This old farm: One London-area family, nearly 200 years of history

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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.

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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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Being on a farm as long as his clan has, they almost certainly dodged many dangers over two centuries. One that sticks out for Cron himself was a day in 1990 when, returning home from a beach, he followed a tornado that “went right through the farm,” passing between his house and a nearby barn.

No one was home at the time, but the damage was hair-raising.

“We had a (farm) shop – (the tornado) literally tore it right off the foundation,” Cron recalled

The twister also threw a 1978 Ford pickup onto the shop debris, blew out all the house’s windows and left “our camper up about 30 feet in a tree in the backyard,” he said.

The high costs of farming, from equipment to land – especially in a region with some of Ontario’s highest-priced farmland – can be a major factor when smaller family farms pack it in and sell to larger operators.

“To go into farming is so expensive. I’ve done it,” Cron said.

Amid surging land prices, Cron said he’s had offers for the farm, but keeping it in the family is important to him.

“I could retire quite nicely if I sold the farm,” he said. “That would be cool, but sometimes you need to think about things greater than yourself.”

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Elgin County falls within a zone of Southwestern Ontario that had the third-highest farmland values in Ontario in 2023, according to Farm Credit Canada. Prices averaged nearly $23,000 an acre that year, up 13.3 per cent from the year before.

The Cron family’s stake in its corner of Southwold Township goes back to 1832. The farmland was deeded to the family’s ancestors in 1853 by Thomas Talbot, a colonial administrator instrumental in settling much of Southwestern Ontario. The family’s Canadian tree began with an immigrant Irish family, the Fultons, who arrived in Port Stanley by boat in 1832 and walked the eight kilometres from Lake Erie to settle and clear the land that later legally became their farm.

Family farms dating back generations like Cron’s aren’t “overly prevalent” in Southwestern Ontario but aren’t rare, either, said Ethan Wallace, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture’s executive director for Huron and Perth counties.

“I look at my own operation, and I’m the fourth generation on my farm,” said Wallace, a Seaforth-area dairy farmer who also grows corn, wheat and soybeans.

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Cron said his daughter, Clarissa, 22, is “big into farming,” and his son, Owen, 20, “would like to live there as well,” which fits with his wish to keep the farm in the family. Clarissa is in her last year of a respiratory therapy program; Owen is completing an electrical apprenticeship.

Cron sees another reason – the high cost of housing, beyond the reach of many young people – that could keep his kids anchored to the family’s land.

“Basically, with the way the economy and everything’s done right now, they will never be able to afford a property like that,” said Cron, who has toyed with the longer-term idea of adding houses to the property to help keep it in the family for future generations.

Sometimes, one child in a farming family wants to stay on the land but their siblings don’t and the property winds up being sold because the one son or daughter can’t afford to buy out the others, said Wallace.

“Everybody wants to share, and asset values have gotten to the point that the siblings’ share is quite significant, and it can be hard to bite off for the person that wants to remain on the farm,” he said.

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Cron said he hopes his family’s turf will keep being passed down for generations to come.

“I would love to be able to build a couple of houses. They (his children) would have their own houses, in their own place they could raise their family. It’s just it’s a wonderful place to live and to raise a family.”

bwilliams@postmedia.com

@BrianWatLFPress

The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada

DID YOU KNOW?

• Ontario has nearly 50,000 farms, totaling about 4.73 million hectares (11.7 million acres).
• Nearly 60 per cent of Ontario farms are considered “small,” generating less than $100,000 a year in revenue.
• The average farm is about 98 hectares (243 acres) in size.
• The average age of an Ontario farmer was 57 in 2021, meaning many farms likely will change hands in the next decade or so.

Source: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Agriculture

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