-----Aylsham

FTLComm - Aylsham - May 24, 2000

The rich farm land that stretches out from Nipawin toward Zenon Park is some of the most productive farm land in Saskatchewan. The light soil with its high peat content can grow amazing crops and does so almost every year. In the middle of this greenery is the little village of Aylsham that at one time was a flourishing centre of agricultural commerce with several machinery dealers and today consists mostly of the business that revolves around its little hotel, for years the only place in the whole area you could get a license for a car on a Saturday. A few miles to the West and South of the village is a small alfalfa dehydration plant. This operation, like most plants in this industry is suffering from the instability in the market place and has been struggling somewhat to stay in business.

This forty-eight or forty-nine cornbinder is sticking its aging nose out of the trees beside the Aylsham hotel. The International farm truck was reliable, inexpensive and durable to the extreme. Similar and almost indistinguishable from the Maple Leaf of the same era these were consider the standard grain haulers for a generation. As a teenage I can remember trying to master the tricks of the transmission on one of these things and ending my battle as a complete failure. Unable to master double clutching I settled for the whack bang - grind grind method and prayed the owner did not hear me. But that transmission was made to defeat me and many others who would hand it more abuse than any other machine could sustain and it seemed the old thing would just shrug off the unskilled like myself and keep on rumbling down the road.

Though we have no pictures, South of Aylsham along the highway to Arborfield is a small saw mill. This operation consisted of a plainer mill and a saw mill. Late yesterday, about the time these pictures were taken a fire broke out in the saw mill destroying the facility, the plainer mill was a separate entity and survived the blaze.