The Barn (circa 1865)

Built in the late 1800s, the Bailey Barn was relocated to the museum in 1999 from its original location at the corner of Deep Bay and Murdoch Road. It dates back to a time when farming was more common here. When Philip Vankoughnet became Minister of Agriculture in 1856 he boasted that this area would one day sustain a population of 8 million farmers. Politicians were desperate to find more farmland in order to attract and retain farmers who they viewed as vital to building a vibrant economy in pre-confederation Ontario. Negative reports about the quality of the soil were ignored and the government set about parcelling off the land to sell and give away in Land Grant schemes. Settlers who moved to a free plot of land needed to satisfy a number of requirements before the land was theirs. They needed to build a house, live on the land for 5 years and clear at least 12 acres of land which they were to use for farming. At the time, this area was considered to be a vast, empty wilderness. Indigineous people had been pushed out through a series of treaties in the early 1800s, including Treaty No. 20 in 1818 which ceded 1,951,000 acres of land to the Crown including all of present day Haliburton County. When settlers moved to the area, it spelled the end for traditional ways of life.

Though the land was undeniably beautiful, Europeans who traveled up Bobcaygeon Road were disappointed to find that the farmland they had travelled hundreds or even thousands of miles to reach was filled with rocks and wetlands. Joseph Dale wrote a warning to English immigrants in 1875, saying that when the plots of land given to immigrants were cleared of trees, their “desperate labour” revealed “nothing but rock, rock, rock”. He asked “Where now is gone that little capital which he [the immigrant] has so industriously saved and got together in England? Wasted upon a worthless block of rock.”

Many farmers left for flatter and less-rocky pastures out West after the confederation. When Canada became a country and gained control of the prairies in the 1880s, there was no longer a shortage of farmland. Homesteaders who moved out West were met with different challenges, such as irrigating dry lands and developing new winter-hardy strains of wheat. Farming on previously uncultivated land proved difficult no matter where you were. Those who remained here helped build communities that still exist today and survived by supplying horse feed to the logging trade, working in lumber camps in the winter or trapping furs to supplement their farming income.