RURAL CANADA
In the 1880s, over three-fourths of Canada’s population lived outside urban centers.
One view of rural Canada at that time portrays it as a vast wasteland of isolated farm communities. However, a more accurate view shows that rural Canadians had access to considerable information. The postal service was efficient and inexpensive and connected rural Canadians with the outside world. Many farm families received at least one newspaper through the mail, usually within a day of publication. The daily newspapers of the period were more substantial than those of today, and many reproduced precise accounts of court trials and public events. Rural Canadians read magazines and books and held discussions about them at club meetings.
Rural Canadians were also able to get together socially. The local school served other functions besides providing formal education, and school districts were often the only sign of political organization in vast regions of the country. Every community valued its one- room schoolhouse as a meeting place, especially during the winter, when work on the farm was much lighter and people had more time for a variety of social and cultural events. People of all ages got together to sing and play musical instruments, perform skits, and play parlor games.
Between 1880 and 1920, there was a growing exodus from farms to the city, mainly because smaller farms could not afford to modernize their technology and were no longer able to support the entire family. However, most Canadians continued to hold rural values, and artists and writers romanticized the family farm. In the novel Anne of Green Gables (1908), Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote about a young woman who strove to reconcile the beauty and peace of the rural landscape with the need to leave it in order to fulfill her ambitions. For large numbers of young Canadians, growing up meant leaving the farm to find work in the city.