Art Harrop
Fintry Archives
[Black and white photo of a young man standing on a dock]
[Title: Art Harrop]
[Colour video of an older man and older woman sitting on a sofa, looking at a photo album. There is another man in the room asking questions but he does not appear in the video.]
Art Harrop: This is Honeysuckle.
She gave 225 pounds of milk a day for three months.
Interviewer: How come they weighed milk by the pound and not by the gallon?
Art: Well, you see we were on what they called R.M.P.
The milk tester would come in …
Interviewer: Regular milking performance
Art: He’d come in and check every month.
Interviewer: But he checked it by the pound?
Art: Yep. And that’s what I had to milk, four times, six times a day.
Interviewer: But he didn’t measure it by the gallon?
Art: Nope
Interviewer: So how many, is it ten pounds to the gallon?
Art: Ten pounds to the gallon.
Marie Harrop: About the same as water.
Art: I milked her every four hours for the first three months, succession. That was my job.
Interviewer: That’s a lot of milking.
Art: And when I was supposed to have a holiday, she was the one had to be milked. She wouldn’t let nobody else milk her.
[The older man smiles and chuckles]
Interviewer: That was your holiday.
Art: Yes. And, do you know, you had to wear black shoes and black socks, white pants and white shirt.
Interviewer: So you had a mode of dress.
Art: And every night, or every morning, that Chinaman would pick those clothes up today, or tomorrow morning, and leave the other ones. So we’d have clean for the next two milkings. I was milking on the average of four times a day.
Interviewer: Wow.
Art: I went there at eighteen, and the first month I was in, do you know what I did? We had to dig a pipe from the intake, well the intake is up the hill, we put in three car load of wooden pipe. And from the top of the hill, intake, was suspension bridges.
Interviewer: Uh huh
Art: Down. We had to carry twelve-inch wooden pipe across that bridge. And we were up two hundred feet in the air.
[Black screen with text: After leaving Fintry, Art had a farming accident that resulted in the loss of both arms. This did not slow him down and he continued farming into his 70s.]
[Credit: Friends of Fintry Provincial Park Society]