William’s farm is the only one of the six original Taylor farms in Freetown, left in the Taylor name. It was farmed for many years by William’s son John, a bachelor, and now by John’s nephew, John. If this farm passes out of the Taylor name, Freetown will have lost a link with the past, and will be the poorer for it.

THE REEVES FAMILY

No history of Lower Freetown would be complete without reference to the Reeves family. In response to a request from William Taylor, the

miller at Dunk River, for a helper, a young lad by the name of Simon Reeves 1 was brought out from England. That this move was advantageous to Simon ' Reeves is attested by the fact that he not only succeeded in marrying the f

miller’s daughter, but fell heir to 106 acres of some of the best land in

Lower Freetown for the modest sum of twenty pounds (Liber 30 Folio ‘

309, Charlottetown; Transfer of 100 acres of land from William Taylor to Simon Reeves) This was part of the 320 acres purchasedby William Taylor in 1810 from George Thompson, the remaining 214 acres across the road

were deeded to William’s son John in 1824 (L43 F301, Charlottetown),

This farm of 106 acres has continued in the Reeves family ever since, and at present is owned and operated by Simon’s Great Grandson Orville. At a time in our history when neighbors were few and far between, the location of these Taylor and Reeves farms seems to have been an ideal one.

Mr. Reeves was a hard working man and like Methusela of old he begat sons and daughters and soon he had a large family around him. As the years passed and the family were growing up, it goes without saying that hardships were many and the comforts few. These hardships may have developed in the man an intolerance to anything that even bordered on softness or sentimentality, and one day when his son John brought home a feather bed, with, of course, the intention of sleeping on it, he was so incensed that he took the bed out to the chopping block, and chopped it up with the axe, with the retort that he’d make Jock’s feathers fly.

If Mr. Reeves could only come back to see the present day when his descendants, by hard work and honesty have arrived at the stage where even the feather bed has been discarded for the spring-tilled mattress (a luxury never heard of, and probably never even dreamed of, back in the days of “straw—filled ticks and steel men”) he would indeed be greatly surprised.

Unlike the Taylor family, which at one time boasted of six farms in Lower Freetown under that name, and is now reduced to one farm, or the Schurman name which has been decimated to the place where there is but one family in all Freetown, the descendants of Simon Reeves have flourished like the green bay tree, and are almost without number in

12