Port Credit Post Card -- Mother of Seven: Schooner Days DCCCXCI (891)

by C. H. J. Snider

IF I had the money the new pier head lights for the new entrance for the new harbor of Port Credit would shine from the heads of two bronze statues, one on each side of the channel.

One would be for Grandma Emily Blowers; and one would be for Aunt Betsey Sharpe, wife of a long-ago harbormaster. Both women were mothers of the port.

Eighty years ago, Emily Gerling, belle of Peel Co., was left a widow by the death of her husband, Thomas Blowers, one of the sterling Yorkshire men, Blowers and Blocks who came to the Credit in Mackenzie rebellion times.

Mrs. Blowers' resources were good health, a good little daughter five little boys, Tommy, Mark, Jim, George and Abram, and a little sloop called the Catharine Hayes which her husband had by industry managed to buy. The sloop was old but fast, and "Uncle Tom" Blowers, and "Daddy" Block had won a championship race with her in 1865, using sails borrowed from the Prima Donna, one of the earliest members of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club fleet.

With seven or eight mouths to feed, including her own and the Catharine Emily had little time for mourning. She moved into the Catharine Hayes, family and all. There was work all summer carrying cordwood to Toronto for steamboat and locomotive fuel, piled up at Hamilton's wharf at the foot of Scott street, and Emily strove to get her share of it. Ten cords was the most the Catharine could carry, and 50 cents a cord "big freight" money. She was lucky to average two rounds trips a week.

The sloop was the most voracious of the family. She drank lake water by the barrel and devoured oakum by the bale to stanch her thirst, and demanded cordage, canvas, tallow, pitch and hardware all the time.

Ten dollars a week was not enough to feed and clothe a family of seven—and the Catharine Hayes. Emily eked it out by stonehooking when she could, picking up building stone along the lake shore.

Stonehooking was hard work for able-bodied men. Some stonehookermen took their wives and families along to help in the housekeeping both at home and afloat, but the work itself was no job for a woman. It was worst in Halton and Peel counties, where local legislation gave the lake shore farmers riparian rights which they enforced with collie dogs and shotguns. These rights extended 2 1/2 "rods, poles or perches" or some such distance into the water, which forced the stonehookers to rake for their humble cargoes from the lake bed instead of gathering them from the beach. No, it was no job for a woman. But Mrs. Emily Bowers, relict of the late Thomas Blowers, deceased, was a super woman.

Tommy, Jr., her oldest son, was only twelve; not heavy enough to budge a stone weighing a hundredweight, but already a smart sailor. Not long' ago Capt. Al Hare of Port Credit, in his eighties, told of seeing Emily wading waist deep in lake water, her black skirt ballooning up around her with the air held, while she helped the little boys load the box-like scow in which they had to ferry the stone out to the empty Catharine, anchored as close in to the shore as they dared bring her. Every stone had to be lifted from the bottom to the scow, from the scow to the deck, from the deck to the hold. It wasn't safe to throw them in, they might go through the bottom of the sloop. Then they had to be carried to the city and be got up on deck again and out on the dock, before the coveted $5 a toise could be wrung from the buyer. The Catharine could carry a little over two toise; once even got $15 for a load which took a week's work.

Emily's burden lightened when she got a place for her little daughter with James Abbs, Parkdale market gardener, for whom the Catharine had occasionally carried a load of manure between stone and wood cargoes. Don't sniff. Roses and cabbages must have fertilizer.

James Abbs was more than a just employer. When Emily despaired of keeping the Catharine afloat another season, she was leaking so badly, Mr. Abbs financed a major operation, which must have eaten up all of a hundred dollars, viz, rebuilding and re-rigging the worn-out sloop into a new schooner, of greater carrying capacity. The work was done by the family with the help of Port Credit shipwrights. The boys' were growing fast and could do the work of men. She called the rejuvenated Catharine after their benefactor, the Janies Abbs.

No longer did Emily have to with billowing skirts to load stone; but she sailed with the boys when required and made a good home for them at all times. As the boys grew, they took over the James Abbs completely, and spread out into othee hookers.

The Rough and Ready, a large Oswego-built scow in the cordwood trade, was perhaps the last appearance of Emily as managing owner, cook and captain-general. Abe, nicknamed "Handsome" as he grew up, sailed the Mary, Lillian, Island Queen at times. Tommy, called "Mind You" from a habit of speech, got hookers to sail, and Markie had the Ida May, which enabled him to build six houses in the village, and Jim the P. E Young, and George the Coral and several others.

George was nicknamed "Samson" for his strength, and sometimes used it not wisely but too well—as when he wrung the flywheel off the head of the seized propeller shaft in the Lillian, in which he installed the first gasoline auxiliary in the hooker fleet. He had planned one for the Coral in 1900, but everybody laughed at the "darned contraptions which cost more than they could possibly earn, and never ran when they were wanted, anyway." Soon afterwards he confirmed—and confuted—the critics with his Lillian experience. She was one of the last of the hookers to operate.

With her family well settled as the saying is, and doing credit to her, Grandma Blowers quietly withdrew from the scene and went to her reward beloved by all. A pierhead light is little enough to point to her good example. Of the companion light for her contemporary Aunt Betsey, we shall speak later if your interest continues in these short and simple annals of an old port.

Glimpse of the old Port Credit hooker fleet.

ONE OF THE BLOWERS BOYS

CAPT. MARK BLOWERS built six houses from his industry with the REINDEER.