Ties that bind, farming, Agrarian ideals, and life in Ontario, 1890-1930

grantor: University of TorontoHistorians have rightly regarded the period from 1890 to 1930 as the time when Ontario emerged as an urban and industrial province. But their acceptance of the idea that this development was accompanied by a crisis of "rural depopulation" in the countryside has led them to dismiss the life of the farm, and ideas about that life, as anachronistic. The prevailing assumption of rural decline in the face of steady urbanization has also meant that little attention has been paid to the interaction between the country and the city, save perhaps to present urban areas as the final destinations of migrating farmers. This study contends that there was no crisis in Ontario's farming communities in this period. The adult farming population remained stable and relatively prosperous. Farm children left home because of the lack of available land in their neighbourhoods, not out of any widespread rejection of their parents' occupation. Their departures were neither sudden nor disruptive, but rather undertaken in stages and negotiated in the context of the family farm economy. The existence of prosperous fanning districts and a large urban population with roots in the countryside ensured that farming and conceptions of farming played a central role in the province's society and culture even as towns and cities expanded and the proportion of people engaged in agriculture declined. Public defences of farming were creative and vibrant, and rooted in contemporary ideas about history, racial decline, science, gender, art, and literature. The thesis presents an overview of these agrarian ideas, and then traces their influence over individual lives, educational institutions, and the home front in the First World War. A final chapter details the first challenge to the idealization of farming in Ontario, at the hands of sociologists and public health officials in the 1910s and 1920s. Through an examination of census material, personal papers, the farm press, and government records, this work argues that the history of Ontario from the 1890s through to the Depression should not be seen primarily as an era of urban triumph, but rather one of the complicated intermingling of rural and urban worlds.Ph.D