Maintaining the household subsistence farmers on the little clay belt, 1900-1930

This research paper was completed and submitted at Nipissing University, and is made freely accessible through the University of Toronto’s TSpace repositoryCurrent scholarship views agriculture in northeastern Ontario, happening predominantly on the clay belt, as a failure. Yet what failed was the creation of commercial, market-oriented farming. Historians have neglected the complex nature of clay belt society during its initial, government-propagated settlement period, from 1900to 1930. Focusing on one area of the clay belt, the Temiskaming district, this paper showsthe ways in which farmers used subsistence farming, commercial sales, wage labour, domestic chores, and reciprocal work bees as strategies to advance the household. They were neither fully a part of the capitalist economy, in the sense that they were not utterly dependent on the market for survival, nor resistant to capitalism, because the market was used. Instead, farmers incorporated multiple dependencies to sustain their households