You see them all across Southwestern Ontario’s vast farm belt: Old Victorian farmhouses, some no longer attached to the land, but many still the hub of the fields and agriculture around them.
As you speed by, you might wonder who lives there and how they make their living working the land – if they still do – in one of the nation’s richest farming zones. After London Free Press photographer Mike Hensen shot photos of a family out haying in Elgin County recently, we circled back with those questions in mind and came across a family with nearly 200 years of history under its belt on the same farmstead.
Family-owned farms that go back generations are not unusual in the London area, which was settled long before Canada became a country in 1867. But with seven generations of his family rooted on his farm north of Port Stanley, Kevin Cron and his clan go back further than many.
“It’s always been home to me,” Cron, 51, said of the yellow-brick house he grew up in, sitting on a 28-hectare (70-acre) property his parents handed down to him in 2000.
“I went to school in North Bay, and I loved it up there, but it wasn’t home and no other house has ever felt like home to me,” he said of the 1890-vintage house.
Nothing says Southwestern Ontario quite as much as its signature old yellow-brick homes, like the three-storey Cron house, many built with brick made on the spot from clay deposits found along the region’s rivers.
The Cron farm also reflects the profile of many smaller family farms in the region, which survive despite the soaring costs of farming – off-farm jobs are almost essential – and the trend to smaller families, often with fewer children interested in staying on the land.
A toolmaker by profession, with an off-farm job, Cron farmed the property himself for years, raising wheat, corn and white beans. He also raised cattle and at one point had 200 dairy goats. Today, the family rents out the cornfields and no longer actively farms, but still keeps horses.
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