A Summer Hiatus
As I have followed John Muir's summer of 1864 I have tried to imagine what was going on in the bigger community of rural Ontario that he had landed in. We know that he was staying with a Scottish family - the Campbells and they were just starting to get a little prosperity happening despite the fact that the father of the family had died a few years earlier. John Muir had gone out for a three week ramble that I talked about in the earlier postings. He then returned to the farm at Bradford and from the lack of botanical specimens from that period I can only imagine that he was actually working with the family on the farm. He would have arrived back in the prime time for "haying" on an Ontario farm. At that time it was all done manually; scythes for cutting, hand bound and then stooked (stood on end to dry) and then hauled to a barn with a horse or an oxen to be stored for the winter. the Campbell farm today Since John had grown up on a farm in Wisconsin ...