Low Down Articles
Echoes from the Past
Article 68 of 111
This article first appeared in the "Echoes from the Past" column of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
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Robert Newton Sully (let not his name be sullied)
Robert Newton Sully was, in his day, a marvelous raconteur. Many of the tales he related to G.H. Wilson in the late 1920s appeared in the Ottawa Evening Citizen on Saturday, 10 August 1929, under the heading OLD TIME STUFF.
To place Mr. Sully in proper context perhaps it would be of interest to learn that he was the grandfather of the late Neil Brown (1913-1970), Arthur Brown (1919-1993) and Andrew Brown (1913-), through their mother Effie Sully (1884-1972), who was the daughter of Robert Newton.
Please share and enjoy the stories spun by Mr. Sully to G.H. Wilson those many years ago. They provide a word picture of how things were in this general area more than a century ago.
DID NOT SMOKE UNTIL HE WAS 50
It has been generally taught that if a young man does not smoke till he is 21 years of age, he will not smoke at all. But in the case of R.N. Sully of Wakefield the axiom does not seem to hold true.
Mr. Sully says he did not smoke in any form till he was 50 years of age. It was a foreman in a shanty who induced him to learn to smoke. He suggested that smoking was a fine thing to keep a man from being lonesome. When he learned he was the only man in camp who did not smoke.
TALL STORY
Talking about tall stories (who was?) Mr. R. N. Sully tells one about a Caywood resident who used to say that once one of his sheep fell into a lake near Caywood, and when it came out it had half a dozen fish hanging to its wool.
(Clearly a case of wool gathering, or a case of pulling the wool over their eyes.)
SAD FATALITY NEAR WAKEFIELD IN 1848
(not an R.N. Sully story)
In the year 1848 a very sad drowning took place in the vicinity of Wakefield. George McKittrick, a pioneer settler, and his young son were drowned in the Gatineau. The McKittricks lived on the east bank of the river.
One fall day Mr. McKittrick and his son, aged about 18, put several bags of oats in a canoe and started out to cross the river, at the same time swimming their horse beside them.
In some manner the line got entangled with canoe, which upset in such a manner that the two men could not get clear and were drowned. George McKittrick was well know and greatly respected.