Mmm..m...1
the way on the sandy beach, or cross over the sand dunes and go through a strip of never cultivated land with the farmers’ back fences on the right and the dunes on the left. There were spruce and wild cherry trees, wild rose and bay-berry, many wild flowers, and large patches of cranberries, which were picked by the residents, who stored enough for home use and sold many bushels to the grocery stores in Charlottetown. She also remembered two ships which came to grief along the Gulf Shore: One ship (the Tunstall), loaded with coal, was wrecked on a ledge of rocks, and for years after, lumps of coal would be found washed up on the beach. Farther east, the Turret Bell was stranded in shallow water near the beach. We went to see it; the hull showed little or no damage, and men had removed the sails and masts to lighten the load and make the ship easier to handle. They waited for a high tide and towed her off. I think she was repaired and again made seaworthy. She remembered swimming out to that ledge of rocks, running parallel with the dunes, and had often swum across Covehead Bay. Concerning the lobster fishery, Mrs. Mutch remembered getting up at 4 a.m. to help get the boats out; and later, when she heard them coming in, she would go down to the factory to start the boilers. The Mutch factory was next to the» boat house on the Bay side, with the Longworth factory across the harbour. The first engine on the North Shore was in her husband’s boat, in about 1910, an Imperial engine from Bruce Stewart’s. A very vivid Bay side memory was of her husband Allie sawing ice on the Bay nearly seventy years ago, to enable him to save the life of a horse which had plunged through thin ice and pulled the sleigh too into the water. The ice was well bushed from shore to shore but the driver took a short cut across the thin ice, which was caused by several small springs running into the Bay. They being of a higher temperature, prevented the thick ice from forming. Catherine (Bowen) Orne, niece of the above Mrs. Mutch, used to spend childhood summers at the Mutch cottage, when it was still a partly converted boat house, with the huge doors on the side, _used previously for George Devlin’s large cruiser. Mrs. Orne remembers her first encounter with the Women’s Institute, at age 8 — she and her aunt had their boat swamped in a sudden squall on the Bay, after a day of berry-picking on the far side. We made it to the MacMillan farm and were taken in and dried out; I was stuck in bed until the W.I. meeting hosted by our rescuers was over, and the husband returned from wherever he had fled for the duration of the meeting, and took us home. I still remember sitting in that huge bed, listening to the babble
of voices from downstairs and sharing the refreshments from the meeting.
We have some delightful childhood memories from Emma Holmes, who with her sisters has had a cottage in Stanhope since 1957, on a lot
243