Gull Rock Farm

by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
Anyone who has ventured down Gull Rock Road knows that when you reach the end of the road at Pond Cove, it opens up into a large field. If you continue straight ahead through the wild grass and clumps of alders, you will come upon a bit of a rise just before the land ends at Point d’Field. Standing on the top of this small hill, you can turn to the right and see Big and Little Pond Coves, turn left and you see Hog Yard Cove nearby and the French Shore in the far distance across St. Mary’s Bay. Face straight out to sea, and right in front of you is Green Island, and beyond that Gull Rock a little further out. These two specks of land, and the ledge of jumbled rock they sit on, are the last visible pieces of the North Mountain Range that runs along the Bay of Fundy from Cape Blomidon, forming the Annapolis Valley, Digby Neck and the Islands before it disappears beneath the Atlantic Ocean.
Right on the top of this hill is where the cow barn once stood. If you look around in the overgrown grass and brush near the base of the hill on the inland side, you might still be able to recognize the old stone remnants of a small farmhouse cellar and maybe even the circular impression of the old well. Once upon a time this was Gull Rock Farm; my father lived here when he was a young boy.
Of all the places on the Island, this is probably the most unlikely spot in which to take up homesteading. Dad and his family lived here during the last years of the 1920’s, by this time, homes on the Island had long since been wired for both electricity and telephones, but neither of those modern conveniences ever reached Gull Rock Farm. This is about as far as you can get from town without actually leaving the Island. You’re right out on the bitter end of a treeless and unprotected point, exposed to that cold, salt-laden Atlantic Ocean wind as it whips in over Pond Cove beach and across the fields. It seems like it would be hard to grow anything at all here, but over the years several different families braved the elements in a valient but usually vain battle with Mother Nature.
Despite the less-than-ideal farming conditions, my grandfather did manage to coax out of the rocky ground a garden that produced potatoes, carrots and turnips among other things. Not only enough to feed his own family, but enough extra that he was able to make a little money supplying the people in town with fresh vegetables.
Besides the vegetable garden, he also kept a herd of milk cows that he put out to pasture in the Big Meadow behind the ponds. The cream from the milk was taken to town and shipped by boat twice a week to a dairy in Yarmouth. To keep it cool until shipping time, the metal milk cans full of cream were immersed in the cold water of the well, which was quite large and had a protective shed built over it.
One day late in the summer, Dad’s best friend Genie Frost was visiting him at Gull Rock and the two of them went berry picking. Returning home with a load of wild strawberries, they decided that a dollop of fresh cream would make them taste even better. While getting the cream out of the well, Genie noticed some tobacco leaves drying in the wellhouse rafters and he reached up and tore off a piece from one of them.
After enjoying a big feed of wild strawberries swimming in a generous helping of cream, Genie rolled up the piece of tobacco leaf and set back to enjoy his homemade cigar. Now, here we have a young boy full of wild berries and heavy cream and we mix in the strong smoke of home-grown raw tobacco! What could possibly go wrong? Genie only got in a few puffs from his make-shift stogie before the strawberries and cream made a sudden and dramatic reappearance! My father still likes strawberries, but maybe being an unwilling witness to this event is one of the reasons he doesn’t smoke.
Dad and his sisters made the long walk back and forth to town every weekday to attend school. As they left the farm and started up Gull Rock Road, they had to pass through Jackass Gate. This was the main gate that blocked off the road from the field and kept all the animals on the farm from wandering away. The primary rule of Gull Rock Farm was “Always Close The Gate”.
One morning on their way to school, they noticed that somehow the gate had been left open and several of the cows had wandered through. The road was narrow and thickly lined on both sides with dense brush. Since this made it impossible to circle around and get in front of the cows to cut them off, the kids first tried walking towards the cows with the idea of passing through the group. The cows of course just kept moving away farther up the road. Next they tried to take the cows by surprise by suddenly running past them. This resulted in the herd bolting even further up the road, heading for town at a brisk clip, leaving the kids with no option but to follow along behind.
By the time they reached the crest of the hill and the village roofs and chimneys started coming in to view, the cows had tired out and slowed down a bit. Just in time, a clearing finally appeared, providing an opportunity to get around in front of the cattle and turn them back. Now the kids had to drive the escapees all the way back down the road, make sure the gate was securely closed behind them this time, then walk all the way back to town again and then explain why they were so late for school.
My father, his parents and his three sisters were the last people to live on Gull Rock Farm. For nearly a hundred years, on and off, a variety of people had tried to make a go of it on this windswept southernmost point of Brier Island. They had tried hard to scratch a living from this rugged and unforgiving part of the Island. Some of the people who lived there had even made a bit of extra cash by salvaging the occasional ship that had the bad luck to run across the Southwest Ledge at low tide or attempt a short-cut over The Bar between Green Island and Gull Rock.
My grandfather tried his best to make the farm successful, growing vegetables, milking cows, cutting hay, raising chickens and pigs, even catching eels in Big Pond. It was a tough life, and probably not too different from that lived by the first settlers on the Island a hundred and fifty years earlier, but my father remembers it with a certain amount of fondness. This was the time of what would come to be known as The Great Depression, compared to many in the world, they were not so bad off. But in the end, just like all the others who had tried to eke a living from these salty windblown fields, it turned out to be too much work for too little reward. So when a better opportunity came along, Gull Rock Farm was abandoned for a final time.
Within a year of their leaving, the house had been burned to the ground, soon after, the barn met a similar fate. Today, after nearly eighty years of wind and rain and sun, nothing is left of a hundred years of hard labour and high hopes. All that remains of the little homestead at the end of the earth is in the memory of my father, the last person to live on Gull Rock farm.