KAWARTHA LAKES-For two generations practically every farmer in the Fenelon Falls area has gotten to know Jack Graham or his son Jim, as they have transported countless animal to farms, pastures and the stockyards that serve the region. Jim’s trucks are a familiar site on the local roads, as they perform one of those essential jobs that no one ever thinks twice about. “It’s a not for profit,” he jokes—farming never has been an easy way to make a living around Fenelon Falls. What will local farmers do when someday he retires?
Jack Graham was born in 1916, went to school in Fenelon Falls, and came home to work on the family farm. He started trucking cattle in 1938—which was then an emerging occupation. “Before Dad started trucking, people would drive [cattle on foot] to the train station to ship to the stockyard in Toronto. They used to load cattle on another train at Uxbridge to go to Montreal.” In Jack’s generation, many farmers were looking for some off-farm income, and several farmers in the region were trucking on a small scale. “Before I was born in 1951, [Alice’s nephew] Orville Beggs was working for Dad. At that time Dad was about 50/50 trucking and farming. He started out with one truck, but added a second in the late 1940s. Orville would do most of the long-distance work, like going to Toronto.” Jack’s other drivers included Martin Devitt, Merv Goodhand and Claude Armstrong.
Jack was a very hard-working man. ““If Dad saw a cow that he liked, he would offer to buy her,” Jim observes. “At one time he probably had 150 head of cattle, that would have been quite a few for the time. He would go and chore at three to four barns during the winter. Dad was working all the time.” When he was interviewed in 1988, Jack recalled, “I trucked in the daytime and farmed at night… When I first started trucking, you’d only pick up one or two pigs at a farm and it took a long time to get a load.” Jim adds, “you would have to pull the loading chute out and put the sides up to load the animals and put it away when loaded. We no longer carry a chute on our two main trucks.”
In 1947, Jack bought Preston “Press” Pennock’s farm on Cedar Tree Road (Orville and Audrey Beggs later operated it for many years), where he would live with his wife Alice (McGee) on Cedar Tree Road. Alice had grown up on a farm what is now Country Lane, and became the school teacher at S.S. # 7 Verulam, Lamb’s School which was just around the corner from Jack’s farm. Alice retired from teaching to have her family, but unlike many teachers in that era, went back to work. “In Grade 1, I had Wayne Robinson, who was in his first year teaching at Lamb’s School. Then mother was my teacher from Grade 2 to Grade 8. It wasn’t that different having your mother as a teacher, you just got treated like everyone else.”
In 1957, Jack and Alice moved to the Fenelon-Verulam Boundary (now Sturgeon Point Road), just up the road from where Jim still resides. Alice then taught at S.S.#3, Blythe School, where she would teach until the school closed. Afterwards she transferred to Bobcaygeon Public School, teaching Grade 6 and retiring in 1977. Early in her career she had taught at Powles Corners and Fell’s Station. It was an unusually long career for a one-room school teacher—typically there was a lot of turnover, as a teacher might only stay half a year, a year or two. “She enjoyed teaching,” Jim explains. “She must have or she wouldn’t have stuck at it that long. She was a very good teacher, a lot of her students still remember her. She had a lot of patience. I remember her spending hours teaching one handicapped girl how to write her own name.”
“The first truck Dad bought was a Dodge.” Like so many of his neighbours, he bought a used vehicle, because that was what he could afford. “They all ran on gasoline until 1983, when we got our first diesel. It was all mechanical with none of the toys that trucks have today. It did not have power steering, so it took a little more shoulder power. The 1975 was our first truck with power steering. The first truck was 14 feet long and could ship 8 cattle at once. Then we went to 16, 18, 20, 22, 24 and now 32 feet long. The older trucks were 7 ½ feet wide, but today they are 8 feet wide. Today a truck carries 15 cows at a time. With the first truck, a lot of the time he would have to make more than one trip.” Starting with their third vehicle, they bought International trucks—Jack’s brother-in-law was Vern Wilson who sold them at Victoria Motors in Lindsay.
“When Dad started the trucks had wooden floors and racks. You didn’t have to fix them as often as you might think—the old rigs were made of oak. The newer ones had metal floors with steel stakes and wooden sides. The first trucks were just single axle, now they are all tandems. You need the tandem under the longer boxes to carry the weight.”
“In the 1950s, it was mixed farming,” Jim says. “Everyone had a few pigs, a few veal calves, a few cows. A lot of guys had a few sheep. Some of the farmers were shipping their animals to Canada Packers in Peterborough. I only remember getting there once or twice with Orville. The plant was where the Holiday Inn was. [It closed in 1962.] Toronto was the main stockyards in the 1950s, and until 1994.”
“When Dad first went to the Toronto Stockyards, selling was done by private treaty. He would negotiate one on one with the buyer. You knew who bought what so you didn’t take a cow buyer to look at a pen of steers. A few years later it went to an auction system. Dad said that took the fun out of it. Orville made a lot of the Toronto trips.”
“Carl Hickson operated the Lindsay Sale Barn, and before him I think Brown owned it. It was where Giant Tiger is now. Keith Hobden started the one in Little Britain. Norman McIntyre had the one in Woodville, long before my time. But most of the cows would go straight to the stockyards in Toronto. There were more buyers in Toronto, it was the biggest one in Canada. The slaughter houses were right there too. There is still one there, St. Helen’s Meat Packers. In the last five years we are going to Toronto more again, doing two to four trips a week direct to St. Helen’s.”
“There used to be a lot of pigs in this part of the country. I drew a lot of them when the Stegenga family had pigs. But there was no money in it for the farmer and there are no farms around here today raising many pigs. Quality Meat Packers used to take them near the Exhibition Grounds in Toronto, we would go there every Friday. Today, the plants to process them are gone. I haven’t trucked a hog in 15 or 20 years. It’s pretty well all cattle now, though we truck some lambs once in a while.”
“A lot of the mixed farms have disappeared. The farmers got older and they either retired or expired. The next generation moved on to something else. For higher money, or even just some money. When I started there was a farmer on practically every farm—the odd one there wasn’t, but now there are a lot of empty barns between Fenelon Falls and Bobcaygeon. They just keep getting scarcer.”
Just as the farm operations have become larger and far less numerous, so too have the trucking businesses. Ken Junkin was one operator from Bobcaygeon. “Hilliard Sproule trucked cattle out of Bobcaygeon in the 1950s and 1960s,” Lorna recalls. “Orville and Gerald Moore operated out of Cameron. Gerald was in business until 2021, when he passed away. Ray Hayes of Cambray and Joe Rettie of Burnt River both trucked for years. Murray and Garry Taylor did trucking as part of their Kawartha Feed Mill business.” Jim continues: “We bought them out in 1977, because they wanted out of trucking cattle. When we purchased the feed mill’s truck it was our first truck with a hoist. It was great. A lot of guys like Fred Johnson (who lived between Fenelon Falls and Bobcaygeon on Providence Road) had a smaller truck than Dad did. They mostly did local trucking, to Lindsay, Woodville or the ranch, rather than to Toronto.”
“When I first started after high school, I did local jobs moving cattle for a couple years before being able to drive cattle to the city, under Orville’s supervision. He was a great influence on my life. You would first get to drive halfway home empty, then all the way home empty, then half way loaded, and finally all the way loaded. I can still remember my first solo trip. My mother used to say don’t do what your dad and Orville do, it’s too hard, but Orville was such a good mentor I just carried on.” Today, Jim is operating six trucks: Three cattle trucks, a flat bed and two grain trucks. He has two part time drivers to help: Keith Brandon and Steve Wilson.
“There are a lot less cattle now than there were when I started in 1973. Spring and fall we would be moving cattle back and forth to the ranches. We still do that, just there are not as many as there once were. The ranches are further apart. When my dad and Orville were driving, the licence restricted you. Basically, they could only truck around North Verulam, Baddow and Fenelon Falls. It was all within 10 or 15 miles of home. Now we go to Bethany, north of Sebright, north of Beaverton and Lakehurst.” Jim trucks for about fifty local farmers. “When I started there were that many just around Fenelon Falls. Now a lot of guys move their cattle in a trailer they tow on the bumper of their pickup. Some bring their cattle here and we take them to Cookstown.”
“When I started in the business, a lot of people kept their cows tied up in the barn. That way the cattle were quieter, now they are loose housing and not as quiet. Today no one wants to use the wheelbarrow or litter carrier to clean up after them. Only the dairy farms had stable cleaners. Round bales of hay made a huge difference. Now you don’t have to put in five or six thousand square bales. You can just pick up a round bale and dump it in.”
“At one time we got $1 per pig to pick them up. When Dad started it was $65 or $70 to go to Toronto and gas was 46 cents a gallon. By 1973, it was $125.” The economics of trucking cattle have really changed. “It cost $7,500 to buy the 1975 truck, but that did not include the box, just the chassis. We put the floor and rack together at Melrose Smith’s blacksmith shop. I spent the whole day with him welding the floor on. To buy a truck like the ones we have now new, you wouldn’t have much change out of $200,000.”
When they opened, the Toronto stockyards were in a very advantageous location. “There was the CN railway on one side and the CP on the other. I can just barely remember seeing cattle coming in on the train, most of them from Western Canada. Dad said when he started going to the stockyards it was pretty well out in the country, covering 40 acres at Keele and St. Clair. In the 1960s, they stopped bringing in cattle on train, because trucks could do it much faster. The province ran the Toronto stockyards, but they wanted the land for something else. Two of the commission firms then built the Cookstown stockyards in 1994, which was similar, but smaller. There was getting to be less volume.”
As he was trucking livestock to Toronto, Jim often brought back freight on the return trip. “We hauled a lot of building supplies for Handley Lumber, Jermyn Lumber and Fenelon Building Supplies. When we bought the trucking business from Bobcaygeon’s feed mill, we would bring back feed like bran and soy meal for the feed meal. We also drew stuff for SwedFurn. We had to clean the truck before shipping other freight. There was a good wash rack in Toronto.”
As he looks back on his career shipping cattle, Jim appreciates the help his wife Lorna has given him over the years. “Lorna does all the records and organizing. If not for her that end of the business would be a little slack. Lots of times she has helped load the trucks and clean them out. Since the trucks have gotten bigger and me older it seems like a much harder task.”
“The trucks have become bigger, and cover a much larger distance, but the business is about as profitable as it once was, but we are handling more than we did previously. You have to charge a lot more for what you do—all the expenses keep going up. It was harder to load cattle 15 years ago than it is now. I don’t know how many times I went into the barn yard and got stuck. The farmer’s tractor often could not do much more than tighten the chain. Once I used about 6 bales of hay under the wheels to get traction.”
In 1987, Jim and Jack Graham received an award from the Ontario Pork Producers’ Marketing Board because every pig they shipped arrived alive. Travelling in a truck is stressful, either hot or cold for animals. Jack explained, “We try not to overload the trucks, and to keep the hogs cool in summer and warm in winter; and we try to get there as quickly as we can.” Jack believed, “if you use the customers right, then you’ll get along just fine.” It’s a philosophy that has helped make the Graham’s family business essential to so many local farmers over the years.
Jim remarks, “people ask if I’m going to retire? Would one miss the repair and fuel bills, the rough roads? No, one would miss the people. Some of my customers are third generation. It is the people that make it worthwhile.”
This story is a memory and nobody’s memory is perfect. Sometimes details get a little mixed up, things get forgotten or overlooked, and the perspective is inevitably subjective. If you notice something that not right, have something you would like to tell us, or a memory to share the museum would be happy to hear from you: curator@maryboro.ca
This story is part of our partnership with Maryboro Lodge, The Fenelon Falls Museum and was written by Glenn Walker.
If you want to make a donation to the museum, you can e-transfer to: curator@maryboro.ca or mail a cheque to :
Maryboro Lodge Museum
Box 179
50 Oak Street
Fenelon Falls, ON
K0M 1N0
