Marion was born and grew up on a farm at Yorkwoods/Grandravine in Jane Finch. As of January 2011, Marion is living in a lovely country house in Bradford, Ontario.
When did you live in the Jane Finch area?
I was born in 1924, in the farm house, and I was married in 1946 and I lived there pretty near the whole time, accept maybe about a year when I worked at Westinghouse in Toronto. We (she and her husband, Fred) went to Bracebridge our first year, we came back and then we built the house at the corner of the farm, beside dad and mom and we lived there from about ’48 until ’67. No, they were starting to build houses beside us and a school. We moved in ’67 and Dad must have sold the farm in the ‘50’s. We lived in Jane and Finch until 1967. Our house is gone now and they built an apartment there. I haven’t been down there in such a long time!
How is it that your family ended up living in Jane and Finch?
My mom was from Oshawa and my dad grew up on the farm. My dad is a Snider and they have been farming there since 1773. Samuel Snider lived there from 1773 to 1884 and I’m the 5th generation of Sniders who lived on the farm. Samuel, Henry, John C, my dad Vern and myself. The Sniders moved here in 1773 from Pennsylvania. They came from Germany to Pennsylvania and came up by covered wagon. (Marion showed me a book called Henry Snider, His Ancestors and Descendants, researched and written by Snider Genealogical and Historical Research Group and edited by Ann Crafford. It’s at the library (Yorkwoods). We were part of Lot 18 and 19. Ross and Jessie Anderson and family were up on Lot 20.
What was the community like when you were growing up?
It was a wonderful and happy life. We never wanted for anything because it was all there, we didn’t have to go anywhere. We played and our work was there. We had to help dad and mom. It was just a great place to live. I had two brothers - older than I. I helped to do the hoeing; I helped to stock grain and drive the tractor when dad was on the binder. The school – I walked from Jane from the farm through my grandfather’s farm and up his long lane to Keele and on up Keele to Finch to the school and in the winter time, sometimes the snow was too deep for us to walk and dad would hitch the horses to the sleigh, put straw on it with a buffalo robe and we could take the sleigh right across the rail fence because it was that high and we picked up the Anderson kids and went on up to Finch to school and that was a lot of fun - having all us kids in the sleigh together. We had school concerts – they were fun.
At the farm, it was known as a recreational place and we had many picnics. We had aunts, uncles and cousins by the dozens who would come and have Sunday swimming and they’d bring their lunch and we had a great time. Dad dammed up the creek - he used cement on the top and wood underneath so that at wintertime, the water would go out and the ice would go out. I think this is how it was. He made a dam for swimming and skating in the winter and we’d have skating parties and young people would come and some days all the boys in the community would come play hockey with my brothers and I was the only girl. They’d put me in goal - I never got hurt. They never raised the puck in those days. It was just a lot of fun.
I went to school at Elia and went to the United Church. The church was further out towards Dufferin on Finch and we walked there on Sundays. We walked all the way until my brother Roy was able to drive the car and then he drove the car. And, Young People’s would be in the evening and I’d walk home at night. You wouldn’t meet a car, you wouldn’t meet anybody. Can you imagine walking all that distance after dark?
I believe that the road was paved after we moved because when we moved, we had a tractor and a wagon with lumber on it and it got stuck on Jane Street, north of highway 7. I can’t remember when it was paved….I know what it was like before because there were times when the baker would come with the bread – deliver the bread, cakes and cookies or whatever to buy and sometimes the snow was so deep that he couldn’t get all the way up our laneway and he’d walk across the field carrying this big basket of bread. And then the Rawleigh Man came. He had spices and salves and vanilla and all that sort of thing so you didn’t have to go to shop even once a week. My parents went to shop in Weston – Weston main-street, the old Weston. We went there by car. Would be maybe a half an hour to go.
What was it like being a teenage girl growing up in Jane and Finch?
That was during the war. So I remember that it was lonely then. I was married in ’46. We played baseball; we had the Elia Baseball Team. We played Downsview and Asbury. I went to Young People’s at night as a teenager. There was some that were helping on the farm and couldn’t go to war at that time. My brother went – my youngest brother Harold. He just got to Halifax when they declared the war was over. My husband was in the army. I can’t remember too much about that time.
Were girls expected to participate in household activities, like baking at that time?
I don’t know if we were expected to but we did. We helped mom and we knew how to do everything and when we had the thrashings, we would have eight or ten extra people and I used to help mom – roast beef, potatoes, vegetables, pies – apple sauce to make and tea biscuits. We had cows but it wasn’t a dairy farm. We sold cream and dad had pigs and beef cattle. We sold maple syrup and at the south end there was a loam pit. It was, and I don’t know why, but it was all loam and my dad and Uncle Ivan built this machine where the loam was put on cups and it went up and into the truck. Dad took it down to the Oakdale Golf and Country Club below Sheppard and on the west side of Jane. Well, he helped to build that. He took all his loam down there when they were building it. When I go down Jane Street now, you can’t see the golf course for the trees.
After the war, do you remember any issues that were impacting the community?
It was a quiet rural community. After the war, when I was married, I moved away for a couple of years and came back in 1948. Toronto was gradually growing up and getting closer and closer. Things were happening that didn’t happen before. I had four children and one of my sons got a chicken, I think from school. He told the teacher that he could look after it. Well, some dogs came in from the new housing and the dog killed the chicken. He had rabbits and the same thing happened to the rabbits. Just different things like that that we couldn’t handle. We had a lovely dog – a Chow. He always roamed lose – never tied up and one day he went across Jane Street and one women was so frightened and thought it was a bear and called the police and we were told that we either had to keep it tied up or build a six foot fence that he couldn’t jump over. So, we kept him tied but the poor thing died. We had him for years and years. It was things like that and as the city grew closer, things weren’t what we were used to.
I think that Joan, my daughter, went to five different schools. The city was growing so she started way over at Weston Road and Sheppard and then she went to Stanley Public School and then one on Sheppard, east of Jane Street. As the area grew up, they built more schools closer to where we lived and so our children had to keep moving closer. She went to Yorkwoods last before we moved up here (Schomberg) where we bought a farm. The youngest boy would have been in kindergarten when we moved up. There was still a field around our house when we moved and that’s where Yorkwoods School was built.
Tell me what it was like going to school?
It was fun! I went to grade 8 from primary 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on. We were all even – guys and girls. We played games outside and we had teams – I forget the names of some of them. We played Fox and the Hound, Circle in the Snow, Anti-I-Over, we played baseball a lot. I remember taking arithmetic, spelling, math, geography, history.
Did the community have any issues that you were aware of at the time?
The only issue I remember was closing our church. As Toronto grew closer, not all the people were United Church people. As our people moved away, there wasn’t enough to keep it going. I remember my Aunt Sylvia and I went up Jane Street, knocking on every door and we had a little brochure that we gave to people to ask if they would come to our church. By doing this, we wanted them to know we had a church there but there were other religions. So that church closed and that was a big issue for us in that community.
What was the diversity like back then?
Most people were English, German, Scottish and Irish. Mother’s uncle and aunt lived up the Black Creek, north of Finch and she was up there to help her aunt. Dad met her there and took her out with the horse and buggy. My husband lived down on Royal York Road, south of Bloor. His parents were mostly market gardeners down that way. He had his mother’s car to come calling. His mother came from the Malton area – Tomlinsons. They built part of the airport on their farm – where his mother was born.
What are some of your fondest memories of growing up in the area?
I just remember being down at the creek and swimming with friends and family, skiing and sleigh-riding down the hills and helping at the maple sugar bush. People came up from the city for maple syrup and mother sold maple syrup for $5.00 a gallon. Now it’s $60.00 or more. That was good money in those days. I remember we had no electricity for a long time, no bathroom - we had to go out to the little house behind the garage and I had my bath in a galvanized tub down by the kitchen stove. I guess when I started to grow up, my mother persuaded my father to put in a bathroom. So we got a bathroom and that was really something. For electricity, we had to put in our own poles, buy the poles, dig the hole and put the poles in and then the hydro came and wired it. I was 11 or 12 maybe when we got electricity. I was coming home from school one day and I got closer to the house and I heard music and I knew the electricity was in the house because a radio was on.
I remember it being so cold when we went to bed and I had what you called a pig – made of pottery (she showed me her pig – it looks like a milk jug). I filled it up with hot water and I put it in my bed and that would warm my feet up. The pig (idea of a hot water bottle) has got to be about 90 years old. We each had a bedroom but my older brother had a bed above the kitchen and the stove pipe went up so he had a little bit of heat there. So, in the morning, I would hold my clothes up around the stove pipe to warm them up before I put them on. But we never felt deprived or sorry for ourselves because that was the way of life. We knew of nothing else. During the Depression time, I never knew there was a depression. We had chickens, eggs, milk and butter – we had cream, vegetables, fruit and we had maple syrup. We had to buy flour and sugar maybe. As a child, I never noticed the difference.
I remember there was this Farm Forum where dad took a bag of potatoes and I guess everybody donated something and they shipped them out west because it was terrible out west in the depression. And, they helped by giving them potatoes. I remember I had an Aunt Flossie who lived out west in Saskatchewan and she must have been very hard up because Dad sent her a pair of shoes to wear. But in the 30’s, I was only about 10 – 12 years old. We always had enough to eat.
My father rented this farm first and then he bought it from his father. My grandfather and grandmother stayed on the home farm on Keele Street and Uncle Percy married and they had to look after the parents and they had two children. My grandparents died there – there were no retirement or nursing homes. The young people were expected to look after them. There were 13 children in my father’s family – Oliver died in the first month of his life and Harold died when he was out hoeing one day. He apparently went in the basement or somewhere in the woodshed and grandfather had made wooden water-kegs like a real barrel and there were two of them and for some reason, they were mixed up. One had a mouse nest in it and he just rinsed it out and didn’t know it and he took the water out and drank it and he died of Typhoid fever. So, that was two out of the 13. And the last one to die was in October about 3 years ago, and she would have been 104 in December. There were two more that lived to be over 100. The men seemed to die earlier than the women. Dad was 88.
When we moved up here, my brothers had already moved up to King Township on farms. My parents wanted to be closer to us so they bought a house in Aurora. Mother developed cancer and died there in 1971 and dad lived with us and also with my brother Roy who lived on Weston Road. Mother was only 75 when she died.
When people got sick, what did they do?
I had a serious appendix attack – it broke. We didn’t know what it was. At the time, my brother Harold had the flu – he had stomach cramps and I guess mother thought that was what I had but it was so bad – it was horrible and we had no telephone at the time so dad had to drive to Weston and told the Doctor and the Doctor drove up. I remember him kneeling on the side of the bed and pushing on my stomach and it was hard as a rock and he went out into the hall and told mom and dad that he was sending an ambulance up. It took me down to Wellesley and I was there for about a month because they had to drain it. The doctor said that if I hadn’t been a healthy and happy farm girl, I would never have made it. I don’t remember seeing any part of the city as I went down in the ambulance and I came home in the ambulance.
But, when I got my driver’s license at 16, mother and I would take the can of cream down to the dairy and I think it was just below Casa Loma where we took the cream to and we’d go onto Eaton’s and Simpson’s to shop – maybe once or twice a year, we would do that. But Eaton’s and Simpson’s…and Woolworth’s were the big stores back then. The city was not built up with big high-rises then, just two or three story homes.
The doctor came to the house when we were born – we were all born at home. I was born on the 29th of August and mother says at that time, they were thrashing on the farm and I don’t know who was helping or doing the work but I was born in the bedroom right off the kitchen and all the thrasher men were at the table having their dinner!
Why did you move to your current community?
Well, we knew the Keffers, Jean and Bruce, behind us. Jack Devins, a cousin of mine, they lived on Hwy. 27 and George Jackson was just across the 400. We knew different people in the area. Some came this direction and the Andersons, Jacksons and Whittakers went Harrison way. We always called the area Elia – right up to when we left. They must have started to call it Jane and Finch when the townhouses were built (Yorkwoods) and it became known as not a wonderful place to live. That’s when we heard the name Jane and Finch; before that it was always Elia. The new people who moved there did not know it as Elia. I don’t know where the name Elia came from but it was just always Elia. We still say Elia today when I talk to people. Edgeley was Jane and Hwy. 7 and Emery was Weston Road and Finch. Our Mennonite cemetery is north of Hwy. 7 on the east side of Jane and that’s where a lot of my family were buried. We were originally Mennonite. The Edgeley Mennonite Church was built in 1824 on Jane Street, north of Hwy. 7. I think they moved it into the village (Pioneer Village), maybe twenty years ago.
Grandfather never farmed because he had eczema bad and the horses and grain bothered him. He had hired men until his sons were old enough to do the work.
The cider mill at the Pioneer Village (Jane and Steeles) was made by my Snider ancestors. There is a cradle in the small log house at the village, where my father’s 12 sisters and brothers were rocked. All I can say is, it was the very best of the good old days.
Marion Thompson’s quote from the book Henry Snider – His Ancestors and Descendants, researched and written by Snider Genealogical and Historical Research Group, 1976
MARION ELIZABETH SNIDER, b. August 29, 1924, m. April 6, 1946, David Frederick Thompson, b. July 8, 1920.
“I was born at my parent’s home on Jane Street, and attended Elia Public School and Weston High School,” says Marion. “I have fond memories of summer activities at the swimming hole. In the winter the snow was shovelled off the ice and boys practised hockey. I was usually in goal with a pair of rubber boots as goal posts. I remember when the hydroelectric service was installed and we bought our first radio. After high school, I worked at De Havilland Aircraft in Downsview and for Westinghouse in Toronto. Following my marriage to Fred Thompson, we lived in Bracebridge for a year and then returned to the home farm. We bought two acres of land from Dad and built our own home. We lived there until 1967 when we bought a 100 acre farm in Simcoe County near Bradford. Uncle Percy gave us the workshop that had been moved to his home on Jane Street. This was the building that my great grandfather and my grandfather had both used for a workshop. We moved this building to Bradford with us. I treasure a painting of our farm house and buildings as Mary Heise painted them in 1888, and various pieces of pine furniture hand crafted by my ancestors.”