Who that has travelled through this country thirty, or even twenty years ago, has not been struck by the immense expanses of rounded tree tops, so uniform in height, and so substantial in appearance as if one might walk in safety over the dense masses of foliage. The settlements then consisted of a number of small cleared spaces cut out of the forest with great labor. The view from the settler’s log cabin was bounded on every side by an apparently impenetrable wall of forest. One or two fields, plentifully dotted with blackened and unsightly stumps, and surrounded by irregular fences, equally unsightly, formed the whole landscape. A small patch of sky corresponding to the size of the clearance, was all of the ”spacious firmament” that the new settler

could obtain a glimpse of.309

However, in the same period there were also areas, especially along the coast, where the openings were now beginning to coalesce, as is evident from another anonymous landscape description, published in an island newspaper in 1836:

On a fine morning in June the attention [of an ’Emigrant’ setting out from Charlottetown] is drawn to the scenery around; the birch, beach and maple are now in leaf, of a beautiful light green; the distant landscape is agreeably diversified with land and water, along the shores of which the forest is broken with houses and cleared fields, spotted in some places with cattle and

sheep.310

Returning to the anonymous author of 1867, we are given a description of a settlement that had reached what he calls the ”second stage of development", a stage that occurred, he said, within just ”a few years" of the first picture he had given:

A few years pass away, The "camp” is replaced by a comfortable one—storied log house, well shingled and clapboarded. [The settler’s] stock has increased, and for them he has built a large stable. These, with the barn and other outhouses, give the homestead quite a comfortable look. The stumps have disappeared from the few acres near the house, and the woods though still extensive have retreated a considerable distance. Many of his neighbors’ houses are in full view. The river or creek, which a few years before was so hidden by overhanging woods that only a few yards of dark water was visible at one time, can now be seen winding

309 Anon. 1867. I note that farms freshly cut out of the forest

were given different names by different persons: MacGregor (1828) called them ‘wood-farms‘, Sir George Seymour, the proprietor of Lot 13, ‘forest farms‘ (Greenhill & Giffard 1967, p. 132), while several witnesses to the Land Commission (1875) called them ‘green farms‘ (e.g. Amos McWilliams and James Metherall of Lot 7 [pp 190-191, not extracted]).

310

Anon. 1836.

50

through the country — beautiful and bright — its banks here and there fringed with bushes, and the slope on either side divided into farms, each with its little cluster of snug buildings. The roads have been widened and levelled, and though the grass grows between the horse— path and the wheel—track, still they can be travelled on

with safety and even with comfort.311

Then, from the 18705, when many areas had been settled for fifty years or more, and the pioneer stage was becoming only a memory, comes a landscape description that is the visual equivalent of many of the ’views’ of the 'farm residences’ that were to be printed four years later in ’Meacham’s Atlas’312 and for a visiting Englishman, the settled and tamed landscape of the island is a reminder of rural England:

The green pastures, the trees which, with a taste rarely met with in the New World, have been left here and there standing amongst the fields, the hedgerows, the hops, and honeysuckle that embellish the walls of the cottages, all these remind the old—country man of home,

and he can fancy himself here in a little England. 313

That the above description presents a ’rose-tinted’ picture — as indeed do many of the ’views’ in ’Meacham’s Atlas’ is evident when it is compared with a much less attractive vignette from the beginning of the twentieth century that was ’written up' by Father Alfred Burke for presentation at a meeting of the Canadian Forestry Association. He describes a landscape that will strike a chord familiar to most Islanders a century later:

The general desire, and indeed the practice ..., was to get rid of every tree in sight. and to-day whole settlements may be visited where the farm buildings stand out bleak, bare and storm—beaten, without a single tree to protect, beautify or endear — not one along the roadside, the line fence, the out—places; possibly a bit of coppice on the rear of the half tilled farm, where the improvident holder still gathers enough of sapling wood

to sustain the kitchen stove in hard weather.314

Granted, that in creating their word-pictures of the island’s landscape, each of the above authors had

3" Anon. 1867 (not fully extracted).

3‘2 Allen (1880). The Atlas farm ‘views' inevitably present a very selective sample of the island farms of the day, and almost all of them are well beyond the pioneer stage. In fact the only farm on which there is some forest clearance still going on is that of James Elliot of Elliots Mills, Lot 21, shown on the cover of this report.

3‘3 Rowan 1876.

3“ Burke 1902.