Let us ponder stumping, a pioneer way of announcing love in old New Brunswick. In 1845 Mrs. F. Bevan wrote Sketches and Tales Illustrative of Life in New Brunswick, North America. Mrs. Bevan noted that stumping was a backwoods method of telling the world you were going to get married. It was a folksy way of publishing the banns. The engaged couple would write their names and the announcement of their wedding date on slips of paper and then stick copies in the crannies and nooks of the many stumps that lined the corduroy roads of Victorian, pre-Confederation New Brunswick. Passers-by who spotted the papers might stop a sleigh or one-horse cutter on a winter twilight, and eager for any local news in cabin-fever time, read the latest gossip, then care-fully put the stumping papers back in their woody holes so that the next neighbour to pass by in a buggy or sleigh could catch up on the local connubial bliss soon to ensue. How much more Canadian was this than having the banns read from a pulpit in the dry, disapproving squawk of some purse-lipped country preacher.
A corduroy road was a common solution to transport-ation problems in Upper and Lower Canada. If the ground or track of a dirt road was soft and squelchy, short sawn logs could be laid transversely across a road bed. The resulting pattern of logs looked like the ribs in corduroy fabric, hence the name. These roads had stumps on both sides often, because the logs were made from trees growing beside the roads.
A Toronto historian named Henry Scadding describes walking up Yonge Street between Davisville and Eglinton in the 1870s: “A tract of rough country was now reached, difficult to clear and difficult to traverse with a vehicle. Here a genuine corduroy causeway was encountered, a long series of small saw-logs laid side by side over which wheels jolted deliberately. In the wet season portions of it, being afloat, would undulate under the weight of a passing load; and occasionally a horse's leg would be entrapped, and possibly snapped short by the sudden yielding or revolution of one of the cylinders below.” From Henry Scadding, Toronto of Old - Collections and Recollections Illustrative of the Early Settlement and Social Life of the Capital of Ontario, Adam, Stevenson and Co., Toronto, 1873. Reprinted by Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1966.
© 2005 William Gordon Casselman
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