It's in the Cards: Packing Apples
This coloured view of Apple Packing at Niagara-on-the-Lake is on a postcard mailed in 1913 from Dundalk, Ontario. So why would someone in Dundalk send this NOTL card in October 1913? Well, it’s quite possible that it was picked up by a summer trainee at the Camp here in town.
Published by St. John Ferguson and Connolly, it’s a contrast to the images of vineyards that one would expect to see today. And it’s not a peach crop that one might have expected as the feature some 50 years ago. We enlarged the image and even though it does not have the resolution of a photograph, we can still make out that the barrels are stenciled as ‘Canadian Apples’ with the attribution to ‘F.H. Baker, Toronto, Ont. X1’.
The description of ‘Canadian’ suggests that the barrels might have been for export and would have been shipped on the Cayuga or some other Lake Boat to Toronto and thence possibly to the U.K. We recall local resident David Greaves’ recent reminiscences to us of peaches being taken to the dock to be loaded on to the Cayuga for shipment to Toronto in a later era.
The message is the sort of thing that people might have said in the pre-telephone and pre-e-mail era:
Dundalk, Ont – Dear Pappa, Just a card to let you know we are all well & trust you are same. I got your letter with content also well. We will start on 14 if nothing happens. Will write later.
Over one hundred years later, we can’t begin to guess what they are going to start ‘on 14 if nothing happens’. Apple picking in Dundalk? We will never know. Postcards can tell us a story – but sometimes only part of it!
Image: Courtesy of Judith Sayers