The East End


The East End

We lived with my Dad’s parents, James William Falt and his wife, Mary Jane, and Dad’s sister Essie. Grandfather had built the house just a few years before for Aunt Essie, she being the only one in the family who had not married. The house was beside the old mill which Grandfather had run for many years.


Aunt Essies House

was a grist mill where farmers brought wheat, oats, etc., to be ground into flour… The mill also had a carding machine so farmers could bring in fleeces from their sheep and have them spun into yarn. [Grandfather] also had a couple of kilns nearby where he provided lime and made barrels to put it in…

…the mill was torn down, Uncle Art built a house on the land a bit nearer the railroad track. There was a huge water tank there and trains often had to stop and fill up their boilers. The station was just ahead. Aunt Barbara decided to take one room of their house and convert it to a little convenience store. There were two other stores much like that in the neighborhood, but Aunt Barbara got the trainmen. They could jump off the train and buy a few supplied, as could the folks in the area. At the time of prohibition Aunt Barbara wondered why men were buying so much lemon extract. Finally someone told her the rummies were drinking it because it had some alcohol in it…


Aunt Tira's House

…In towns of that time most everyone had a cow and maybe a horse or two, so they had a barn or shed to put the animals in, and that gave a place for a privy. In town Grandfather Falt had a shed where he kept a few hens and wood for the stoves, and the privy was there as well…

…Dad became manager of the Antigonish Dairy Company Ltd. It was a sort of Co-Op of most of the farmers for miles around. There was a Board of Directors that Dad reported to…Some years later there was a reorganization and the name was changed to Antigonish Creamery…

My first “paying” job I had was at the Dairy imprinting butter with the 2-pound molds. I can’t remember if it was for certain number of blocks or for an hour’s work I got 50 cents…Butter for home use was with these 2-pound blocks, but for hotels or hospitals, it was usually 50-pound boxes…

Later on, Dad was one of the men to form the Board of Trade (much like the Chamber of Commerce today) Antigonish was at least seventy-five percent Roman Catholic but there was an unwritten law that after we had a Catholic mayor, he would be followed by a Protestant. In 1926 and 1927 Dad was mayor of the town…










contact: Antigonish Heritage Museum antheritage@parl.ns.ca