The following is a re-print of a past column by former Advertiser columnist Stephen Thorning, who passed away on Feb. 23, 2015. Some text has been updated to reflect changes since the original publication and any images used may not be the same as those that accompanied the original publication.
Harrison and Martha Lyon, a young married couple, came to Wellington from Huron County in the late 1880s.
Harrison was seeking work as an agricultural labourer. In 1888 or 1889 they moved to a farm at the very south end of Nichol, just off the Fergus-Guelph Road, at Concession 10, Lot 5. Their employer was Maurice O’Connor.
The Lyons had been married only a few years, and the relationship was not going well. Martha spent hours getting the household neat and spotless, while Harrison was, to use a modern colloquialism, a complete slob.
He ridiculed her fastidiousness, and tried to exercise control over all her activities.
Strong willed and independent, Martha resisted. Month after month, the relationship continued to deteriorate. And caught in the crossfire was a young child.
In November of 1890 Martha went to Guelph to see a doctor. Rather than one of the physicians with a regular practice, she chose a medic named Dr. Mackenzie. He had no office at that point, but ran his practice from his room at the Commercial Hotel on Macdonnell Street.
A month earlier, in what seems to have been a late Victorian version of a mid-life crisis, he had walked out on his wife and child.
Martha was captivated by the doctor’s attentions, whatever his medical skills might have been. A few weeks later she left Harrison and their child and moved in with the doctor.
The new arrangement did not last long. A few weeks later she returned to the O’Connor farm, asking Harrison to take her back.
Despite their rocky relationship, he agreed, probably because it was difficult for him to look after their child and keep up with his farm duties, and it would be more so in the spring when he would be out in the fields all day.
Twice more during the winter Martha left her husband for brief periods with Dr. McKenzie, but each time returned to Harrison after a few days. Not surprisingly, the couple’s relationship did not improve. In February she left yet again, this time to accept temporary employment as a domestic servant in Guelph. She seemed to have pleased her employer. Martha had no trouble finding another household to work in after that first short-term assignment.
Dr. McKenzie visited Martha at the household she was with about April 10. Afterward she told her employer that the doctor “was dogging her,” suggesting that she wanted nothing further to do with him. Her employer did not attempt to get involved; Martha was 25 or so, not a naive teenager, and obviously a woman capable of looking out for herself.
On April 14 Martha left her employer’s house in the evening, and did not return.
Earlier that day Dr. McKenzie told the clerk at the Commercial Hotel that he would be away briefly, but would return “in a day or two.” Harrison Lyon concluded that his wife had eloped with the doctor, and most who knew one or the other were inclined to agree.
After she left town, Martha sent a letter to her employer through the Grand Trunk Railway’s express office, requesting that her trunk be brought to that location. She would later send shipping instructions for it. Martha said she was going to Ottawa to stay with a brother who lived there.
Martha’s letter went on in great detail to complain about her treatment at the hands of the residents of Guelph. She said she had left town suddenly due to the fact that “there was a great deal of low talk going on about me in Guelph” because she had separated herself from “that man Lyon,” as she referred to her husband. The situation had made her life unbearable, she went on. “I made up my mind the sooner I left Guelph the better, and I have had perfect rest and peace from backbiting and lying people ever since.”
Neither her employer, nor anyone else, would blame her if they “only knew what she had suffered from the people of Guelph.”
She dated the letter “Guelph, April 21,” but the contents suggest she was no longer in the city. The letter concluded by repeating the instructions about the trunk, and the statement that she never intended to return to Guelph again.
It is hard to believe that in even in the small city that Guelph was in 1891 Martha could have been one of the chief subjects of attention and continuous gossip. That sort of thing was usually reserved for the indiscretions of the city’s older and well-established families, not the wife of an itinerant hired farm hand.
Interestingly, she makes no mention of Dr. McKenzie, and blames her problems only on the fact that she had left her husband. More surprisingly, she made no mention of her child in the letter.
Harrison Lyon and Martha’s former employer discussed the matter, and Harrison asked that instructions be given to the express office not to release the trunk to anyone but his wife. If that was an attempt to lure her into returning, he soon changed his mind.
About a week later Harrison took steps to have a deed of separation drawn up. An Ontario divorce in the 19th century was difficult and expensive, certainly beyond the reach of a farm labourer such as himself. He retained custody of the child.
As usually happens with such cases, there seems to be nothing more in the public record about these people, in Ontario at least. The 1901 census shows a Harrison Lyons working as a farm labourer in Middlesex County, with a wife named Belle. But the age does not match well: Harrison’s is listed as 35. The man in this story would have been about five years older.
More intriguing is an entry for Guelph in the 1901 Census: a Harrison Lyons, aged 76, his 72 year-old wife, a son Elija, aged 33, and a 14-year-old grandson. Could that have been the abandoned husband’s father and son? I will leave that to a genealogist with plenty of spare time to sort out.
But even if it is possible to link the couple in 1891 with the 1901 census returns and other public records, they will yield nothing about the life they led during the aftermath of Martha’s flight from her husband, and during the remainder of the 1890s.
It was common for people in difficulty or scandal at that time to move to the west or to the United States, and sometimes change their name or alter it slightly.
What we do know, even from this brief glimpse of everyday life for a rather ordinary couple in early 1891, is that marriage failure did occur more than a century ago, and that the legal and social remedies for failed relationships were virtually nonexistent, particularly for people at the bottom of the economic order.
*This column was originally published in the Wellington Advertiser on June 22, 2007.
