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The Goderich Signal-Star, 1977-04-21, Page 21w .4410. Itford... then coda riving enterprise MacEwan's International well on the lake bank, Goderich, had facilities for loading n ships. roily homestead in the 12th concession of Hibbert township, long unoccupied, wu the home of MaeEaan and family, who came from the Glasgow area of Scotland in 1852. There ltbeldlisend three daughters; aeels. sokPat•r, was the driller who tapped the at P Saltford... now obertrb SIGNAL 130 YEAR -16 THURSDAY, APRIL 21,1977 Start of salt industry STAR SECOND SECTION eter M acEwan's family 1 migrated from Scotland. BY W.E. ELLIOTT The Scottish Family Peter MacEwan, who migrated from Scotland, had six brothers and one sister, Robert was a baker, George a bookkeeper, David a lum- berman, James a bailiff at Dumblain, and John a foundryman near Dundee. Mr. and Mrs. John Pet- tigrew, the latter a sister of Isabella Scheuller MacEwan, were already living in Canada, in Blandford township, Oxford county, probably in concession 12, near Bright. They wrote to the MacEwans advising them how to prepare for a voyage to America. Mrs. McLeod has a letter the Pettigrews in Blandford township sent to the migrating MacEwans, dated May 15, 1851, advising them to bring certain food they would need aboard ship. "Bring plenty of potatoes with you," they recom- 1 mended; "they relish well on the sea. Bring plenty , of peasmeal, for you will get none of it here, It is good on the sea. Bring plenty of eggs with you. Pack them in salt; they will keep well, and ham and salted fish, they relish well on the water, Bring plenty of oatmeal cakes with you, for you will not eat many of .the ship's biscuits. You need not much oatmeal nor much tea, but you need some sugar, more than they give. "If you come, bring me 6 calfsstomachs for making cheeses. Bring me some gooseberry slips, as there is not many of them here.' "Look for a good ship and a steady captain from the Broomielaw to Quebec, or Montreal. If possible, from Montreal to Hamilton in a steamer, but we carne from Montreal to Toronto. It cost us 16 shillings for each adult, with all our luggage. Plenty of people win for less money when there is competition. Make your bargain as cheap as you can, but come strait on for Hamilton. From there you come by land. ' "There is a man about a quarter -mile of the lake as you go in to the town; his name is Huett. He keeps a tavern or inn, We stopped two nights in his house when we went back to Toronto for our luggage. We' thought them honest people. He keeps horses and wagons for the purpose of taking people up the country. We hired him to Galt with out luggage; it cost us $8. You can hire him the whole way. It is 25 miles from Hamilton to Galt, and 20 miles from Galt to our place in Blandford. We think you will be best to hire horses, as we have oxen and do not know where you may land." On arrival, tine MacEwans stayed a short time with the Pettigrews, then moved up into Hibbert township, Perth county, settling on Lot 5 in Concession 12, Date of the Canada Company's grant to Peter "McEwing" is Jan, 28, 1863, but he may have been on that land as much as ten years earlier. He died in 1867, bequeathing the farm to his w ife, In 1885, Peter MacEwan the younger and his wife, with Margaret Towers, Isabella MacEwan, Mary and Allan McDougal, • signed off their interest in the property to George M. MacEwan, Peter's uncle. Two years later, George MacEwan sold the 100 acres to William Dalrymple for $2,500. "A couple of years ago," Mrs. Alex Forbes recalls, "Agnes MacEwan and I visited that spot. I don't know. why the house hadbeen allowed to go to rack and ruin, for it had been a really nice brick house with an apple orchard, raspberry bushes, rhubarb, etc. The barn was still in use, and the farm used as a ranch by a neighbor." Peter MacEwan's wife, Isabella Schouller, a native of Lancashire, had two brothers and two sisters: John, Joseph, Margaret and Nellie. A grandfather clock given to Isabella Schouller by her mother, Margaret Brown Schouller, is in possession of a great -great grandson, Peter Scott MacEwan, whose new house is on the site of the former salt works in Saltford. His grandfather had it restored by two Scotch work- men whom he found atthe organ factory. It is inlaid mahogany, but has been repeatedly varnished. John Scheuller MacEwan, son of Peter, born in 1898, lived in Minneapolis. He was a lawyer, and a bachelor. He sometimes visited relatives in HuFdn in his later years. He died in 1920 and is buried in Maitland Cemetery, Margaret MacEwan married John W. Towers, They lived in a cottage on Maitland road, Goderich. They had no family. Mary MacEwan married ' (continuea on page 3A) Cordwood tp nuclear power The period covered in the MacEwan story parallels, approximately, the development of fuel all the way from cordwood to atomic power. Peter MacEwan undoubtedly used wood in the Hibbert township farmhouse and at Harpurhey, as most people did, and when he came to Goderich to operate the International well he used great amounts of wood to dry the brine. Similarly, at the Saltford plant great quantities of wood were used, and there was a time when Saltford was sometimes called Slabtown, by reason of the traffic in short lengths of cordwood sliced off with the bark on. Nobody is old enough to•remember it now, but cordwood was piled along the Buffalo and Goderich Railway track at the Huron road for its wood -burning locomotives in the 1860s. Big horizontal stoves, bricked -in, were sometimes used as wood -burning fur- naces in residential cellars, but along in the 1880s, a coal -burning heater was a fixture in most houses, and there was no more familiar sound each fall than that of domestic -size coal roaring down chutes into cellars. Coal was, of course, the No. 1 industrial fuel except for those industries where wood was a by-product or -,waste. The coal came from Penn- sylvania, though some from Alberta was used with wood for domestic heating, The MacEwan fuel yard, opened on Anglesea at the Grand Trunk tracks, just south of the MacEwan residence, stocked a half-dozen sizes of coal, W, G. MacEwan operated it for many years; later it was taken over by J. B. Mustard, of Brucefield, who had two yards elsewhere, and M4. MacEwan was manager until his retirement. Edward Fuels, which acquired the business, is today 'a major distributor of fuel oil, but still sells coal to a surprising number of customers, trucking it as much as 75 miles.' The firm is the only coal dealer between Windsor and Tobermory, in the Lake Huron area. In view of the wide use of fuel oil today, and its rising cost, it is worth recalling that in the year that salt was discovered here, 1866, a Stratford man was quoted by the Beacon as saying "our Goderich friends, ay thank their stars that they struck salt instead of oil, which at -present, at least, is a mere drug on the market." The Union Gas Company, which laid its lines in Goderich district in 1958, brings natural gas from storage in Dawn township, Lambton county, and gas piped from Alberta. Hydro -electric power, which Sir Adam Beck called "white coal," is partly produced now by coal -burning plants. Electricity is widely .used for domestic heating and now, after years of preparation, we have nuclear power hooked up to transmission lines in Western Ontario from the Douglas Point generators.