News from our rich agriculture history

Harry J. Boyle was born in the small community of St. Augustine, Huron County, Ontario. Boyle’s home life was dominated by the general store that his father ran alongside their farm. Boyle spent hours each night taking in the sounds and stories of rural life as they conglomerated on the first floor.

When Boyle’s father gave up his farming to focus on the store Boyle, still in his childhood, attempted to continue in his own small way by taking up gardening. A memorable anecdote of Boyle’s described his ordering of potato and cosmos seeds for a school fair. The

George C. Creelman’s life was dedicated to his two greatest passions: higher education and agriculture. As president of the Ontario Agricultural College (O.A.C.), Creelman helped to establish the place of agricultural science as a legitimate and practical discipline, and earned international renown for himself and his school.

In spite of his later contributions to agriculture, George Creelman was not born on a farm. The son of a music teacher, George was born in 1869 in Collingwood, Ontario. When George was nine years old, the Creelman family moved to a fruit farm in Grey