THE FAMILY FARM IN HALTON HILLS
By John Mark Rowe – February 20 -26th 2017 Ontario Heritage Week
To honour Ontario Heritage Week and Canada’s Sesquicentennial, the Esquesing Historical Society will celebrate the family farm throughout 2017. Halton Hills is under great pressure to grow and our valuable farmland is being urbanized. Nevertheless, we still boast of working family farms and lots of wide open spaces.
Our project was inspired by the Centennial Farm signs offered to family farms in 1967 by the Ontario Junior Farmers Association. The qualifying criteria was a farm owned by the same family from 1867 to 1967. In November, 1966, a list of 79 Century Farms in Halton County was published in the Milton Champion. The list noted the owner’s name at that time and the year the property came into the family. Twenty Esquesing farms were included. However, our recent research shows that some farms were missed. We would like to add them to the list.
Esquesing Historical Society would like to recognize all our long-term farm families. Therefore, we want to know of any farm owned by the same family for any 100 continuous years. We’d also like to recognize Canada’s Sesquicentennial by recognizing farms owned by the same family from 1867 to 2017 or farms owned by the same family for any 150 continuous years.
Your help is needed in determining which farms to honour. We’d like to collect stories about those farms. Please submit your ideas for our committee to follow up by e-mailing esquesinghs@gmail.com or writing the EHS at P.O. Box 51, Georgetown, Ontario L7G 4T1. If you live on a family farm we’d love to receive scans of Crown deeds, farm pictures or family pictures. When sending scans to the Historical Society, esquesinghs@gmail.com please indicate if the Society can add it to our collection. Original photos or documents can be donated through the Halton Hills Library in Acton or Georgetown, for our Archives.