By Land and By Air

IOHN E. MACDONALD

He was born in 1869, as his father was a stonemason and was working on the grey stone in Georgetown Town Hall. As previously mentioned, I think he was born in Georgetown, although he spent most of his young life in Little Sands, attended Little Sands school and all his education was obtained there. I suppose he left school in his early teens but he could read well, and had a sprinkling of math. When he was quite young, he decided to be a carpenter and Mr. Emery in Belle River was teaching young men to be cabinet workers as well as builders.

My father used to walk the eight miles home from Belle River on the weekends. On one of his trips, two men caught up to him with a wagon, and told him to jump on the back. The man driving said they were coming from a sad job, as they had dug up his father who was buried in the Wood Islands graveyard (at the shore opposite the old Wood Islands West school). He had been buried 30 years before, and they wanted him buried beside his wife in the new graveyard on Greys Road, as the old graveyard was very wet and the open graves used to fill with water. He said that the box was so heavy that they opened it, and his father looked like the day he was buried.

Emery did not show them the fine points such as making a window. There were getting no pay, just their food, not their clothes, so one weekend home Collin Taylor (McDonald) showed him with a stick on some firm snow how to make a window. Emery was not pleased when he found out he could make a window. One thing my father learned was to use a shaft. One time when I broke the shaft of the cart at the shore, he said, ”Take that old cart mould (about the shape of a shaft) and we went out to the woods

l8