Eighty-Seven Years A-Sewing
Mrs. Charles Liberty, Almonte, Ont.

I married Charles Liberty of Ottawa, but I was Mary Theresa Scissons, from Dunrobin. They're all scattered now, but there's still an awful lot of Scissons. As you drive in toward Ottawa there is a huge brick house on the left-hand side of the road with a lovely big barn with two ventilators on it. My father used to have everything perfect. Why, he wouldn't even let a hen go into the stable!

My grandfather, Sam Scissons, bought that hundred acres for my father Tom. My grandfather Scissons was a first settler at South March, and he owned about a thousand acres at the South March Corners there. It's his money was in the Klondike Hotel. It was built at the time of the Gold Rush; that's way they named it that. Grandpa Scissons' first wife, a Miss Woods from England, died long before I was born. Then my dad got married to Margaret Ann Ryan from Huntley, and then my grandfather met her sister and fell in love with her and married her. So that made my grandmother both my grandmother and my aunt!

I was the oldest of eleven. I had to mind them all because I was the oldest, had to take care of them all. When my mother and father would go to the market in Ottawa, they'd have to get up at two o'clock in the morning and drive in with their butter and eggs, meat and pork. They didn't have a regular stand; they used to get whatever there was.

But I used to have to go more often than my mother did. At the market, my dad would leave me on the wagon or the rig and he'd run around to see the price of everything because he didn't know just what to charge. I had to stay and watch the produce because there were so many people stealing. Whenever my mother went with him I'd stay home and mind the kids, but I had to go oftener than she did because she generally had a lot of work to do at home. She used to bake eighteen loaves of bread every second day. And I had to do it when she was sick, when she'd be in bed with a new baby.

I didn't go far in school. Third book, and then I stayed home and worked. I went out into the fields and done a hired man's work. I followed the binder and stoked the grain. And I lifted sheaves of grain that was heavier than myself. I only weighed eighty-five pounds; they used to call me Tiny. Oh, I loved to dance! There was this one huge tall fellow I used to dance with at all the parties. He always came for me to dance with him and he'd say, "Well, Tiny, this is the long and short of it. Let's dance!" His name was Johnny Carroll. But I think he's dead now.

The summer I was eighteen my father had a big box social. There was four hundred people at it. It was a meal. There were tables set up in our kitchen. He built a platform outside for the dancing. And he had another place over the drive shed where he had the musicians' place set up and he had dancing up there. It was to get money for a library in the school. He had raised four hundred dollars. People came from Ottawa even.

Each lady put her lunch and her name in the box she brought to the social. Then my dad auctioned off all the boxes and each man had to go and find the lady whose name was in his box. I tried to hide on the somebody that got my box, I didn't want to eat with him, but afterwards, we had a great old night. We danced the whole night.

I was sewing since I was seven years old. First my mother got me to make her housedresses and her aprons and all that. I got so fond of sewing that that's what I wanted to do. All the farmers over the country heard about me being good to sew, so they would come and get me and I'd go to their places and sew; spend a week or two at each one. I was a travelling sewer at sixteen.

In that time you couldn't really store-buy any ready-made dress, so I had to make their dresses for every day and their aprons, even their good dresses. They'd buy the pattern, they'd have the material; I'd cut it out, fit them, and make the dresses. I can't remember how much I charged, I know it wasn't much.

Just recently I sewed for the mayor of Carleton Place, but way back I sewed at his mother's place when he was just a little wee boy going to school. I even sewed for the Raes'. They were supposed to be kind of queer. I never seen anything wrong with them, but they got that name. There was one Rae and, if he seen anybody coming, they say he'd go and lie down in the furrows. There was another Rae so big that I had to get her to hold the tape measure while I walked around her to get the other end of it. But they were good to me, if they were queer, I never seen it. They couldn't get me enough to eat; they'd always ask me if I wanted more.

Then I stole down to Ottawa. I told my mother I wanted to buy a new hat. I'd been going from place to place sewing, and thought I'd like to get a place where I'd be settled, you know. I don't remember how I found out about the C. Ross Company. I went and knocked on the door; it was on the corner of O'Conner and Sparks. It was a big store and an up-to-date store. A man told me to go to the fifth floor. I got off the elevator there and looked all around to see where I thought was the sewing place. Nobody told me and I didn't ask anybody, but I went and I tapped on that door. Madame Lapolice, the manager of the dressmaking department, answered me. I asked her if she would take me to sew. She said, "Can you sew?" I said, "I've been sewing since I was seven." She took my hands and looked at them. I never forgot that. Then she said, "Yes you can sew. You can start right away." "Oh," I said, "Madame, I come from the country and I gotta find a place to stay." "Well," she said, "get a place today and come back tomorrow. We need you right away."

I didn't know where to go in the big city. But I happened to meet a lady on the street that I knew from South March. I asked her if she knew anywhere I could live, so she told me a place. Well, I went. The woman says, "I never take girls, I have all men." When I told her I was just in from the country with no place to sleep, she gave me a little cot in the storage room.

I don't remember where the house was, but I only had a couple of blocks to walk to the C. Ross Company. My first day was all right. Madame Lapolice brought me in and introduced me to a lot of the others. There was about twenty-five girls sitting at a big long table where all the work was spread. There was two French girls, sat right across from me. I had never seen French girls before.

"We can only give you two dollars and fifty cents a week," said Madame Lapolice. And I paid a dollar and a quarter a week for my bed. Just the bed, imagine that! When I tell my family now, they don't believe me. We weren't allowed to go in the front door; we went in a little side door on O'Connor Street. We weren't even allowed to see Madame Lapolice fitting the ladies, She had a fitting room and it was all glass, figured glass, and it was on the corner of the workroom. The workroom was as big as this house all together. But the fitting room was all glass and cut off from the workroom, and that's where she took the ladies to fit them. I made dresses for Lady Laurier and Mrs. M.J. O'Brien and Lady Grey, but we never saw them.

All the materials and all the patterns were from Paris. The whole salon downstairs was filled with materials and patterns from Paris. In the summer we got a week's holidays and Madame Lapolice went to Paris and got all the new styles, new materials, everything. There was one dress we made; it was a pink satin slip underneath and the outside dress was white satin covered with beads, white beads. I'll never forget that dress. You'd catch one end of it and hold it up and it was like a fish, the beads were so heavy. It was an evening dress for the Opening of Parliament. I heard via the grapevine it was for Lady Laurier.

There was one dress with a train on it and it was all flowered. The material came stamped like embroidery work, all over with flowers, and somebody had to do the embroidery - me! Madame Lapolice put the dress on the dummy and she spread the train away out on the table and then she asked me to step up. "I want you to sew this braid on all the flowers. Follow the stamp marks and sew the braid on every mark."

Do you know I was three weeks on that? The whole train and bottom of the dress and I think there was some going up on the body too. I've forgotten whether it was front or back or both. I had to sew this little narrow gold braid on every flower. The smell of the thread would kill you. I couldn't eat; the smell of it was terrible. My stomach used to be sick all the time. And the gold thread was like fine wire to work with.

One day when Madame Lapolice came I told her, "I can't live on two-fifty a week. I have to get another job. My room costs a dollar-twenty-five a week. After buying food I can't buy any clothes. If it weren't for my landlady and mother helping out, I couldn't exist." She said, "I can't afford to let you go, I have to keep you." And I said, "Well, I can't live any longer on that." She said, "I'll give you some of my own, I can't ask them for any more money." So after that she took it out of her own pocket. She gave me a dollar a week more.

We worked from seven in the morning until six at night. We had an hour at noon. We learned things but we didn't learn to do fancy work there. Just make fancy dresses, satin and net and silk. Nothing ever cost under twenty-five. The first day I went there, there was a dress hanging up on the wall away down at the end of the workroom. It was still hanging there the day I left to get married. Whoever had ordered it had died or went away or hadn't the money to pay for it.

I met my husband at the boarding house. I made my own wedding dress; it was cotton lace, silk underneath, fairly open. I bought a hat. We lived in Ottawa for a good while and then we moved to Almonte, where the mills were getting busy. I'm here in this house pretty near seventy years. It was a tumble-down shack when we bought it, but there was a lot of ground. I had a big garden when my family was at home, four children.

A couple of year's back an old friend took me for a drive to see the place where I was born and grew up at Dunrobin. I got really sick when I seen the way everything was. My dad, he had everything perfect. He even had plants, geraniums and petunias, growing in the stable windows… A very good farmer, people used to come there to buy their grain for seed to plant because they knew there wouldn't be any weeds in it. We used to have to pick that over on the table in the house. After our homework every night we'd spread a white sheet on the big dining-room table and get around the table and pick out every seed that wasn't the seed that should be there. We'd do a pale full every night.

Before that we'd fan the grain. The fanner was in the barn and separated good seed from the bad seed. We used to that at night too. And we used to be frozen out there in the barn doing that every night. Father was so particular…

And do you know what happened to him? He got a sliver under his toenail. Mother wanted him to go to the doctor but he started poking at it himself. "I often got a sliver before and got it out myself." But it turned to blood poisoning and he died. He was only seventy-three, but he was so smart, you'd think he was only about fifty.

Myself, I've been sewing for eighty-seven years, but lately I've cut down considerable. I just do work for a few regular customers - keeps me going.