Written By Kae Elgie
For many of us, December brings thoughts of Christmas feasts from our past. We hunt up favourite recipes, place orders for fresh Christmas fowl, bake treats for parties.
Do you ever think about what the people who walked where you live today ate 10,000 years ago in winter time?
Kae Elgie has done research to share information at the January meeting of the Glencoe and District Historical Society. Co-sponsored with Middlesex County Library, Kae’s talk, entitled “10,000 Years of Food and Agriculture in Southwestern Ontario” will take place at Glencoe Public Library, 123 McKellar Street, Glencoe at 1 pm on Wednesday January 21, 2026.
Sparked by evidence found on her family’s farm in Chatham-Kent, Kae consulted archaeologists and historians, and land records, and family letters, and genealogists, and former neighbours, and pieced together the story of all the people who lived before her on the two hundred acres where she grew up —back to the Ice Age, and up to the present! Her two brothers and two nephews and their families currently live on the same two hundred Chatham-Kent acres near Dawn Mills.
Copies of her book, This Land: The Story of Two Hundred Acres in Kent County, Ontario will be available for purchase at her talk.
Elgie was amazed to discover that her family farm had been criss-crossed for centuries by people hunting mastodon, caribou and other game, after the three-kilometre-thick ice sheet covering it melted about 12,000 years ago. Relics that her dad and brothers called “arrowheads” turned out to be Indigenous tools 10,000 years old.
Some of her discoveries were troubling. Reading the translated diaries of Christian Denke, a Moravian Brother who established a mission on the Sydenham River near Florence, showed how easy it can be to have cultural misunderstandings.
Denke’s Christmas 1804 entry was poignant. “It snowed again so that the snow is now more than knee-deep everywhere. The hungry Chippewas, of who many passed by here, have a hard time because they cannot hunt.”
The Chippewa “pester us and beg constantly” wrote Denke several times in his diaries. He never realized what Western University archaeologist Neal Ferris discovered two hundred years later, that there was a cyclical nature to this. Ferris’s investigations showed begging was non-existent during the fall hunting season August to November, infrequent between April and November when fish were available, and most prevalent between November and March, peaking in late December. Begging from other families or communities was an accepted traditional way of coping with seasonal scarcities, Ferris explained.
“The idea of sharing the returns of a large undivided expanse of land was foreign to the Europeans who first encountered Indigenous people living on the land that eventually became our family farm,” wrote Elgie in her book, This Land: the story of two hundred acres in Kent County, Ontario. “It had been centuries since my Elgie ancestors in Britain had lived on undivided commons whose produce was shared.”
The story of how the thousand-years-old Indigenous hunting and foraging grounds became an award-winning family farm turned out to be long and complicated. As well as the many Indigenous generations who had looked after the land for centuries, there were at least eight other people who “owned” and used the land for various purposes before Elgie’s twice-great grandfather George Elgie set out, in 1870, to turn the land into a productive farm.
Particularly interesting to Elgie was the complicated path of land purchases, sales and mortgages George undertook to create a land mass supportive of mechanization, while simultaneously setting up all four of his sons with farms of their own —even sons like William who “was always fond of machinery far more than farming,” according to his sister Martha Jane.
Threshing machines like the ones William Elgie bought were a way to reduce the hours of labour previously spent, sometimes over the winter months, flailing grain heads to release their seeds. Ironically, though they reduced the number of individual man-hours required to produce a bushel of wheat, their introduction slowed because of a shortage of labour. It took a team of at least six men (more was better) to thresh a field of grain.
One constant over the ages was maple syrup making. Moravian missionary Christian Denke noted in his diary the comings and goings of the “Chippewas” to their “sugar places” throughout February and March 1805 and also recorded the location of several abandoned Indian sugar huts along the Sydenham River between today’s communities of Grove Mills and Florence.
In the 1970s, Elgie’s father Ken decided it was time to rediscover the benefits of the sugar maple trees that had always stood in the bush at the back of the farm. He built a very basic shack he named “The Shanty” where he would spend the hours and hours and hours needed to wait for that critical instant when boiling sap turns to syrup. In 2011, Elgie’s brothers Earl and Bill built a new sugar shack with separate boiling and bottling areas to meet Canada Food Inspection Agency standards.
Copies of Elgie’s book, This Land: The Story of Two Hundred Acres in Kent County, Ontario will be available for purchase at her talk.
