William Saunders and His Five Sons (and Daughter)

Of the nine children of James and Jane Saunders, it was the youngest son, William, who achieved the most fame outside the family circle. He, in turn, had five sons who all went on to have quite remarkable lives of their own. So let’s delve more deeply into the lives of Alice Miner’s Uncle William and her notable cousins.

William Saunders in 1897
Library and Archives Canada

Like the rest of the Saunders siblings, William (1836-1914) was born in Crediton and baptized at the Wesleyan Methodist church in Exeter. Shortly after his arrival in London at the age of thirteen, he was apprenticed to a local pharmacist, John Salter, and by the time he was nineteen he had opened his own drugstore. Two years later, he married Sarah Agnes Robinson (daughter of the minister who had performed the wedding of Bertha Saunders and Richard Patton the year before), and they had six children: Annie Louisa (1858-1938), William Edwin (1861-1943), Henry Scholey (1864-1951), Charles Edward (1867-1937), Arthur Percy (1869-1953), and Frederick Albert (1875-1963).

William Saunders was a good businessman, but he was also interested in the science of pharmaceuticals. His interest in the medicinal properties of plants led him into the study of botany and then to entomology. In the garden of the Saunders home in London, he established an extensive orchard where he studied plant diseases caused by insects. In 1873, William purchased six acres of land outside the city where he continued his work in entomology and fruit and flower hybridization. These orchards were also early laboratories for the Saunders children, where they received their first lessons in natural history by helping their father with his work.

Central Experimental Farm, Ottawa, 1890
Friends of the Central Experimental Farm

By the mid-1880s, both William Edwin and Henry had qualified as pharmacists and were able to take over many aspects of the family business. This left their father free to pursue a new project: the establishment of Canada’s experimental farm system. In February 1886, Saunders submitted a report to the Minister of Agriculture describing what he had learned on his visits to numerous agricultural research stations in the United States, and proposing that Canada establish its own system of farms for research in cereal culture, dairying, animal husbandry, horticulture, forestry, and the application of chemistry and botany to agriculture. Soon thereafter, the Dominion Experimental Farms system was established, with William Saunders as its director.

In 1887, William, Sarah, Annie, and Fred moved to Ottawa, which was the home of the Central Experimental Farm. Four other farms were also established in Nova Scotia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. The aim of all these farms was to produce practical results in the form of better varieties of grain, improved livestock, and fruit-trees that could thrive in the Canadian climate. One of its main goals was the development of strains of wheat suited to the climate of western Canada, and to this end, William Saunders appointed his son Charles to the position of Dominion Cerealist in 1903. 

Canadian postage stamp, issued in 2000,
honoring Sir Charles Saunders

Charles had studied chemistry at the University of Toronto and Johns Hopkins, but had been pursuing a career in music in Toronto. Now he took charge of a new department at the Central Experimental farm, the Division of Cereal Breeding and Experimentation and began work on what became known as Marquis wheat. The strains of wheat being grown in Saskatchewan and Alberta frequently matured too late and were damaged by frost. Marquis wheat matured earlier, produced yields as good or better than other varieties, and had excellent milling and baking qualities. By 1920, 90% of the wheat being grown in western Canada was Marquis wheat, and it was largely responsible for the boom in Canadian wheat exports. In 1934, Charles Saunders was knighted for his services to the Dominion.

Although Charles followed most closely in his father’s footsteps, all five sons shared William’s scientific interests. William Edwin ran the family pharmaceutical business, but he also engaged in a dizzying range of other activities, most related to the study and preservation of the natural world. He was an expert ornithologist and a founder of the Ontario Entomological Society, wrote a weekly nature column in the London Free Press from 1929 to 1943, and was instrumental in the preservation of what became Point Pelee National Park on Lake Erie—to name just a few of his accomplishments.

“Silvia Saunders” peony, named
after Percy’s oldest daughter

Arthur Percy and Frederick Albert also pursued careers in science. As his brother Charles had, Percy (as he was known) attended the University of Toronto and then went to Johns Hopkins, where he earned a Ph.D. in chemistry. From 1900 to 1939, he was a professor of chemistry at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. He also carried on the family botanical tradition through his work in the hybridization of peonies. Percy, his wife Louise Brownell, and their four children were beloved members of the Hamilton community, and were remembered fondly by notable students such as Ezra Pound and James Agee (who liked them so much he married daughter Olivia).

The youngest son, Fred, followed in his brothers’ footsteps to the University of Toronto and Johns Hopkins, where his area of study was physics. He taught at Haverford College, Syracuse University, Vassar College, and Harvard University. At Harvard he began research into the field of acoustics, and was able to unite his interests in music and science by studying the mechanical properties of musical instruments, particularly the violin family. Fred also shared the family love of nature, particularly ornithology, and he and his wife maintained a bird sanctuary at their country home.

Cover of Henry’s book Parodies on
Walt Whitman, 1923

Henry Scholey’s path started off very much like that of his brothers. He shared their interests in nature and music, and followed William Edwin to the College of Pharmacy in Philadelphia. For thirteen years he worked with William to run the family business. But in 1898 he closed the business and decided to pursue his interest in music, playing the cello in various orchestras and string quartets in Toronto. What Henry ultimately became known for, however, was his extensive collection of material related to the life and work of Walt Whitman. This included every edition of all of Whitman’s writings (except for the first and last editions of Leaves of Grass). Henry also assembled 219 hand-made notebooks in which were gathered newspaper clippings, book reviews, and other printed material that referenced Whitman, and printed limited editions of books about Whitman. In 1932, Brown University purchased the entire Henry Scholey Saunders collection of Whitmaniana—some 15,000 items—for its library.

And what about Annie, the only daughter? As is so often the case, we know much less about the women of the Saunders family than we do about the men. She never married and continued to live with her parents until they died, after which she may have gone to live with one of her brothers in the United States for a time. By the early 1920s she was back in London, where she remained until her death in 1938, but what she was doing during all this time remains a mystery.

The five Saunders brothers in 1934: Percy, Henry, Fred,
Charles, and William

Also still something of a mystery is the extent of Alice Miner’s relationship with her cousins. The papers of William E. Saunders in the archives of the University of Western Ontario include some Heart’s Delight Farm greeting cards and calendars, which suggest that they kept in touch, at the very least. Certainly the Saunders brothers would have shared many interests with Alice and William Miner, from agriculture to literature. We hope that further study of Saunders family archival material will reveal more connections!

Sources:


T. H. Anstey, “Sir Charles Edward Saunders,” in The Canadian Encyclopedia, Historica Canada, 1985, article published May 16, 2008.

Dan Brock, “In Search of Annie: The Forgotten Saunders,” London and Middlesex Historical Society Newsletter, Summer 2016.

Harry F. Olson, “Frederick Albert Saunders, 1875-1963: A Biographical Memoir,” National Academy of Sciences, 1967.

Elsie M. Pomeroy, William Saunders and His Five Sons: The Story of the Marquis Wheat Family (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1956)

Ian M. Stewart, “SAUNDERS, WILLIAM,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed October 31, 2017, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/saunders_william_14E.html.

P. A. Taverner, “Memories of William Edwin Saunders, 1861-1943,” The Auk: A Quarterly Journal of Ornithology 61, no. 3 (July 1944), 345-351.

Making a New Life in Canada: The Saunders Siblings

Immigrants are welcomed by a woman
symbolizing Canada, 1880

In our last blog post, we looked at the life of the Saunders family in England and their arrival in Ontario. Beginning after the War of 1812, there was a significant wave of immigration from Britain and Ireland to Canada, mainly to Ontario. Most of the Saunders brothers and sisters married men and women like themselves, who had also come to Canada with their families as children or young adults. 

The desire to find suitable husbands for five daughters may have been one of the motivations behind the Saunders family’s emigration. By 1850, about one quarter of the female population in the United Kingdom between the ages of 20 and 45 was unmarried, and the 1851 census showed that women outnumbered men by as many as one million. The problem of the so-called “surplus woman” was one that would occupy commentators in Britain for the rest of the 19th century and into the 20th. But in many parts of Canada, there were more men than women, particularly in newly-settled areas with large immigrant populations.

If seeing their daughters married was indeed one of their goals, James and Jane Saunders were very successful. Shortly after their arrival, daughter Emma (1827-1917) married William Skinner, a family friend from Crediton who had come over to Canada on the same ship. William Skinner, like James Saunders, was a shoemaker, and he established a successful business in London. Emma and William had five children, one of whom, Lillian, was sadly a victim of the notorious 1881 Victoria disaster, in which an overloaded steamboat capsized, killing 182 passengers.

Illustrated title page from Louisa’s
autograph book

The next daughter, Louisa (1829-1870), also married soon after her arrival in Canada. How she met Bernard Trainer, or indeed anything about his early life, remains a mystery. They were married in 1850 and lived in London until around 1855, at which time they moved to Goderich, where Bernard Trainer joined the Huron County constabulary. Louisa and Bernard had twelve children (Alice was number seven) before Louisa died in childbirth in 1870. Unfortunately, we have little personal information about Alice’s mother, and no photographs, but an autograph book in the museum’s archives which she assembled before leaving Crediton suggests that she was a young lady of refined tastes and genteel aspirations.

Ann (1832-1864) seems also to have married in the early 1850s, as did brother Stephen (1824-1889), though I haven’t been able to find out much information about either of them or their spouses. Next in line was Bertha (b. 1834), who married Robert Lynch Patton in 1856 and moved with him to Montreal. The officiant at this wedding was Rev. J. H. Robinson, and a year later William Saunders (1836-1914) married Robinson’s daughter Sarah Agnes. As I noted in my previous post, William was apprenticed to a local druggist and soon opened his own pharmacy. His interest in pharmaceutical plants, horticulture, and entomology led to his appointment as director of Canada’s Experimental Farm system in 1886. William and Sarah’s five sons also went on to have notable careers in science, music, and literature—they’ll get a blog post of their own. The youngest daughter, Mary (1839-1907), was married in 1870 to William Gurd, a gunsmith whose family immigrated from Ireland in the 1840s, and they had three children.

Mary Saunders Gurd

All in all, the Saunders siblings seem to have led mostly ordinary, middle-class lives. No doubt the parents were happy to see their daughters married to respectable and prosperous men, and two of their sons established in their careers, with William ultimately achieving great success and a national reputation. Edwin (1822-1895), the oldest son, chose to follow his own path, however. Soon after the family arrived in Canada, he moved to Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, where he built a small log cabin and lived by hunting, fishing, and gardening. His nephew William Saunders kept a diary of a family visit to Manitoulin in 1880, during which Uncle Ned helped the five brothers indulge their interests in fishing, hunting wildlife specimens, and sailing. Although Uncle William Skinner is said to have claimed Ned “never did any work,” residents of Manitoulin remembered him as an important part of their small community.

So, although Bernard and Louisa Trainer had both died by the time Alice was a teenager, she and her siblings still had an extensive network of aunts, uncles, and cousins, many of whom lived nearby in London. They would continue to maintain these ties after they moved to the United States in the 1880s.

From Crediton to London: The Saunders Family Arrives in Canada

Both of Alice Miner’s parents, Bernard Trainer and Louisa Saunders, were immigrants from the British Isles to Canada. Unfortunately, we have very little information about Bernard Trainer’s early life. The notice of his death that appeared in the Goderich Signal in September 1880 stated that he had lived in Goderich for about 25 years. He was believed to have been born in Edinburgh, Scotland, of Irish parents, and had come to London, Ontario “when quite young.” Without any more information, such as the names of his parents, it has proven very difficult to trace his history. 

The Crediton parish church, where James Saunders
and Jane Woollacott were baptized

The Saunders family is more abundantly represented in the records that are available to us. Louisa’s parents were James and Jane Woollacott Saunders, and they were both born in Crediton, Devon, England. James, the son of William and Eunice Saunders, was born in 1792; Jane was the daughter of William and Jane Woollacott, and she was born in 1795. They were married in August 1817, and their first child, Thirza, was born a year later. She was followed by eight more children: Edwin (1822), Stephen (1824), Emma (1827), Louisa (1829), Ann (1832), Bertha (1834), William (1836), and Mary (1839).

Early Methodist meeting

James Saunders was a shoemaker, and he also served as a Methodist lay minister. The Saunders family’s Wesleyan Methodism was a central part of their identity. Methodism was still a fairly new denomination in the early 19th century, but it was growing rapidly. Begun as an effort by Anglican clergymen John Wesley (1703-1791) and George Whitfield (1714-1770) to address what they saw as some of the shortcomings of the established church, it placed great emphasis on preaching, and members were encouraged to meet regularly in small groups for spiritual fellowship and guidance. John Wesley urged members to pursue personal holiness and a disciplined (or methodical) Christian life. He believed that individuals are free to accept or reject God’s grace, and that it is possible to attain perfection, or the overcoming of a will to sin, in this life. Eventually, Whitfield and Wesley divided over doctrinal issues, and the term “Wesleyan Methodist” was used to distinguish his followers from those of Whitfield, known as the Calvinistic Methodists.

Lay ministers such as James Saunders played an important role in Wesleyan Methodism, which originally did not have established houses of worship and relied upon traveling preachers and lay ministers to guide worship and manage the administration of the church. Methodism grew the fastest in those parts of Britain that were being most affected by the Industrial Revolution, and it was most popular among members of the working class and others on the fringes of 18th-century society. Wesleyan Methodism’s emphasis on simple living, self-discipline, and virtuous behavior would have appealed to working people with strivings toward respectability and middle-class status, like James and Jane Saunders.

Mint Lane Chapel, Exeter, ca. 1900

All nine of the Saunders children were baptized at the Methodist chapel in Mint Lane, Exeter, about seven miles from Crediton. The building of permanent chapels was a product of the period after around 1800, when membership numbers were on the rise. In 1798, there were only about 70 members of Wesleyan Methodist societies in Exeter; by 1815, there were almost 300. In 1808, Exeter had become the center of a circuit, or a group of local churches under the care of a minister who traveled among them, and in 1810 the Trustees decided to begin building a new meeting house that would accommodate 700 people. The first services were held at the Mint Lane chapel in 1813.

We don’t know what prompted James and Jane Saunders to leave England in 1849, but they may have been encouraged to do so by their son Stephen, who had already gone to Canada. James, Jane, and seven of their children (Thirza was married by this time, and stayed in England) boarded the sailing vessel Margaret in Torquay in the spring of 1849. Like many immigrants, the Saunders family traveled with friends from home, William and Sarah Woodley Skinner and their children. The Margaret made regular trips between Torquay and Québec, carrying emigrants west and returning with loads of timber. This part of the journey took six weeks. After traveling past the falls of the St. Lawrence, they then boarded another boat which would take them up the river to Hamilton, Ontario. There they met up with a Mr. Pickard, who drove them the last 80 miles to London—another two days of travel. The Saunders family arrived in London in late May, 1849.

Photograph of James and Jane
Saunders, taken after their arrival
in London

There the Saunders family would have found an established Wesleyan Methodist community and perhaps reunited with other people they knew from England. Certainly they seem to have settled into their new home very quickly. Later that same year, daughter Emma married the Skinners’ eldest son, William, and in 1850 Louisa married Bernard Trainer. William Saunders became an apprentice to druggist John Salter, and in 1855 opened his own pharmacy, which would eventually lead him to a long and distinguished career in science. The other daughters, Ann, Bertha, and Mary, also married prominent London men, while Edwin, the oldest son, became something of a local legend as “the Hermit of Misery Bay.”

Jane Woollacott Saunders died before Alice was born, in 1862, but James Saunders lived until the age of 87. Although London and Goderich are some 70 miles apart, it would not have been impossible for the Trainer siblings to remain in contact with their Saunders relatives, and indeed there is evidence that they did. We will look at the next generation of the Saunders family—Alice’s mother and her siblings—in our next post.

Sources:

Information about the Saunders family comes primarily from the birth, christening, and marriage records in the International Genealogical Index, available online at FamilySearch. The family was also recorded in the 1841 England Census (this is the earliest census available).

The account of the family’s journey from Crediton to London comes from Elsie M. Pomeroy, William Saunders and His Five Sons: The Story of the Marquis Wheat Family (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1956).

Information on Wesleyan Methodism comes from Allan Brocket, Nonconformity in Exeter, 1650-1875 (Manchester University Press, 1962) and A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, Volume 2 (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2017).

Becoming Canadian, Becoming American

Catharine Parr Traill
(1802-1899)

As I recently noted on Facebook, we have been doing some research into cake recipes of the mid-19th century in preparation for Alice’s birthday party in September. One of the most interesting sources we found is a book called The Female Emigrant’s Guide by Catharine Parr Traill, first published in 1854. Traill’s book is similar in some ways to the domestic guides being published around the same time in Great Britain, such as Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, and in the United States, such as The American Woman’s Home by Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. But Traill’s book is unique in that it was written from a specifically Canadian perspective, and was intended as a guide for women who were emigrating from the British Isles to Upper Canada (later known as Canada West, and now the province of Ontario).

Catharine Parr Strickland was born in 1802 to a middle-class family in Suffolk, England. Her brother, Samuel, emigrated to Upper Canada in 1825, and in 1832, Catharine, her new husband Thomas Traill, her sister Susanna, and her brother-in-law John Moodie followed him there. The families settled on Rice Lake, north of present-day Peterborough. The Stricklands were a literary family, and Traill had already written a novel set in Canada while still living in England. Thus, when the Traill family was in need of money, it was natural that Catharine would turn to her experiences in Canada for material. Her first nonfiction work was The Backwoods of Canada, published in 1836, and based on the first few years of her life in Canada.

Illustration of a Canadian log house
from The Backwoods of Canada

By the 1850s, the Traill family was living in much more settled conditions, and Catharine had many more years of experience to draw upon. Traill had two audiences in mind when writing The Female Emigrant’s Guide (or The Canadian Settler’s Guide, as it was called in later editions). One was women like herself, who came from genteel, middle-class backgrounds and who did not necessarily have the skills that they would need in the more remote regions of Canada—knitting, making candles and soap, baking bread (which might require making one’s own yeast as well). The other potential readers were women who came from more modest backgrounds and had limited resources, and who already had these basic household skills, but would need advice that was specific to Canada. These included how to grow and cook with corn, how to make maple sugar, and how to find and prepare local foodstuffs, such as “Indian rice” and wild berries.

Alice’s mother, Louisa Saunders, immigrated to Canada with her family in 1849. She was twenty years old, and thus was part of the group to whom Catharine Traill often directed particular advice. She urged “the daughters of the intending emigrant to acquire whatever useful arts they think likely to provide serviceable to them in their new country,” and cautioned them not to feel that it was unbecoming to a “lady” to engage in practical household tasks. Traill also reminded girls that one of their most important jobs was “cheering and upholding their mother in the trials that may await her.” 

Panorama of London, 1855
From the London Historic Maps Collection

The Saunders family—parents James and Jane, and eight of their nine children—settled in London, which was a rapidly growing city. In 1846, it had a population of about 3500 people, and boasted a theater, ten churches, and a weekly newspaper; by 1855 it had a population of 10,000 and was officially incorporated as a city. So they would not have experienced the kind of frontier or “backwoods” conditions that Traill described. Still, making the journey from England to what was then the western limits of Britain’s North American colony would have required some adjustment to new circumstances (including learning the difference between English and Canadian pumpkin pie!). 

Like many immigrants, the Saunders family traveled to Canada with friends from their home town. The Skinners were also from Crediton in Devon, and the two families would soon be united—William Skinner and Emma Saunders would marry shortly after their arrival in London. The families also would have been able to join a strong Wesleyan Methodist community. This support system undoubtedly helps to account for the relative rapidity with which members of the Saunders family were able to achieve positions of prominence in Canada.

In the 1880s, Alice and the rest of the Trainer siblings would themselves become immigrants, moving from Ontario to the United States. Given her own family history, it may seem surprising that Alice later embraced the Colonial Revival movement, which was in many ways nativist and saw immigration as a potential threat to “American values.” But for Alice and her contemporaries (both in the US and in Canada), there was a great deal of difference between immigrants like themselves—English-speaking, of British descent, white, and Protestant—and those who were coming from southern and eastern Europe. The early 20th century was also a period during which some Americans were trying to strengthen the ties between the US and Britain by emphasizing their shared cultural heritage. Thus there was no resistance to someone of Alice’s background claiming American identity. 

In future blog posts, we’ll tell more stories of the Saunders and Trainer families, and further explore these issues of national identity. 

Sources:

Most of Catharine Parr Traill’s books are available in digital form through sites like Google Books and the Internet Archive. A recent print edition of The Female Emigrant’s Guide, edited by Nathalie Cooke and Fiona Lucas, includes extensive supplementary material, including modernized recipes. Library and Archives Canada has put together a website of material—including original letters and other documents—on Catharine Traill and her sister Susanna Moodie.