Up the Gatineau! Article
This article was first published in Up the Gatineau! Volume 18.
The Store at Kirk's Ferry
Carol Martin
With its white walls and silver roof, the store gleamed and flashed in the sun. The contrast of dark woods and the hill behind it enhanced its visibility, and the highway ran within twenty feet of its entrance. It was flanked by an ice-house and a gas station to the north; on the south side a lawn and flower garden were enclosed by a neatly-trimmed cedar hedge.
The two-storey building was turned with its gable end facing the road. From its apple-green trimmed verandah, the main entrance was to the right, and the upper floor had a smaller porch as well. The white stucco walls were finished with crushed quartz, and these crystals caught and reflected the light like dazzling big flat snowflakes. Its roof design, styled with a double slope, seemed unique to me; the roof was also notable because it, like the walls of the building, reflected light from its shiny tin surface which was embossed in a design of raised, rounded shingles. Across the front the sign, in red letters on a white ground, read "Reid Bros., General Merchants“.
The store at Kirk's Ferry was part of my childhood world. Each summer, after the seemingly endless trip from Montreal in the De Soto filled with boxes of cooking utensils, toys, and summer clothing, my family would spend July and August at a cottage next door to the store. My brothers‘ and my anticipation would build as we left the city world at the end of pavement on St. Joseph Boulevard in Wrightville. As we drove north on the gravelled Highway 11, my parents announced the landmarks — “up the Mile Hill"... "Chelsea", where we had aunts, uncles and cousins, and finally, down the big hill at Kirk's Ferry, we would see the store and then our cottage.
There was a path between our cottage and the store, so a child never even walked along the highway to get there. In the mornings. I remember my legs wet with dew from the tall timothy grass; later in the day the crickets would jump from the path as we ran along it. We must have gone back and forth to the store at least three or four times a day.
Certainly. our first trip was always made before noon, to get a pitcher of water to drink with lunch. A tap on the north wall of the store provided cold, clear spring water which Mother said tasted better than any other. The spring itself was on the hill above the store, and when we were older, we children examined the damp, mossy fern-grown site with wonder that the water could reappear just a short distance away flowing from a real tap like in the city, and that there seemed to be a never-ending supply of it derived from this small, dark opening in the ground.
During the period of my childhood, In the 1940s and 1950s, the store was operated by my Uncle Ernie and Aunt Sarie (Siiri) Reid. Their business included the local telephone exchange, the post office, a gas station and an ice delivery service. These activities served the highway traffic of trucks going and coming between Hull and Maniwaki, a small core of year-round residents, and a larger summer-cottage community. The latter were generally Ottawa-based families whose breadwinners commuted by train to government or professional work during the cottage season.
When we were in Kirk's Ferry, our identity was defined by the relatives - we were "Dorothy Reid's family”, or “Charlie Reid's grandchildren.” Unlike the other cottagers, we had family who lived permanently in Kirk's Ferry. As well, our father came up to the cottage on weekends only, since he worked In Montreal and stayed there during the week.
It was years before I realized that the "Bros." on the store stood for "brothers", since we knew of only one brother, Ernie, involved in its operation. I later learned more of its history, and how my grandfather had started the business in 1926.
Charlie Reid had seen the possibilities for development when the Gatineau Power Company announced plans to build the dams at Chelsea and Farmer's Rapids. The rise in the Gatineau River's water level would wipe out part of his original farming site and some of the earliest settlements along the river bank, but it stimulated other activities. Kirk's Ferry and the communities along the west side of the river received electricity, and a new highway on higher ground replaced the old road along the river which was flooded when the dams were completed. Grandpa was ready for new ideas and activities, and his children, then aged from 14 to 21, were going to need employment. He decided to set up a store, located on the new highway.
Howard, the eldest son, had already declared his interest in farming, and had taken an agricultural course at MacDonald College at Ste. Anne de Bellevue. My mother Dorothy, the only daughter, began helping run the store when it was built; the year was 1926 and she was just 16. Ernie, Arthur, and Cecil, the other sons, all worked at the store at various times too, but by the 1940s Ernie and his wife Sarie ran it.
Inside the store, one big room had heavy oak counters along two walls. Shelving ran from floor to ceiling behind the longer counter, holding canned goods and bulk staples. Large windows were let into the front and side walls. A pigeon-hole system for mail, the scales for weighing, and a big cash-register were ranged along the counter. The walls, of tongue-and-groove boards, were decorated with advertising signs of metal or cardboard — “Sweet Caporal Cigarettes”, “Black Cat Tobacco", “Coca-Cola", and a multitude of others, large and small. One doorway at the end of the room led to the living quarters and basement, and through a second opening the switchboard could be seen.
What a different world from the Steinberg's where we shopped so anonymously for groceries in Montreal! There, we picked items from the aisles to fill a shopping cart, and paid money to the impersonal clerk who rang up our purchases and bagged the groceries. At Reid's, our Aunt or Uncle assembled the groceries for us a variety of ways. Eggs or butter would be brought up from the cool basement, and the butter would then be wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string. Sugar and flour were weighed out on the scales while Aunt Sarie or Uncle Ernie added the final grains from a scoop until the balance tipped and you had exactly the 2 or 3 pounds you had asked for. They chose which can of peas or baking powder you would get from among the rows displayed behind the counter, but you lifted out your own bottle of milk or raw cream from the cooler in the corner, where cut-up ice chunks and bits of sawdust floated in the water which kept them chilled. My Aunt or Uncle would carefully wipe the bottle with a cloth to dry it and remove any sticky residue of sawdust. There were displays of chips and chocolate bars on the counter; alas, these almost never seemed to be on my mother's shopping list.
Once our order was complete, the items and their prices were listed "on the bill" in our family's account book It seemed to me that cash seldom was used at Reid's; a row of these record books with names penciled on their backs were for the accounts of the many regular customers. These people whose accounts were paid periodically by cheque were all personalities, individuals known to the storekeepers, and the shopping relationship involved conversation and exchange of news as well as buying the items themselves.
My brothers and I liked being sent on those countless errands to the store. I liked the bright colours and glamourous pictures of adult life depicted on the advertising signs. I yearned for the chocolate bars, “junk” candy, chewing gum, nuts and chips displayed on the counter. And I liked the bustle of different people coming and going, the glimpses into adult activities and conversation as my Aunt and Uncle went about their work and chatted with the customers. As I grew older, I worked at various schemes and ways to participate in the action at the store, and to barter my services for the tantalizing snacks and soft drinks which I could not seem to include in the list of things needed for the family lunch or dinner.
When I was in my early teens I learned to operate the switchboard, proudly saying “Kirk‘s Ferry" as, under close supervision, I plugged in the line to the right jack to make the connection, asking “Are you through?’ before disconnecting. But waiting for the telephone buzzer to ring had limited appeal for me when the summer sun was shining, and I wasn't really of much help to my Aunt and Uncle with that activity.
We looked forward to riding in the back of the Fargo truck when the teenaged boys hired for the summer made the rounds delivering ice to cottagers for their ice-boxes. We enjoyed traveling along the bumpy back roads around Larrimac and seeing all the cottages there, but Mother's disapproval of this “gallivanting” was communicated to Uncle Ernie and Aunt Sarie and we had to look for other activities.
It was allowed, however, and always fun, to ride in the back of that same truck when Grandpa made the twice—daily trips to put the mail on the train or pick it up. Each afternoon there were at least two big canvas bags, one containing individually addressed copies of the Ottawa Evening Citizen since the newspaper was then mailed to subscribers, and the other for letters and the odd parcel. A small crowd would gather in the store to wait as Uncle Emie stamped and sorted the mail. He would call out the names to match the waiting customers who were simultaneously being served by Aunt Sarie with a few grocery items.
I think it was the summer that I was fifteen, when I proposed to my Aunt and Uncle (and, surprisingly, had no veto from Mother} that I should put the mail on the train in the morning. The morning mail was just one bag (although it actually contained the second one, rolled up inside it), and it was sent in on a passenger train which passed through at about 11 o'clock. I would toss the mailbag to a baggage man who stood at the open door of the second car of the train; he would store it with the rest of the mailbags from “further up the line”. As I walked back up the steep gravelled Kirk's Ferry Road, I would be planning what soft drink I would choose from the cooler — for that was my daily payment, a soft drink which was then valued at 10¢. Pure Spring made delicious minted grape, and grapefruit and lime flavours; there were also rotund bottles of Stubby drinks in many fruit flavours, and Orange Crush in a pretty ribbed orangey-brown bottle. My brother Donald collected bottle caps and I would go through the tray under the bottle-opener of the cooler, checking for any unusual kinds, or ones I didn‘t like myself, such as Hires root beer or Kik cola. This was a job that I liked, and I was proud of being a “mail girl" for most of the two months of that happy summer.
It was in the months just after my marriage in 1958 that both Grandpa and Uncle Ernie died. Shortly after, we moved back to Kirk's Ferry to live, and I found myself once again stopping in at Reid's Store for a chat with Aunt Sarie as I picked up the evening paper along with a few groceries. The switchboard still served the Kirk's Ferry exchange in 1959, and the post office was still in operation, although the gas station and ice business had been discontinued. Over the ensuing years, the switchboard, and then the post office were no longer needed, and there were plans for a new highway that would mean far less traffic passing by the store. Kirk's Ferry was also becoming a year-round community of people who worked and often shopped in Ottawa and Hull. Reid's store, a family business for over fifty years, was reaching the end of its cycle as Sarie ran it alone for an ever-shrinking clientele. For me, the store continued to be a friendly stop and link with my childhood and family until Sarie‘s death in 1978.
The business was then sold, but present-day reminders of these former Reid enterprises remain in the foundation of the ice-house, roofed over for a storage space, and the store building, now considerably altered and run as a dépanneur or convenience store.