History of—T/aileyfield and Congregation 5

AN OUTLINE OF THE HISTORY OF VALLEYFIELD PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND

VALLEYFIELD IN 1840

”This is the forest primeval, ' The murm‘ring pines and the hemlocks.”

In his opening lines of “Evangeline” the poet, Long- fellow might well have been describing Valleyfield as it ap— peared on that fair May morning, in the year of Our Lord, 1840, when the first white man arrived here to carve a home for himself out of the forest. The difference, though, between Valleyfield, in 1840 and the Land of Evangeline when the poet immortalized it, would have been very marked, for Grand Pre was then well settled by the Acadians, whereas the whole district south of the present Valleyfield Read and east of the Murray Harbour Road, was unbroken, virgin forest, not even traversed by forest trail of white man’s making.

The only evidence that the land had been visited even, by white man, was in the Surveyor’s blaze marks of some of . the future roads. One of these blazed lines was made by one Mr. Douse, a surveyor and this line was to be known as Douse’s Road, afterwards renamed Valleyfield Road.

Into this primeval forest, then, on a May morning in 1840 came the district’s first white settler, (Big) William . Martin, freshly arrived from Scotland. He located his future

homestead at Douse’s Road, to the northwest of the present Valleyfield Church. The farm has been in continuous occupa— tion by his descendents, the present one being Malcolm D.

' Martin. We, who reap the benefit of the hardships and difficulties

under which the early pioneers laboured in order to carve a home out of the forest wilderness, cannot well appreciate the tasks which faced these people, Even the simplest tools needed to clear the land, build homes, make furniture, plant and harvest crops, as well as the many other tasks that had to be done in order to provide the bare necessities of living, were almost non—existent. A saw and an axe would be all the tools available for carpentry; a hoe, sicle and flail would have to suffice for the planting and harvesting of the crOps. At the beginning there would be very few cattle, or sheep, as live stock. Fortunate was he who owned an ox to help with theheavierta‘sks of pulling. . It was some years after arrival of the first settlers that the first horse appeared on a farm.