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Article Excerpt
We met one summer day in 1953. I was a child of ten and Annie was a kindly, silver-haired, Great Aunt of mine, one of my Grandmother's four sisters. Unfortunately, I never knew my Grandmother Maud; she died the year before I was born. It was baseball season, and I was a Little League Lion with delusions of throwing a perfect game. I had no interest in hearing the older generations reminisce, and no idea of the tales that Annie might tell.
Some 45 years passed before I began to uncover her extraordinary story. In August 1998, my father passed away, leaving me an ancient leather trunk filled with his mother's things. For the first time, I spent an afternoon with Maud uncovering the precious mementoes of her life: white-leather baby shoes, a linen swaddling dress, lace coverlet and shawl, tintypes and daguerreotypes, magazine and newspaper clippings, a leather-bound dictionary dated 1853, histories of the Canadian Prairie and of the Great War, photo albums of every significant ancestor since the great potato famine in Ireland, plus bundles of letters, notes, and diaries.
At the bottom of her trunk wrapped in yellowed lace and tied with faded blue ribbon, I found the most treasured artifact of all, a packet of letters and photographs. On top was a dusty, olive-colored portrait folder with penciled note, "Annie and I - 1902." Inside, two attractive young women smiled at me from an oval frame.
So this is Grandmother Maud and her sister Annie, I thought to myself. They look like Gibson Girls from the pages of Colliers Magazine. In the photo both sisters are wearing dark, tailored skirts with vertical pleats, and trim white blouses finished with lace and high collars of dark satin. Each sister is wearing a broach pinned at the throat. Both gaze into the future with proud, determined smiles on their faces. Clearly, the girls were students of fashion. Enchanted, I had to know more.
Five minutes into Maud's diary and I knew that, in all likelihood, the girls had sewn their own clothing for that special portrait. In 1902, they had only recently left their childhood home, a cattle ranch just south of Morden, Manitoba. Their parents, John and Rachel Shaw Johnston and some 18 siblings had migrated from Enniskillen, Northern Ireland to Dublin, Boston, and Ontario in the 1850s. Maud's diary of 1938 told the story of their lives.
Her parents, John and Rachel, had met and married at Kepple Kemble, Ontario in the 1860s; and then, migrated west to Prince Arthur's Landing and Winnipeg in 1871. Rachel was pregnant with her third child when they arrived in Manitoba.
In her diary Maud recorded that "within weeks of their arrival they all fell ill with cholera. Rachel was deathly ill herself, but she would not give in to it. She nursed the entire family back to health, although it took the new baby 6 years to learn how to walk."
At first, John worked as a carpenter for the Hudson's Bay Company. And then, in 1875, he filed a landgrant claim to a few hundred acres of tall grass prairie at the foot of the Pembina Hills in southern Manitoba (Section 1, Township 2, Range 5). As a joke, they named the muddy little stream that wandered through their property the Liffey, after the broad river that had carried them out of Dublin to the new world. And, she called their burned-over patch of prairie "Phoenix Park ... after the mythical bird of fabled beauty that arose from its own ashes."
According to Maud, "their little Garden of Eden was regularly blackened by prairie fires, ignited by lightening or by hunting parties of Assiniboine Indians." Although she never mentions it, her parents may have spent their last evenings in Ireland wandering through the wondrous city gardens in Dublin, also called Phoenix Park.
Maud's diary is filled with tales of growing up on the Canadian prairie. On winter evenings, she and her six siblings and dozens of cousins would bundle up in old buffalo robes in front of the fireplace, listening to the howling of the wind and wolves while their grandparents told tales of Ireland before the famine. As toddlers in Enniskillen their father, John and his twin Robbie had raided the pantry for a bag of wheat one summer afternoon and filled the house with grain. As teenagers they had regularly fished illegally in the Arno River where it crossed through Lord Cole's private preserve; the punishment was "transportation" (exile to the colonies).
In Manitoba, John and Rachel had cleared giant oaks from the banks of the Liffey; hauled, split, and stacked them into a sturdy cabin with rough plank flooring, mud caulking, and a large fireplace of stone. Maud wrote: "our home was filled with work, love, laughter and songs. The boys tended cattle ... and there were endless chores for the girls: churning butter, shelling peas, sewing, cooking, hauling water, making soap and candles." There was a well and fenced garden in the front yard, and cows, chickens, barns and a wooden privy in back. At night the farm was protected by a pack of half-wild Irish Wolf Hounds.
Between 1870 and 1900, the Manitoba rangelands gave way to plows and hayfields. A grid of dusty (or muddy depending on the season) farm roads appeared, each framing a one-mile square section of farmland. Maud and Annie, their siblings, friends, and dozens of cousins all graduated from the one-room schoolhouses at Chicken Hill, Glencross, Morden, and Windygates (only the latter two appear on maps today). The kids studied history and poetry as well as the Bible; they were drilled in spelling and penmanship until every word reflected well on the family and community.
On 28 February 1893, for her sixteenth birthday, Maud received a slim book of poems, Selections from Tennyson. The inside cover bears an inscription, "To Maud, with Love from her friend, RB." On the facing page someone doodled a cartoon of a human stork labelled "Bob Broadsworth;" and another friend wrote, "Look out Maud, old Bob Broadsworth loves you." At night in their secret places, Maud must have shared her treasure with Annie, and then hidden it away. Whoever RB was, she had rejected him.
As the new century dawned, the two girls were in their early twenties, unmarried, and without parents. Their father John passed away in May 1898 and their mother Rachel in January 1900. One by one, the older Johnston children married and moved away. Three of the girls (Susan, Maud, and Annie) graduated from Normal School (teacher training) in Morden; the latter two went on to complete nursing programs.
The oldest Johnston girl, Susan, was written up as a town hero in the local history, Ripples from the Creek by F. D. Baragar of Elm Creek (p. 42). During the great prairie fire that swept through the area in 1895 she had turned her school into a refuge and emergency hospital. Sister Annie appears in the same history as one of the early teachers of the Wingham school (p. 93). Teaching, however, was not a long-term career for Annie and Maud. They had other ambitions for themselves.
Maud had continued her schooling, graduating from the nursing program at the Freemason's Hospital of Morden in 1902, the year she and Annie had their portrait taken. Then, they went their separate ways. Maud left Canada for a nursing position at Sacred Heart Hospital in Superior, Wisconsin. Annie gave up a teaching job at Elm Creek and entered the nursing program at Winnipeg General Hospital.
Over the next few years the two sisters sent a steady stream of letters and photographs to each other. Maud wrote of her new life in Wisconsin and her new husband Bert, a tall thin, handsome dentist with deep dimples and curly hair. Bert had a powerboat on Lake Michigan, and he liked to take their friends for a cruise on Sunday afternoons.
Annie replied with stories of her progress in nursing...
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