Ogdensburg 1929: Edna Smith's bitter homecoming
Another century's American migrants
Edna Smith was born to poor people in one of North America’s poorest places. Her father, George Smith, was a store clerk in Newport, Gaspésie, when he met the teenaged Marie-Agnès Morin in 1910. George was French, but he and his family still bore English names passed down from Scottish fishermen and Loyalist refugees who had washed up in the Gaspé. George’s family were fishermen, maritime sharecroppers, really, forever owing next season’s catch to the company store. The Robins Company had monopoly control over the small fishing villages and beaches along the coast of the Baie des Chaleurs.
The company gave fishermen credit to buy fishing lines, hooks, salt, and other materials they needed to equip themselves for the season, as well as clothes and food for themselves and their families. The fishermen then repaid the loan with the cod they caught, dried, and salted. The company set the price of cod each year. The fishermen had no choice but to accept it. It was well known that Robins kept tight control over their fishermen. If any man tried to sell to a competing company for a better price, he was threatened with a summons for debt or was made to work without pay on a trans-Atlantic voyage. Since most fishermen, including George’s father, could not read or write, they could not argue their accounts with the Robins. They worked hard to make a poor living, forever in debt.
George was lucky. He was the first person in his family to go to school and learn how to read and write in English. He was twenty-six years old, and Agnes just nineteen, when they married.
For the early years of their marriage, George and Agnes moved back and forth between the Gaspé coast and upstate New York, following the work, although as time went on, working was not a priority for George. Their first child, Isabelle, was born in 1911 in Anse-aux-Gascons, Gaspésie. Edna was born in Cranberry Lake, upstate NY, in 1913. She was born in a diner, and named after the waitress who assisted in the surprise delivery. Two little boys named Edward followed, neither living past infancy. Four more siblings followed: Stanley in 1918, then the twins George Albert, “Bert” and Georgiana Albertina “Tina” in 1919, then Alice in 1920.
George must not have been able to make a go of it in Newport, or, more likely, logging may have offered better money to support a family with six children under the age of ten. In the 1920s a labor shortage in upstate New York drove up wages, particularly for woodsmen. His brother William had been living in the North Country since George’s last sojourn there, back when Edna was a baby, and had probably told him that jobs were plentiful.
In 1921, the Smiths returned to the United States, to the same outer edge of the Adirondacks where they had lived before. George crossed the border with Agnes and the six little children with $30 in his pocket. He paid for the journey himself, taking a bet there would be the work.
According to the U.S. Alien Examination record, George was thirty-seven years old, and of “the French race.” He was skinny, at 5’11” and 135 pounds. In the only photo we have of him in these years, he looks delicate. He was not anyone’s idea of a lumberjack, but he returned to logging. Throughout the 1920s, William and George kept moving, following the work in different North Country towns—Tupper Lake, Benson Mines, Carthage, Wilna, Watertown—places along the road that is now Highway 3, an artery that bisected the North Country and penetrated into the wilderness to extract its timber and iron ore. It gave work to the Smith brothers and so many other Canadian migrants in their logging camps, sawmills, and iron pits.
When Edna was born at Cranberry Lake in 1913, and then later, when Ernest was born, in Tupper Lake, in 1922, George would have been a woodsman, working in a logging camp in the bush during the week and visiting his family in town on his days off. These camps might be used for only a few years, and then abandoned, their buildings slowly disintegrating in the North Country snow and mud, reclaimed by the forest. The forest was so vast and wood so plentiful the loggers did not bother to salvage their camps, preferring instead the nomadic life of the original inhabitants of the forest, settling somewhere anew with fresh logs. George himself lived a similar itinerant life, settling down and the breaking camp, countless times, wandering from the Gaspé to the Adirondacks, back to the Gaspé, back to the Adirondacks, to Ontario, back to New York State, then to Montreal.
George had only short and sporadic stints as a logger. Only Edna and Ernest were born in the timberland tracks around Tupper Lake, and the family began spending winters over the border in Prescott, Ontario, returning in the spring. Logging was however a winter job, since the snow allowed sleighs to transport the logs more easily that carrying them out of the woods by other means. “Skid logs while the snow falls,” was the woodsmen’s slogan. George may have only logged when it suited him, or when the money was good.
George tried his hand at other jobs. He was likely an employee of Benson Mines at the time Thomas was born there in 1923. Benson Mines was the largest open iron ore pit mine in the world at that time, employing thousands of people to extract and crush ore, and then wash and load it into railcars for shipment to the steel mills of Pennsylvania.
When John was born at Carthage in 1924, George was probably working in one the factories on the banks of Black River, where timber from the Adirondacks floated down to mills and was turned into newsprint and paper bags. In 1925, the family lived just outside Carthage, where George was employed as a carpenter, possibly a mill hand. The following year Francis was born. Edna was 14 and had by now lived in at least half a dozen homes.
The family spent the winters in Prescott and also sometimes returned to Quebec. It’s not clear what had made Edna’s childhood such a wretched migration. Edna’s father did not like to work, and her mother was remote, depressed, overwhelmed by children. By the time they were living in Carthage, the Smiths had ten.
There was an attempt at a formal family portrait, with everyone in their Sunday best, but the Smiths don’t pull it off. Agnes is too distracted to face the camera. She looks down at her brood. Is she shy, evasive, or just trying to make sure ten children sit still? The littlest ones have been told to squeeze in close and are grinning like monkeys. Stanley is a little man, posing placidly, proud of his grown-up suit and tie. Isabelle, the eldest, furthest to the right in the back, is smiling obediently for the camera. There are no stories about Isabelle as a young girl. She too was overwhelmed by chores, babies, the constant moving around, but Isabelle was harder than Edna, and kept her troubles to herself.
But Edna, furthest to the left in the back, is showing teenage girl attitude. She would have just started high school when this photo was taken. She was a good student and loved school. She spoke French at home but never learned to write it, since her only education was in upstate New York. Learning to read in English. Learning to be American. She knew the Pledge of Allegiance by heart. She knew all the words to the “Star-Spangled Banner,” which in later years she would sing in full voice, at the drop of a hat.
The constant migration meant school was something to catch whenever it was there, like a bus going by on its route. No wonder she loved school. It wasn’t something to take for granted. It was a treat, like an outing on Sunday dressed in your best clothes, excited to be there, squirming with anticipation, pinching the little ones to sit still, pay attention, this is important. In the few photos we have of Edna as a girl, she stares down the camera, taking it all in. Her name, Smith, put her three quarters of the way down the class room, closer to the cloakroom than the blackboard, but she sat straight in her chair, determined to learn.
George is not looking at his family, he is personally involved with the camera. His hair and moustache have been carefully tended. He may have slicked back his hair with Brilliantine, or just petroleum jelly, but in the photo it is perfect. For someone unaccustomed to suits, he wears his well. He is the only one not smiling, except for the petulant baby.
The insouciance of the slouch and the cigarette are the only other possible markers we have for George’s alleged narcissism, except for Edna’s hot, bright hate, that I feel even now, a hundred years later, having only heard the stories secondhand.
When did her hatred of George begin? Was it the constant moving around from one rented house to another? When she was pulled out of school to go back to keep house in Prescott yet again? When did she put together the lack of money and his disinterest in work? Or was it two equally strong wills colliding? Edna looked just like her father, with the same strong features and the same penetrating gaze.
1929 was the year the twig was bent. Edna was 15, and her father told her it was time to leave school and go to work. Her English teacher from Carthage high school came to the house to beg him to let Edna stay and graduate, that she was so bright, that she loved school. But there were nine kids at home, eight of them younger than her, and George said she was ready to get a job.
In 1929, the year 15-year-old Edna was sent out to work, the Algonquin Hotel, in St. Andrews-By-The-Sea, New Brunswick, on the border of Maine, had just had the busiest and most successful season of its history. The Algonquin was one of the grandest of the CPR hotels, a 200-room mock Tudor castle overlooking the bay. Algonquin summers were grand for golfers, swimmers, and tennis players. The hotel had a sweeping verandah where guests could sip tea in the shade and enjoy the view of the Gulf of Maine beyond lush green lawns, or see matches on the tennis courts. There was swimming fishing and golf, and dancing to a full orchestra every evening. The hotel made its own ice cream. Talking films screened three times a week.
From dinner table to lounge is the beaten path of the Algonquinite. Here you may spend a restful hour—comparing adventures and scores, listening to a favorite piece entrancingly placed by the Algonquin orchestra.... At 9:30, the first fox trot sounds from the Casino. All the younger set is on hand . . . and between dances why not loll on the Casino veranda enjoying soft breezes and delightful companionship, or stroll on the grounds, admiring the bay suffused with luminous moonlight.1
Edna found a job as a waitress at the Algonquin. She spent a lot of time just observing people. As a young woman, Edna was a sponge, always wanting to know about the larger world, and how other people dressed and behaved.
Edna did not send the money home. Not trusting her father with her paycheck, she instead came home and marched the younger children to the shops to buy whatever they needed. Years later, after she died, one of her younger brothers said that if it hadn’t been for Edna, they wouldn’t have had shoes.
During that summer of 1929, Edna was enlisted to help in the move back to Canada. She may have been summoned home from the Algonquin to help out. A ferry manifest from that summer has 16-year-old Edna travelling from Carthage to Canada alone with four little boys between the ages of 6 and 3. Their destination was Prescott, Ontario. Agnes and George must have left for Prescott with the elder children, leaving the younger children with Edna.
The journey to the ferry over Adirondack roads by bus would have been the better part of a day, then the ferry from Ogdensburg to Prescott. Edna would not have known that in 1783 her foremother, Alice Pennington, an American Loyalist refugee, had made a similar hard journey, crossing the border the same way, with empty pockets and her arms filled with little children. Like Alice, Edna was an American who would never live in the United States again.
Edna was traveling back to another rented house, another season of poverty, maybe if she were lucky, another waitress job, but this time not as well paying as the Algonquin- the glamorous hotel job was only for the summer after all. She would never return to school.
When providing information for the ferry, Edna claimed, or the immigration officer decided, that they were Irish. She was probably too busy trying to keep four little boys from putting their hands where they shouldn’t, climbing the railings, falling overboard.
The ferry manifest asked for the name, relationship, and address of the nearest relative in the country from which you came. Edna reported “Nil.” She had already learned how to never look back.
“Saint Andrews by-the-Sea,” Ste Croix Courier, August 27th, 1936
Thomas was my grandfather, this article is gold to me!
Great storytelling!