of stimulating public interest in
agricultural work. Conditions were not favourable to organization. The
'town meeting' was concerned mainly with the question of the height of
fences and regulations as to stock running at large. One attempt,
however, was made which should be noted. Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe took
charge of affairs early in 1792, and, immediately after the close of the
first session of the legislature at Newark (Niagara) in the autumn of
that year, organized an agricultural society at the headquarters which
met occasionally to discuss agricultural questions. There are no records
to show whether social intercourse or practical agricultural matters
formed the main business. The struggle for existence was too exacting
and the conditions were not yet favourable for organization to advance
general agricultural matters.

When the War of 1812 broke out the clearings of the original settlers
had been extended, and some of the loyalists still lived, grown grey
with time and hardened by the rough life of the backwoods. Their sons,
many of whom had faint recollection of their early homes across the
line, had grown up in an atmosphere of strictest loyalty to the British
crown, and had put in long years in clearing the farms on which they
lived and adding such comforts to their houses, that to them, perhaps as
to no other generation, their homes meant everything in life. The
summons came to help to defend those homes and their province. For three
years the agricultural growth received a severe check. Fathers and sons
took their turn in going to the front. The cultivation of the fields,
the sowing and the harvesting of the crops, fell largely to the lot of
the mothers and the daughters left at home. But they were equal to it.
In those days the women were trained to help in the work of the fields.
They did men's work willingly and well. In many cases they had to
continue their heroic work after the close of the war, until their
surviving boys were grown to years of manhood, for many husbands and
sons went to the front never to return.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See 'Pioneer Settlements' in this section.

A PERIOD OF EXPANSION, 1816-46

The close of the war saw a province that had been checked at a time of
vigorous growth now more or less impoverished, and, in some sections,
devastated. This was, however, but the gloomy outlook before a period of
rapid expansion. In 1816, on the close of the Napoleonic wars in Europe,
la