No transcript available for this episode.
S01:E19
In 1857 a common school teacher named John Earl published a pamphlet at the Norfolk Messenger office in Simcoe that undertook to list, lot by lot, the name of every landholder in Norfolk County, Canada West — the statistics all speaking from 1855, the assessment year he worked from.
Go through his lists with a pencil and the family appears forty-three times, in six of the seven townships. This episode walks the lots: the homestead in its third generation, with the Old Windham Church and Jabez's grave inside one fence line; Michael Culver on the lot granted in right of his mother Miriam in 1796; a Culver still on the Pettit half-lot, keeping an eighty-year New Jersey entanglement; and the entry where the enumerator gave up — "Culver Family and others" — the undivided estate that is the closest thing we have to William Valentine's address in 1855.
There is also a cheese manufacturer we cannot yet place, and an open invitation to any reader who descends from him.
And there is the ending Earl himself wrote: seven stanzas of recruiting verse — "Would you be wealthy, come away" — that the next generation obeyed in the opposite direction, to Bay City, Michigan.
The midpoint snapshot between the grants of 1794 and the Michigan exodus, from the schoolteacher who counted everybody.
Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.