Down on the Farm: Childhood Memories of Farming in Canada

Bruce Grainger is head of the Public Services Department, Macdonald
Library, McGill University.

Down on the Farm describes how Canadian farm children lived, worked, and
played from the 1880s to the 1940s. The contents are organized around
such themes as the farm, school, community, celebrations, and games. A
wide range of farm, home, school, and church experiences is recounted
using anecdotal quotations linked by the author’s text and illustrated
with more than 150 photographs. Not all the memories are fond; living
conditions were often extremely harsh, and especially so for the 80,000
children imported as child labor from Britain.

If there is a fault to this work, it is that the differing conditions
and changing circumstances of farm life in a country as vast and varied
as Canada over a period of more than 60 years are underplayed. That
said, the anecdotes of farm children presented here ring true and
describe a common way of life that shaped our country.