Why old farm houses are so far from the roadPeter Power/The Globe and Mail
This week, Collected Wisdom is going back to the land. Yes, we're going to sit on the farmhouse porch drinking cider while our hapless underlings do all that back-breaking rural toil. Seems only fair.
THE QUESTION: Why were so many old farm houses built so far back from the road? Jean Macintosh of Brockville, Ont., wants to know.
THE ANSWER: "In Western Canada, the governing consideration for very old farms was for the farmhouse and other buildings to be located near the middle of the land being farmed, which meant being in closer proximity to the work," writes James Irving of Edmonton. He says this put the farm house farther from the roads, but there was less travel then, and roads were not cleared in winter. "My homesteading ancestors," he says, "accepted they could not count on getting to town for several months each winter."
Barb Heidenreich of Bailieboro, Ont., concurs. People in rural areas did not commute to work, she says, so time travelled related to taking horses from the barn by the house to the fields to be worked and back again. Thus centring the home in the best arable land was the most efficient way of doing things.
Mr. Irving says that as farming became mechanized and equipment could be easily moved, and as the public roads became better maintained, it made sense to locate farmhouses closer to the roads.
"A shorter private access road meant the farmer needed to do less snow clearing to reach a public highway and required a shorter and less expensive connection to serve the farmhouse with electricity, when it became available."
Christine Ferguson of Toronto adds that as more roads were constructed, they were built along farm boundaries, so many old farmhouses still remained far from the highway.
FURTHER NOTICE
Last week, we discussed why it's so difficult to fold a piece of paper in half more than seven times. It's because the paper's thickness doubles every time you fold it.
This prompted Hal Irwin of Saanichton, B.C., to wonder how thick a theoretical piece of paper of infinite length and width would become if you could fold it 100 times. He's assuming a thickness of about 0.08 of a millimetre for the unfolded sheet.
Well, the mathematical minions at CW have never been ones to shrink from a challenge. So, we got out the spreadsheet and calculated that after 25 folds the piece of paper would be 2.68 kilometres thick, and after 50 it would be more than 90,000 kilometres thick.
After 100 theoretical folds, we calculate the paper would have a thickness equivalent to about 10.7 billion light years. In other words, almost as thick as the Sunday edition of The New York Times.
HELP WANTED
- Why do very ordinary cars have speedometers that go to twice the legal maximum speed limit? Mark Mietkiewicz of Thornhill, Ont., wants to know.
- Why do some sequences of musical notes sound pleasant while others sound discordant? And, asks Robin Barfoot of Toronto, is this the same for all human groups?
Send answers and questions to wisdom@globeandmail.com. Please include your name, location and a daytime phone number.