TRANSCRIPT

INTERVIEWER:
James O'Brien Bourchier…

A.B. ANDERSON:
Bow-cher

INTERVIEWER:
Bow-cher. He had the woollen mill, the saw mill, and the flour mill, and the store?

A.B. ANDERSON:
Yeah.

INTERVIEWER:
He must have been an extremely enterprising man to have run all four things at the same time, how did he do this? Did he, he had enough money of course to hire people to take over.

A.B. ANDERSON:
Oh yes, and everything was done on credit. During the summer people'd come in and buy all their supplies that they wanted. I have his account books and all the prices and everything in them, and then in the fall they'd bring in pigs and cattle and horses and lumber and wheat and all that sort of thing. And, that was fine, for the war between the North and the South in the States they wanted everything that could go and it was shipped to Toronto, the wharf in Toronto were just piled high with horses and cattle and sheep and grain - everything, foods of all kinds, well that was fine, and as I say everything was bought on credit. He got paid for that, but the war suddenly came to an end and the United States put a great big high tariff on it that shot up all this stuff and the consequence was the stuff that we grew, we had no market for it, we didn't know what to do with it.