Upon taking up new land, Innisfil’s earliest settlers would need to clear land to plant crops and provide pasturing for livestock.
The process began with a few acres being ‘brushed’ by cutting away shrubs and saplings. Then the trees on this acreage were cut down.
After a tree was felled, its branches were cut off and piled high. The trunk might be rolled aside for later use (building a home or barn, split for shingles, cut for firewood, or even sold to a logging company) or it might be added to the growing burn pile. Eventually, the pile of limbs and logs was set aflame.
Initially the resulting ashes would be left on the field to provide nutrients. Later, once Innisfil was more settled, farmers would gather much of the ash to be made into potash or sold for the manufacture of soap and other items.
But the hardest part of clearing land was yet to come, as stumps still studded the field. Small stumps could be dug out with a grub and pickaxe. Others would have been so large and heavily-rooted that farmers initially opted to plow around them for several years.
But eventually they’d need to go, as stumps not only made plowing and harvesting more difficult, but they might take up as much as 10 per cent of the cleared field. You couldn’t wait for them to rot as maple and oak might remain for decades, and resinous stumps, such as pine, resisting burning.
Large stumps, therefore, would eventually need to be forcibly removed.
Today, stumps can be removed using a stump chopper or chemicals that cause rapid decay. Such options weren’t available in the 19th century. Sometimes dynamite was used, but most often settlers used a stump-puller, a tall, tripod-shaped device that — as the name describes — literally pulled the stump from the soil. It was an ingenious but simple device.
Pulling a stump wasn’t a one-man job. It required several men, between four and six was ideal, and a team of sturdy horses or oxen. Often times, stumping bees were arranged, whereby many local men would descend upon a given farm to assist the property owner.
First, grub axes were used to dig around the stump and cut off smaller roots. A pickaxe would hack through larger roots. A cable was attached to the stump, ran up to the peak of the tripod, pulled around a roller, then stretched out to the team of awaiting horses. The horses walked around in circles, pulling the cable tight and lifting the stump free from the ground. Because the process was all about leverage, there was very little strain put on the horses and so they could repeat the process all day.
Particularly large roots were often used on the outer rim of fields as stump fences.
Clearing land was an exhausting and time-consuming task. Even with the aid of stump removers, the sight of stump-studded fields wouldn’t entirely disappear from the landscape for more than a generation.
