Thistle Ha’

William Miller Jr was the youngest brother of John Miller of Thistle Ha’. He came to Canada in 1838 at four years of age with his parents, Helen (Farrish) and William Miller Sr, and his older brothers. Growing up at Atha farm, the family called him “Atha Willie”. Willie possessed an extraordinary talent for selecting and managing pure-bred livestock, and was general manager at several leading American livestock farms (see William Miller Jr/Atha in Pages sidebar). He was also a good writer, contributing numerous letters and feature articles for leading livestock papers such as the The Breeder’s Gazette. In one of the Gazette articles he recalls his arrival in Canada.

Photo: Oil portrait of William Miller Jr, Saddle and Sirloin Club (International Livestock Hall of Fame) Portrait Gallery, Kentucky Fair and Exposition Center, Louisville.
Source: William Miller Jr,”Live Stock on the Atlantic.” excerpt, The Breeder’s Gazette, Dec. 19, 1894, p. 408.

My first experience on the water was along with farm stock. In the summer of 1838 my father left his native Annandale for Canada with my mother and family, my oldest brother John having gone some four years before. With us went ten Leicester sheep, four white swine and two dogs. At Liverpool we were loaded on the barque Mogul for New York – the sheep on the deck in the long boat, swine in a pen, dogs and children at large, but they could go into what by courtesy they called the second cabin. The ship was slow, the winds light and it took forty-nine days to make New York. Thence we took a steamboat to Albany; then through the Erie Canal to Rochester (which took a week), then across Lake Ontario by boat to Toronto, where friends met us and took us in wagons through the woods and into the woods in Pickering some twenty-eight miles, near what is now Brougham, Ont., where my father and brother John hewed out for us a comfortable home and gathered around them fine cattle, horses, sheep and swine, gaining for themselves in those early days a name among the leading breeders of the land. Brave hearts and strong arms like these made Ontario what she is today – deservedly the pride of the New World for sturdy independence, real intelligence and successful agriculture.

Image: The Breeder’s Gazette, 1892

Thistle Ha’ first entered livestock in the Ontario late-summer agricultural fair in 1838. In 1879 this show was permanently located in Toronto and renamed the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE). Thistle Ha’ did not enter the show every year – family members were busy buying livestock overseas, or exhibitions were cancelled in wartime. However, Thistle Ha’ livestock appeared at these provincial shows for a span of over 110 years until the CNE turned away from its agricultural roots to focus on attracting the urban crowd in the 1950s.

As told by: Hugh Miller
Quotation from: Past Years in Pickering by Rev. William R. Wood. Published by William Briggs, Toronto, 1911.

Rev. Wood’s book describes the privations and hardships experienced by pioneers attempting to live at the edge of civilization:

… roads were often simply paths blazed through the woods … horses were few and the farmer who was advanced far enough to own a team was often requested to loan or hire them to his neighbors to bring loads from a distance. Many a bag of seed-potatoes and grain and provisions was borne in those days on the settlers’ backs through the forest path from points as far distant as Whitby and Toronto. Soon little “clearances” surrounded the little log dwellings of the settlers, and season by season they widened till at length clearance joined clearance…

John Miller is known to have carried on his back from Thistle Ha’ a 50 lb. [23 kg.] sack of wheat to be ground into bread flour at the nearest mill in Markham Township, about 8 miles [13 km] distant.

He also faced the daunting task of clearing enough crop land to become comfortably self-sufficient in food for his family and livestock. Until then, there was anxiety each year to get the spring garden planted and producing as early as possible, when food supplies were at their lowest. One spring the family was in such dire need for food that the cattle were turned out into the bush, and watched closely to see which plants the cattle ate. These plants were then harvested for the family to eat. The seed potatoes also had to be dug up and eaten before they sprouted.

The Millers had faced this hardship before. It is said that in Scotland the family used to buy pigs with large heads, since when they sold the carcass, the head was the only part they could keep for themselves to eat.