Bea Johnson Remembers her Childhood

Feature

Three of the hundreds of flags that Doug Johnson collects to raise for special occasions in Southampton

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Bea Johnson (L) and Reverend Margaret Greenhow with Johnson's childhood cart

Bea and Doug Johnson

Bea Johnson, now of Southampton but who was born and raised in Saskatchewan, remembers her childhood days and riding to school in a small cart that carried her and five siblings and that has a long tale of how it finally arrived in Southampton.

"Our horse Fly pulled us in the cart," says Johnson. "We called her Fly because she seemed to fly as she pulled the cart." She and her five siblings would pile into the cart, along with a creamery can filed with water for the horse, and travel from the family farm near Nobleview to school.

Bea completed her high school in a convent school in nearby Biggar. "When I finished high school, I was going to go out to British Columbia to look for work when a relative suggested I could easily find work in the East and, so, off I went to Ontario ... much to the dismay of my parents."

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21/07/2009 12:18 AM

She ended up in Hamilton where she immediately found employment at the Dominion Bank (now T-D) and, there, she also met her husband of 52 years, Doug Johnson.

When the couple made a trip west to Saskatchewan some 40 years ago, they visited the family farm that had belonged to Bea Johnson's family. There, Doug Johnson discovered the cart that had carried his wife and her siblings to and from school. "It was in pretty bad shape," says Johnson, "but I thought it was part of Bea's history and should be saved."

Johnson, a collector of all sorts of items, dismantled the cart, packed it into his car and brought it to Ontario where he had it reassembled by Mennonite people.

"Our friend Bob Trelford completed the cart, adding a step and door at the rear and painting it the exact colours that it had been when Bea was a girl," says Doug.

For several years, the cart stood in the couple's yard where Bea used it to collect leaves. "Yesterday, Sunday," says Johnson, "is the first time it has been drawn again and carried someone." Johnson was referring to the recent 150th Anglican Church anniversary celebration in Saugeen Shores when Anglican Reverend Margaret Greenhow, arrived at the special Pioneer Park service in the cart that had found its way from Saskatchewan to Ontario.