Doodlebug

Beavers have holed up the stream banking slack water; lily pads clothe the drowned forest in lurid green. Sitting on the guard rail of the old train bridge on an August day, I watch as a daddy long-legs spider wades through the shadows of timbers that hang above the playground of tadpoles and whirligig beetles.

Through the trees is the roof of the twostorey former Hillier Cannery building. About this time of day in Augusts past, men and women laboured at the loading ramps, pulling in wagon loads of green and yellow beans while acres of peas and field tomatoes inched their way along canning lines. And at this time of day in Augusts past, through the forest came the shrill of the westbound train as it met Closson Road. Steam from the coal-fired engine ran atop tall cedars that lined the grade down to Hillier Station.

“All the kids went to high school and to Picton Collegiate, and they went by train…the station used to have the telegraph in it but it was taken out. The freight train came back from Picton, I think it was 1:20,” Anne Taylor once recalled of her days running the Hillier depot.

My boots sound on the hollow of the bridge as I take to the quieted line. A mallard duck rests in the emerald light of the treed canopy; a cicada sings and shad flies run the cattails. I suppose it was about here, close to the bridge and hidden among the brambleberry bushes where on an August afternoon in the Great Depression of the 1930s, a 16-year-old Charles Sherwin awaited the 1:20. He secreted aboard an empty train car bound for the mainline at Trenton and traded his home in Hillier for a life in the hobo villages. Sherwin joined an army of boxcar cowboys.

“The train came down at 10:40, and then at 11:30, I called it the ‘Doodlebug’, it was just a passenger…like a streetcar,” Taylor told an interviewer two decades ago. Good chance the ‘Doodlebug’ was the ‘15820’, a self-propelled diesel–electric passenger car that was built in Kingston in the 1920s and was a familiar sight on the Trenton-to-Picton run.

Bellflowers, loosestrife and silver-rod line the way; I come to an isolated marker, a lichen-covered concrete slab, part of the platform of the former station. Curious of the derelict landing’s dimensions I count 25 paces along the original track edge.

“The station agent’s job was something like a caretaker, money order agent, and express agent,” Taylor described. “I went down at 10 to nine. After the train came in, I got the express off, and if there wasn’t any—lots of times there wasn’t any—I would go back home and come back for the one o’clock,” she recalled. “Then most of the afternoons I would come home, and go back for the one that comes up at 20 to five. We lived right on the corner [Station Road and Hwy. 33] by the Town Hall there, and I’d run all the way to the station. It must be about half a mile, that’s where I got my exercise.”

The Taylor family was at the hub of enterprise in the village, farming 140 acres that stretched along Dorland’s Creek. Jack Taylor grew vegetables, ran a cider house and owned the nearby Pleasant Valley Canners. Hillier was home of ‘Taylor Made Tomatoes’, the brand proudly displayed on the family’s tinned produce.

If a body was short of work in Augusts past, the canneries had plenty of it. But as Anne Taylor told it, the season’s change brought on a change of tempo. “In the wintertime…the road wouldn’t be ploughed out, snow right up to your knees…I’ve walked down and it would be 10 below zero…mostly I would stay there,” she said. “We used to have the section men…when it was snowy and bad out…in the waiting room I played checkers with the foremen, Mr. Fritz and Mr. Johnson. There was always somebody in there to visit with.”

Then Taylor wound up the conversation recalling the perks that would sometimes be available. “Margaret Palmer had shown me how to do waves you know, because she went to the beauty parlour…So I had my curling irons down there and I was always curling the people’s hair.”

The site is now still. A truck rattles past, neatly rounding a steep curve on the nearby road. I stand amidst the bones of the old platform; a breeze stirs the scent of spread manure with the far-off cry of an eastbound freight.

Stations are junctions, meeting places. Their image resides within us as a metaphor for change. Once built of sticks and mortar, it seems that the stuff of their remains is held together with once hellos and goodbyes.

Anne Taylor interview courtesy: Trent Port Historical Society.