Proof on the sand
Once the sand plain had shown what it could do, development came fast. Agriculture Canada’s history credits experienced growers from the United States with proving the land in the mid-1920s.1 Henry Freeman was one: in 1923 he and William Pelton, both Americans, harvested a commercial crop at Lynedoch.2
Reading the soil
Growers also needed to understand the ground. In the late 1920s, Professors Gerald Ruhnke and Frank Morwick of the Ontario Agricultural College studied the area’s soils, and the first soil map of the area was published.1
Plantations and tenants
The early new belt was not only small family farms. In January 1928 Freeman resigned as superintendent of the Harrow station to become owner of Ontario Tobacco Plantations in Norfolk County.2
The historian Jonathan McQuarrie ties early flue-cured growing in Norfolk to plantations that created “a system of shares reliant on managers and tenant farmers.” One, the Norfolk Tobacco Plantations, was set up in 1927, held 1,800 acres and sold shares at $100 each.3 Large plantations sat alongside smaller independent and tenant farms, and for a newcomer with little money, working a farm on shares was a way into the crop.3 Chapter 7 follows that path.
Norfolk takes the lead
By 1931 Norfolk’s flue-cured crop had overtaken the total tobacco production of Essex and Kent, the counties of the old belt. McQuarrie credits Freeman and Pelton’s efforts, and the interest of the Imperial Tobacco Company’s buyer, Francis Gregory.3
By 1938 the new belt, centred in Norfolk and reaching into Elgin and Oxford, grew about 52,600 of Ontario’s roughly 58,000 acres of flue-cured tobacco.3
1933
Two things happened in 1933 that would shape Delhi for decades. The federal government opened a tobacco research substation just west of town, the subject of chapter 4.1 And, according to the history of Delhi’s Hungarian hall, a newspaper advertisement that year called unemployed Hungarians to the district for tobacco work, and about a thousand came. Chapter 7 tells that story.4