by the South Edmonton District Agricultural Society. They were all successful with large numbers of competitors. The largest were forty-two entries and that plowing match was held on the Harold Wonnacott farm and there were only ten or twelve tractor entries, the rest being horse outfits ranging from two-horse teams on walking plows to three-bottom plows or four-bottom plows with eight horses. At these matches we won many prizes for the best dressed horses but not all 'firsts' as the competition was pretty keen. The credit for many of the early matches can be laid to the hard working committees under Clyde Gillies, president, and match superintendent, James Allan. This society was active until 1941-'42 when gasoline was rationed and most of the young men had enlisted in the army, causing a complete social change in the district During those years, mostly in the 'thirties', besides the plowing matches which were a great social event -besides the competition -at which the group of directors and their wives operated the booth which helped to create funds for the society. Another project of the Agricultural Society was the purchase of a portable seed grain cleaner which was used up until 1950. Two or three successful seed shows were held in Strathcona and at least two community auction sales were held. During the winter the entertainment committee arranged dances which were well attended. Previous to the portable Society grain cleaner we used, first, a hand-operated fanning mill to clean our seed grain and later a larger one run by a small gas engine. We used a hand-cranked fanning mill owned in partnership with our neighbor, Harry Fulton and it took a lot of time and work to clean the seed grain in those years. My father was always quite particular about using clean seed grain and always treated it for smut with formaldehyde. My mother took care of a very large garden, growing a wide variety of vegetables. There was almost always flower beds near the house and, in later years, many perennials were planted out The Gratrix family, neighbors, came from Ontario and brought bees with them which they wintered over. I can recall my very first taste of honey from their hives and it had the honeycomb floating in it It was many years later before bee­keeping became at all popular.

Father often exchanged help with the Gratrix boys in the first years and I still have the gamb stick that Alf Gratrix made from an old piece of hardwood. It served well in butchering hogs for over fifty years and is still sound.

We usually had some home-cured hams and bacon on hand. In the summer they were

wrapped and stored in a bin of grain and usually came through with very little wastage. Butchering a beef was usually a problem. It had to be done late in the fall and pieces packed in boxes in an ice-house or a large box of snow. This was okay until spring when the weather warmed up.

All five of us children attended the East Edmonton School and we always walked except the odd time when we would get a ride on the way home.

In 1912 there was a land sale boom in the city and with the high price of land our father and grandfather decided to sell the farm and break up the partnership they had. Enough land was sold to pay my grandfather his interest in the farm and he moved to the city. We moved to an acreage nearer the city and lived there for a little over two years before we came back to the farm. During this period my father took on the job of road work and road boss, and under his supervision many of the roads were opened up for travel in the surrounding area. Sloughs were corduroyed and covered with dirt, ditching done here and there. Previous to this most of the trails were around sloughs holding water, across country, not even on the proper road allowance. The land was all being fenced up and in many places if the people followed the old trails there were a lot of gates to open and shut. It was difficult to persuade some people from taking short cuts across the farms on their way to the town. Some neighbors were in the habit of over-indulging in the saloons of Strathcona and they had no thoughts of shutting gates on their, sometimes, wild trips home! In later years you could always spot where the old wire gates had been on the fence lines.

Living adjoining the city limits for this period, the children of school age attended the nearby schools in the city. Rutherford, Ritchie, King Edward and later Strathcona High School.

In 1913 our parents took the entire family on a trip back to the mid-western states to visit my mother's family who, by that time, were living in several different states. It was all by train and two trunks were taken as we were away most of the summer holidays.

1914 saw us moving back to the farm and living in our grandfather's house, the old house, until the addition to the original house was completed. It took all summer to get the house finished. It must have been quite a change for my mother to move into a large roomy house with hot air furnace, large concrete cistern to hold rain water for washing, complete with a pump. There was still the necessity of bringing in cooking and drinking water every day. It was another three or four years before a deep well was drilled and the water pumped with a gas engine. The water from this well was always taken to the house in eight gallon milk cans. It was almost 1948 when the Calgary Power was installed, the water was piped into my parent's house and the sewage system was installed. The interior of this house was plastered with the rough finished plaster. Several rooms were papered and the others calcimined. Lighting was with coal oil lamps until Aladdin lamps were used and these gave an excellent light if properly cared for.

The countryside in our area was originally a mixture of high and low land, many sloughs and quite a few open areas between the groves of large black and white poplar, and many willow bluffs. Before they got pastured out in the next three years these open areas had vetch and peavine growing in them,, sometimes to a height of four and five feet, and this provided excellent feed for the cattle. There were large spruce groves on the farm originally and from these, log buildings had been built. In 1935 we were able to again cut logs for lumber in these swamps. Our farm had a high ridge running across part of it and so the farm was named 'Highview Farm'.

In the first few years there was always the danger of prairie and forest fires coming across the farm. The last came across from three miles east in 1911. This one burned one haystack and pretty well ruined a snake fence made of logs built around the hog pasture. It was getting pretty close to the farm buildings. All the land was broken up with horses and breaking plow until 1930 when a tractor breaker was hired. Pretty well all the boundary fences were built of the tamarack posts and barbed wire. The posts had to be bought and hauled from other areas as we had no tamarack growing on the farm but we did have a good supply of willow which we used for temporary fencing along with poplar. For many years there were ducks around all summer, prairie chickens around most of the winter as well and always partridge in the spruce swamps. There were muskrat houses in all the larger sloughs. We always had garter snakes, ground squirrels and, of course, coyotes. Along with ducks there was a full range of waterbirds every year. Most of these birds decreased, I think, in numbers as the fields got larger and the sloughs got drained. Two creeks close to our farm were Fulton Creek and the large Mill Creek. Both of these were usually dry by freeze-up but could be dangerous in the spring break-up because they sometimes were as large as small rivers for a few weeks.

It is a wonder that the children ever got home from school on time because there were always birds and nests to look at on the way home and gophers to chase and muskrats to scare off the odd log in the sloughs.

For many years the mail was picked up at the South Edmonton post office but about 1916 the rural mail delivery was started out the Wye Road and we got our mail three times a week in a box a mile from the house on the Wye Road. We shared a mailbox with the neighbors, the Harry Fulton family, for more than twelve years. This was Rural Route 2 and that route with many changes is still in the rural mail service. There have not been many different mail carriers in the last sixty odd years because the last two carriers, Grant Hall and Ralph Stanley, each served us about fifteen years each.

The first varieties of wheat sown and grown on the farm was the Red Fife and usually a two-rowed barley which could be used as green feed for livestock if it didn't mature. Marquis wheat soon took over from Red Fife, and Banner and Victory variety of oats took over from some of the early and unnamed varieties that had been used. These varieties have latterly been dropped in order to take advantage of the rust resistant, early maturing, high yielding varieties that have been made available to the farmers. In the pioneer days there was always a market for hay in the city. Timothy hay was, and still is, in demand for horse feed, so we usually had a field sowed with Timothy which would last about three years as a prime crop and then it had to be plowed up. We often fed some fairly good slough hay and upland hay for feed along with partially ripened oat bundles. My father sowed brome grass in about 1910 but we did not sow brome again for pasture hay until about 1931, just after we had sown down some acreage to alfalfa. A fair number of our neighbors sowed sunflowers for silage in 1923 but we stayed away from the heavy work that was involved with silage at that time. My father always had a liking for a few acres of flax each year in order to have the flax seed to mix in with the grains for all the farm animals.

We had a Mr. Smith teaching school in 1921. He had assembled a crystal radio set and brought it to the school for us to listen to. We heard a bit of music but the reception was not good and of course, all of us boys at school got enthusiastic about building radios. I tried to make one but somehow it never did work. Some people did make them and not having a headset used the receiver from the telephone now and again. In 1923 we persuaded our father to buy a battery operated radio. We had a loudspeaker but it took more power so we usually used the headsets. Certain nights the reception of the U.S. broadcasting stations were always good, especially in the colder weather. It would be 1919 when my mother bought a second hand piano and my sister took lessons from a Mr. Burch in the city and then from a neighbor, Mrs. Chamberlain. I took about six lessons from Miss Elliott, one of the school teachers, but that ended my musical career!

The First World War had quite an effect on our district Many of the young men who had grown up in the district and gone to school together enlisted in the army. Some of them were Jack and Billy Shepherd, Archie and Tom Mylar, John Inkster, Jim Anderson, Will Lang, Andy Adamson, Ed Gratrix and others. All returned except Johnny Inkster. Mrs. Chamberlain arranged patriotic social gatherings in the school and usually a large picnic to raise funds to buy treats for the soldiers overseas, for war widows and families and the Red Cross. Mrs. Fred Herbert distributed wool to all the women who would knit socks and mittens for the soldiers overseas. My mother, even with her fair sized family, did a lot of knitting. Mention should be made of Mrs. Leander Fulton who was pretty well confined to her chair knitted more than 200 pairs of wool socks. I have a very clear recollection of the parade of the 63rd Battalion in Edmonton. I saw them parading on Whyte Avenue; the parade took place a few days before their departure for overseas in 1915.

Our school inspector, Mr. Fife, stopped in at our school on November 11, 1918 and solemnly informed us of the Armistice being signed.

Another important occasion was the parade down Jasper Avenue of the 49th Battalion on their return from Europe in 1919. This battalion detrained at the C.P.R. Station and paraded down Jasper Avenue. Many had been away four years.

I should mention a bit about the local government. The first of which was the Local Improvement District that the local councillors were appointed to. Practically all the farmers for many years worked out their land taxes by doing work improving the roads each year. There was always portions of new roads being built each year, ditching to be done to drain the sloughs and building roads across sloughs instead of traveling around them. Wooden culverts needed repairs every year and certain areas always had mud holes whenever it rained. The Provincial Government built all the Bridges. Government grants, although small, provided the chance to earn a little extra cash. Improvement Districts were changed into Municipal Districts and one of the first Secretary-treasurers of the M.D. was John Sanford who come to hold that position for many years. Ernest Wilson was another of our councillors for many years. As I mentioned before William Place was one of the early councillors in the Improvement District.

The boundaries of the M .D. were from the city limits east to Cooking Lake, everything south of the Baseline to the correction line and west to the Saskatchewan River. The

M.D. apparently bought a tractor for doing a little bit of grading and dragging the roads and this was a Titan tractor bought about 1919 and later a larger tractor was bought and cut all the large ridges quite easily. The need for roads with the higher grade arose and this was accomplished with the use of the first wheeled scrapers and then fresnos which were pulled by four horses.

As I mentioned before the East Edmonton Community Hall was planned and the building finished for use in the winter of 1923-24 by volunteer workers. At that time there was an active East Edmonton social club who were all young people of the district. At that time my brother, Ralph Briggs was president, and he was elected to the board of control of the new community hall. This hall looked after the social needs of the district for the next forty-odd years. It was improved throughout the years from coal heat, gasoline and coal oil lamps to natural gas heating and electric lights, water and sewage system. This hall was used in this location until about 1969 when the land owned equally by the community and the County of Strathcona was sold. There was sufficient funds available to move and renovate it so it was given to the Hurstwood Community. I was president of the East Edmonton Hall board for the last few years of its existence. The last meeting was held in 1972 in the hall and when we did straighten out all the business we donated the remaining funds to the Sherwood Park Robin Hood School for Retarded Children. This hall was in the district for almost fifty years and I believe there was only a few years when there was not a member of the Briggs family serving on the board. Co-existing throughout almost the entire life of the Community Hall there was the East Edmonton Wye Road Willing Worker's Club. There was a small group in the district who were members of the United Farm Women of Alberta, but due to strong political overtones in the U.F.W.A. and all the membership money going to the support of head office it didn't get any far-reaching support in the district.

Quilting bees had never been held in the district as far as I know until my mother organized one. A few more were held and out this grew the feeling that the women of the district would all like to support a club with no ties to anything else. Throughout the forty-four years of its existence, the membership changed a lot as many moved out of the district or died. There were always new members joining or helping out. It would not be easy to enumerate the many projects carried on throughout the years by this club and I wish to say that all the record books, minutes and reports of the Willing Workers Club, the East Edmonton Social Club, the East Edmonton Hall Board and the South Edmonton Agricultural Society finally came into my possession and have been donated to the County of Strathcona Municipal Library as a start for their archives collection.

The Willing Worker's Club was composed of a remarkable group of women throughout the forty-four years of its existence. Without them the Community Hall would not have been kept operating. They always made sure the hall was kept in condition for their use and for anyone else that rented it. They supported innumerable charities every year with donations. Any girl in the district getting married was always given a shower. It was quite often rented to the Salvation Army for services and Sunday School. For many years the day was arranged when they would thoroughly clean the hall, wash and wax the hardwood floor. It was such an excellent hall for all the social activities of the district.

Although my parents did not have the opportunity to obtain a great deal of formal education they made sure that the family had chances to get as much schooling as we wished. Isabella, Ada and myself all graduated from the Strathcona High School in South Edmonton. It took a lot of transportation time to do this as we were never attending high school in the same years.

I will recount more of the personal recollections in my life in the present day County of Strathcona where I was born seventy years ago.

I commenced school before my fifth birthday and I can say that I always enjoyed school life. My first year was in a one room school, teacher being a Miss McLean, a young Scottish girl, and there were about thirty-five pupils in the school. In my third year we had the additional school room on the school grounds and we had about eighteen or twenty children in our room. The Christmas concerts were always eagerly looked forward to and I imagine I wasn't the only one who enjoyed taking part in them. I probably took part in more Christmas concerts than the average because when I was ready to enter grade nine the school board decided to hire a teacher capable of teaching high school subjects. She taught grades seven, eight, nine and ten and there were about seventeen or eighteen students. The numbers in the high school were helped out by some coming from the Salisbury district, Frank Smeltzer, George and Edna Ball. Even high school students weren't left out of the concerts.

For many years, at the end of the school term, the school picnic provided a great get­together for the whole community. There was a basket picnic at the end of the day. Prizes of books were usually given out to the child with the highest marks each grade, and quite often a prize for the best attendance during the year.

The first warm day of spring would see most of the boys taking off shoes and stockings and 'taking their bare feet' as we called it You stuffed your stockings in your shoes, tied the laces together and slung them on your neck when it was time to go home. A rainy day would see everyone come to school barefooted because very few of the children owned rubber boots. In some families the children never wore shoes from the time the snow left in the spring until it snowed again in the fall.

We played games at school such as baseball, football, now known as soccer, prisoner's base, pump-pump pull away, dodge ball, tag and many others depending on the season. Marbles every spring both in the school and outside when the ground became dry.

During her teaching career my sister, Isabella, taught in the East Edmonton schools for two or three terms.

Now, to get back to the farm. The folks always had cattle and hogs in fairly large numbers on the farm. Up until 1915 my mother usually made butter and sold it instead of selling cream which had to be delivered regularly. In 1915 we commenced to deliver whole milk to the Edmonton City Dairy then located on the south side of the river next to the Low Level Bridge. The milk had to be taken in every day and it was not long before we shared this trip with Bill Hawkins. Since we had almost twice as much milk as he had he took his tum every third day. The dairy supplied the eight gallon cans to hold the milk and every shipper had a tag number, ours was No. 153. This was to identify our cans of milk until they were weighted. Eventually almost all the farmers in the district shipped milk and the size of herd varied from eight to twenty-five milking cows. We did not have sufficient pasture at home as the herd increased and for many years we drove our young stock twenty-five miles out to pasture at Ministik Lake. This was always a good long day's drive. We had Shorthorn cattle so we raised all the calves and always had some pail-bunters around the barn or kept in a separate calf pasture.

We bought our first car, a Model T Ford in 1917 and it was used a lot. A few years later it was always used in the busy season to haul the milk into the dairy. Then we had a Dodge Touring in 1925, a Ford Model A half ton in 1929 and a Dodge Sedan in 1933.

Shipping whole milk provided a good steady income but we certainly missed the thick, separated cream and the home-made butter. We usually robbed a bit of cream from the night-before cans of milk for our porridge and coffee. I might add in here, that during that period we happened to buy a fifty pound tub of home-made butter from some of our friends west of Leduc and this fifty pounds, just kept stored in the basement, was good until the very last particle! The Shorthorn herd on the farm gave way to Holsteins to get more milk. This was in the 1930's when you increased the farm income in every way possible.

It was also in the 'thirties' that we grew a fair amount of registered grain to improve our yields and also get a little extra price by selling it for seed to other farmers. It all added up to extra work and care but there was a lot of satisfaction as well as some extra income. Along with a tractor which I bought in 1943, we continued to use some horses until about 1956.

I took my high school, grades nine and ten, at East Edmonton School and we had a very excellent teacher in the person of Miss Cain. To get my grades eleven and twelve I attended the Strathcona High School in South Edmonton. I rode in five miles to the school on a bicycle as long as the dirt roads were dry. When it was wet someone in the family took us by car or buggy. A neighbor girl, Frances Fulton, also attended and the two families took turns with the transportation when necessary. About five months in the winter we boarded with a family in the city. I was on my own the next year as Frances dropped out Itwas quite a change going from a school with about thirty-five to forty children to one with 150 to 300 attending! There were about six or seven other country boys attending the Strathcona High School and it may be a bit unusual but we made up half the soccer team that took the city High School soccer championship that year...! guess the traveling kept us in good condition. One of the teachers there was the Reverend Edmonds and I later took one of his sage remarks to heart. Itwas, 'that we should acquire all the education possible because it would never cost us anything to carry it around'. To support my belief in that I was able to attend the University of Alberta for a year and then, later, graduate from the Vermilion School of Agriculture. And, in the course of a few years, I took a winter course at Alberta College. To make use of my agricultural school education I continued to farm on my father's farm until I bought a farm of my own in 1942 which we still own.

I became married to Mary Armstrong in 1946 and we continued to live on our farm of 325 acres until 1974 when we moved to Sherwood Park. We raised a family of four children and they throughout the years, helped out with all the farm work.

We developed a herd of registered Aberdeen Angus cattle, entered in many of the cattle shows in Edmonton, often sold bulls at Calgary, Lacombe and Edmonton bull sales. The children were active in all the 4-H clubs, including dairy, beef, garden and sewing club, and my wife and I have both served on the adult committees of several of these 4-H Clubs. We also took part in the Edmonton District Agricultural Society program, getting awards in the 'Save-the-Soil' campaign and the 'Farm and Home Improvement' program.

Among other things, I was a director of the board of the South Edmonton Mutual Telephone company, Edmonton District Agricultural Society, of which I was the president for one year, served as school trustee for many years and as well as on the East Edmonton Hall Board. My wife, Mary and I helped to form the first Home and School Association in East Edmonton and later worked with the Ellerslie and Salisbury Home and School Associations. I led a less active farm life from 1962 to 1972 when I got the position of Agricultural Field man for the County of Strathcona. These were a very satisfactory ten years. Members of the family kept the farm operating during that period with some changes in the operation.

Some of the early doctors used by the family were: Dr. Archibald and Dr. Hotson. Some of the later ones being Dr. Brander and Dr. Keillor. Some of the pioneer dentists were Dr. Austin and Dr. Fuller. All these men had offices in South Edmonton. The early drugstores included Cowles Drugstore and these were very important to the people in our area because people could get service there at anytime of the day or night At Cowles you could ring a bell to arouse someone living above the drugstore. For quite a period this would have been Alex McDermid who, in later years, operated his own drugstore.

Our folks had a number of home remedies for coughs and colds. One of these was virgin oil-of-pine. This was available in a very small vial and the label gave directions for mixing with other ingredients. There was also salve called 'sticky salve' for cuts and abrasions and a white salve for skin irritations. My father had many recipes for livestock care and in those days the drugstores carried all the ingredients for them.

The folks usually took along eggs and homemade butter when they went to Strathcona to get groceries. They traded at Douglas Bros. Store, Mc Donalds, Richard Bros. And later the Farmers' Supply and Trading Company. For many yeari, the eggs were stored at home in boxes of grain before egg cartons and crates were available. The eggs went to the store in boxes of grain. The grain kept them at an even temperature and prevented any breakage.

Perhaps not the earliest, there were two hardwares operated for many years by the Western Hardware and Will Werner. For several years they were about the only places on the southside that you could buy gasoline. Burns and Company had a depot on Whyte Avenue for collecting cream until the South Edmonton Creamery came into existence.

In the early years there were a few house parties, mostly for the children and young people, with the odd dance in the school house and a few whist drives. After the hall was built whist drives and dances were held quite regularly during the winter months. Practically all the young people learned to skate and depending on the winter a lot of skating was done on the sloughs. Also, some hockey games were played with the other districts. In the 1920's a hockey league was formed consisting of East Edmonton, Salisbury, Gover Bar and a couple of teams from the city. For three or four years the soccer league consisting of East Edmonton, Salisbury, Bremner and the Wye district was arranged. This was a very successful league and the Edmonton City Dairy provided a trophy for the winning team. About the same period there was a girls basketball league operating.

My father and mother continued to live on the farm until they passed away in 1951 and 1952. My brother Ralph took over the running of the original farm in 1934 and in time George and my sister, Ada and her husband, Roy Trimble had farms one mile south and I had my farm one mile east Most of the land is still being farmed but the Briggs families are now living elsewhere."

"Thank you Robert for this history of the Briggs family. I have known Robert for many years and I appreciate very much him giving the history of his life as well as the rest of the Briggs family."