The Rural Voice, 1980-10, Page 10Corrle and Adrle Bos, plus their youngest son Hank found it hard to buy a farm in Holland, with prices up to $20,000 an acre.
They chose Canada
Immigrants from other countries have made their special contribution
to area
BY YVONNE REYNOLDS
Canada is a land of immigrants. Even our native people are
believed to have come originally from Asia via the Bering Strait
centuries ago. Our history books tell of succeeding waves of
people driven by religious persecution, famine or poverty to seek
a new life in another country.
For example, in the 1800s the Industrial Revolution in
England, the potato famine in Ireland, and the Highland
Clearances in Scotland forced thousands of people from their
native lands to the shores of Canada. To quote Stephen Leacock,
' . . A great migration poured forth from the British Isles . . .
. immigration fell like Portia's mercy as a double blessing, on
him that gave and him that took. The emigrant ship, crowded
and dirty and triumphant, was the world's symbol of peace and
progress."
These people all made their special contributions. Many
hacked their farms slowly and painfully out of "the Queen's
Bush"; Irishmen helped build the Rideau Canal system; the
Chinese worked on our railways; Lord Sifton's Ukrainians settled
the prairie. The list is long and impressive.
Since the Second World War, Canada has welcomed a
different kind of immigrant - those who, after weighing all the
PG. 8 THE RURAL VOICE/OCTOBER 1980
farming
pros and cons, decided of their own free will to leave their
homeland and start again somewhere else.
(To mention each and every person who has come from Europe
since 1945 to the arca covered by Rural Voice would take a
magazine the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Instead, the
writer has arbitrarily focused on a 40 -mile area of Huron County,
a representative segment of the mosaic that is Huron, Bruce,
Grey and Perth Counties.)
Harry Burgsma chose Canada. Arriving in 1955, a lone
teenager, he lived and worked in Sarnia for two years while
staying with a sister, then returned to Holland to become
engaged to a dear childhood friend. Gerda and Harry were
married in Sarnia in 1958, and moved to a 100 acre farm
southwest of Dungannon that they had purchased shortly before
their wedding.
"The first year was difficult; the first winter was bad. Once
Harry had to walk from Carlow back home with snow up to his
knees and a box of groceries in his hands", Gerda recounted in
her gentle voice. Her eyes swept around her attractive modern
kitchen. "This place sure didn't look like this when we bought it.
We had an old oil stove, but we ran out of money for oil, and used