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The Indivisibility of Land: A Microanalysis of the System of Inheritance in Nineteenth-Century Ontario

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

David P. Gagan
David P. Gagan
Affiliation:
McMaster University
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Abstract

Although they had recourse to both the perfectly partible and the perfectly impartible systems of inheritance, nineteenth-century Ontarion farmers commonly employed a unique English-Canadian variation on the perfectly impartible pattern. They devised their estates upon one, or occasionally two of their children, binding them to pay out of their inheritance or other resources the provisions for remaining survivors made in the will. The purpose of this system was to allow land rich and money poor agrarians to pass on their principal asset intact, and it reflects their belief that favorable man/land ratios were the essence of security and prosperity. At the same time, the system made the principal heir the instrument of the deceased parent's desire to treat all of his surviving dependents more or less equally in terms of the value of their inheritances. The system guaranteed that those who inherited land would acquire sufficient land to pursue time tested agricultural methods, but it promoted severe demographic and social dislocations.

Type
Papers Presented at the Thirty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , March 1976 , pp. 126 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1976

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References

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12 Ibid.

13 Many contemporary writers commented on the subordination of Canadian farm children to the larger economic goals of the family. For example, Catermole, William, Emigration: The Advantages of Emigration to Canada (London, 1831), p. 166Google Scholar. The Peel County History Project has documented, on the basis of available marriage data, a mean age at marriage for males of 26.3 years across the period 1830–1870. Formal education for farmers' sons, according to census microdata, seems to have ended by age 13.

14 Gagan, “The Security of Land,” p. 143.

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