Adrien Dumesnil is a third generation Ste. Agathe resident who has never longed to live anywhere other than his beloved hometown. At 86 years of age, he enjoys his suite at the Chalet Ste. Agathe seniors residence where he receives regular visits and phone calls from his five daughters, six grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.
Until retirement, Adrien knew nothing but farm life, and even today he pays regular visits to the fields and farms in the area, talking shop with the local farmers—and he personally knows every one.
While a quadruple bypass in 2012 slowed him down slightly, he still fills his time driving friends to Lucky Luc’s restaurant or Tim Horton’s for visits over coffee.
The Chalet Ste. Agathe, he jokes, will be his final home because it’s so close to the cemetery—the last move he plans to make.
“We come and visit often,” says daughter Danielle. “But if he needs help, there’s still people [in the community ready] to help him… We’re lucky. He’s got a great interest in life… Every time he meets somebody he wants to know what they do and I love that he gets in his car and helps his friends. Back in the day, they used to say [to Dad], ‘It’s too bad you didn’t have boys.’ But now people say, ‘You’re lucky to have daughters to take care of you.’”
And Adrien’s memory is as sharp as ever, remembering every one of his daughter’s birthdays and making a point to invite them out for breakfast or lunch.
“He never misses saying, ‘Let’s do something for your birthday,’” Danielle says with a smile.
Life on the River’s Edge
Adrien’s grandfather moved to the Ste. Agathe area from Quebec in 1885 and began a humble farming operation two miles south of the community.
“He built close to the river so he had access to water,” Adrien says. “[It was] for the cattle and the family. In those days, they would use the water from the river.”
At just 18 years of age, Adrien’s grandfather lost a hand in a threshing accident but Adrien says it never stopped him from fulfilling his farming dreams. Years later, Adrien’s father assumed the family farmstead and the grandparents moved to a house in Ste. Agathe.
As a young child, Adrien recalls living at his grandparents’ home, along with two of his sisters, from Sunday to Friday every week so that they could attend school.
“We were lucky,” Adrien says. “Some kids had to travel with horses [up to] five miles to go to school. The parish had a barn at the back and this is where they had to leave their horses… Then at noon they had to go back and feed them.”
He describes his grandparents as patient, kind, and helpful when it came to giving guidance with schoolwork in the evenings. They were, though, were very strict about their faith and insisted that Adrien and his siblings attend Mass with them every weekday morning at 6:45 before the start of school.
“Even if there was a big storm outside, we still had to go,” Adrien says. “My grandparents were religious people… There weren’t too many kids who would come out in the morning like that except for us… There was no argument there. You live in [my grandparents’] house, you live by their rules.”
His daughter Danielle says her parents weren’t as strict about church attendance, but she fondly recalls attending with her parents on Christmas Eve.
“We used to go to midnight mass and then we would come out at 2:00 in the morning and there’d often be snow falling like a typical movie,” Danielle says. “Then we’d go home and have a big meal and open up our presents. The next day [we’d go to my grandparents] and all the cousins [would be there, too].”
As a child, Adrien enjoyed swimming in the river at his parents’ farm and paddling his boat in the Red River on the weekends. He quit school in 1950, the year of one of history’s most memorable floods.
“We had to move out [of our house],” says Adrien. “We had about five feet of water in the yard.”
It was a time before advance flood warnings. Adrien’s family could only predict the outcome of the spring flood based on how quickly the river levels rose near their home. When things began to look dire, the cattle were moved to higher ground on a neighbouring property. As the water continued to rise, the livestock was loaded up at the railroad one mile west of Ste. Agathe and sent to the stockyard in Winnipeg where they were sold.
“The market was very, very bad because the prices were low,” Adrien says. “My dad lost quite a bit of money from that.”
Soon, the family also had to load themselves onto a railcar, along with a few meagre belongings, and head to Dauphin where homes and cottages were opened up to flood refugees. It was a few months before they could safely return and begin the cleanup.
“The [returning] people picked up a mop and pail at the train station and went home,” Adrien says. “We had to stay there while we were cleaning up. We had no other place to live… We just threw everything outside, cleaned up, and life went on.”
Taking Over the Farmstead
As a young man, Adrien took over his father’s farm and purchased or rented small parcels of land west and north of Ste. Agathe for crops.
He met his wife in Ste. Agathe and they were married in 1955. Unfortunately, the marriage ended in divorce years later. But not before they’d lovingly raised five girls, making a special effort to raise them bilingual.
“There was a program on TV called Chez Hélène and it would teach them to speak English,” Adrien says. “So before they went to school, they were all bilingual.”
He laughs at a memory he has of his daughters visiting an English bachelor who lived nearby. In struggling English, they asked him, “Who’s your cooker?” wondering who it was that made meals for a man without a wife.
During those years, Adrien and his father provided an egg delivery service to restaurants and residents of Winnipeg. The pair went door to door every Friday, building a regular clientele.
“We sold three dozen eggs for a dollar,” says Adrien. “If you sold two hundred or three hundred dozen a week, you had a few dollars in your pockets to buy groceries.”
After each harvest, Adrien also delivered his grain to a feed mill in Blumenort. The mill owner owned a general store and offered credit for the grain at his store. That, Adrien says, was how he brought home groceries to his family through the winter months.
1968 to 1970, he recalls, were a string of bad years for crops due to an abundance of rain, but Adrien says a farmer always finds a way to survive. He worked an outside job during those years building chicken barns in order to make ends meet.
“I worked for a dollar and a quarter an hour,” Adrien says. “We were getting $75 every two weeks… We were happy with that.”
Before there was a bridge in Ste. Agathe, the ferry was a common method of transport for Adrien to visit his sister on the east side of the river. He remembers a near tragedy at the ferry one year when a young mother accidentally drove her car over the edge. The car, with mother and baby inside, began to sink in the river but the ferry driver moved quickly to save both of them through the window of the submerging vehicle.
For Adrien’s daughters, life on the farm was exciting. Danielle recalls harvest time being very special.
“My mom would make meals and we’d bring them to the fields and we’d have this big picnic,” Danielle says. “Sometimes we’d stay and [get rides] in the combine and fall asleep in the cab.”
She has one distinct memory of riding with her siblings, one of them only two years old, in the bucket of her dad’s tractor. Her oldest sister, Nicole, was in the cab on her father’s lap, learning to drive.
Winters, too, were fun for Danielle.
“The river would freeze and we had a snowmobile. At 12 or 13, you could go everywhere,” Danielle says, remembering horsing around on the machine all winter with her cousins.
Retirement from Farm Life
Adrien retired from his own farm in 1985 but spent many of the following years helping others on their farms. He also took a job working maintenance at the local arena. For 20 years he played on the Old Timers hockey league and travelled in an old bus to tournaments around the province.
He was also a community advocate, volunteering along to relocate Cartier Park to higher ground after the flood of 1997. He was instrumental, too, in the erection of a new arena in 1975.
For his eighty-sixth birthday on September 17, Adrien’s plan was to spend the day with his family riding on the Prairie Dog Central.