A Farm in the Family: The Many Faces of Ontario Agriculture over the Centuries

Pleasance Crawford is a Canadian landscape and garden-history researcher
and writer and the co-author of Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian
Garden Writing.

John and Monica Ladell’s Inheritance: Ontario’s Century Farms Past & Present (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada) was published in 1979. This second book on Ontario agricultural history by the Ladells is similar, in its focus on the people whose families have farmed this province and on the contrasts, yet the continuities, that exist when successive generations, related or unrelated, work the same land. In each book, the authors present the families’ histories and personal anecdotes and varying approaches to agriculture. Whereas Inheritance dealt only with farms in the same family for at least a century, A Farm in the Family celebrates both long-settled families and recently emigrated ones. “Part Three: The Twentieth Century” is particularly interesting when it explains new approaches to agriculture, such as intensive market gardening, high-tech farming, and commercial horticulture, in human as well as technical terms.

A Farm in the Family is extensively illustrated with historical and modern photographs. Unlike Inheritance, it has neither endnotes nor index.