Hired Men: Ontario Agricultural Wage Labour in Historical Perspective

THIS IS A PAPER ABOUT the men1 who from the earliest days of settlement worked the land of Ontario for wages. They are a little known group. The myth of the province has been that the workers of the soil are its owners, and that farms were made from forest, swamp, and slabs of rock ill-disguised by brush by independent yeomen. Traditionally, those who worked farms were seen as freeholders who possessed the land they cleared, fenced, and tilled by patent, who were their neighbours' equals in forming rural communities and have remained equal before the law. Scholars too have claimed that from the begin nings of the province, agriculturalists' desire for independence combined with the rigorous seasonality of rural work to determine that no hierarchical labour organization would persist in Canadian agriculture.2 Yet in each successive