CRESSMAN MEAT LIMITED

 "When I was a little girl, my mother used to tell me how she would go to the Kitchener Market with her Dad, Amos Snyder. When mother was still a teenager her mother died. My mother took over the house duties. There were four younger children, one nine month baby. Those days they went to market with horse and buggy in the summer and with the sleigh in the winter. In the winter she would put hot bricks to the feet to keep warm and lots of blankets. They lived one mile north of Baden. She went to market all her life. When mother married my dad, Joseph Shantz, they continued going to market. During the twenties and thirties times were rough. they made butter, cook cheese, breads, coffee cake, and cottage cheese. They would kill a pig or two and make all the sausage they could sell. They sold the sausage at twenty-five cents a pound. They would take all kinds of fresh garden vegetables in the summer. In spring they would tap trees and make maple syrup. That was lots of fun for me. I didn't have to do the heavy lifting.

 

The winter time was a bad time to come to the market. Our road was not open for cars in the winter so my dad would take the car to good neighbours who lived on the highway and leave it beside their barn or shed. He would leave it there as long as the road we lived on could not be travelled by car. We would load all our boxes, baskets, dishes with sausage on a sleigh and cover them up with blanket. In real cold weather we would bundle ourselves up, too. Then we would take the bush lane to where the car was, reload all to the car, and then go off to market on the highway to Kitchener. Sometimes the road was very narrow - no wide roads like we have now. After my father died in 1941 my brother Wayne and I took over. We kept up ever since, doing more and more. We have been at it thirty-three years." - Alice Cressman "Our Wonderful Kitchener Farmers' Market"