She was born to love the land above
SOME THINK there’s not much history on the Mountain, but Edna Davies Dobbie has lived lots of it.
In 10 days, she turns 90. And she has spent all that time in the land above. She — and her family on both sides — are pioneers of that place. She admits she could live nowhere else.
Her grandfather scaled the 30-storey limestone ledge first, around 1888, not many years off the boat from the county of Flintshire, in Wales. He built a house on Mohawk near what is now Upper Wellington. Remarkably, it’s still there. At the time, there was a rise of land out front, and Edna and her brother Billie loved to roll down it.
Edna has treasure in a red tin box — 37 letters of courtship written by her father, William Davies, to her mother, Minnie Johnston. The Johnstons arrived from Northern Ireland in 1875, and had a dairy farm where townhouses now grow at Upper Wellington and Limeridge. Under the name Longfield Dairy, the family delivered milk across the Mountain.
William’s first letter, written on Nov. 28, 1910, began: “Dear Minnie. Read that with emphasis on the first word.” By letter No. 37, on Feb. 9, 1914, he was calling her “honey bunch.”
And in-between, he was promising to buy some land and build her a house on the Mountain. He did that, and that home is still there, too. The street is Upper James, but in Edna’s day they
just called it the Caledonia Road.
The city limits ended at Fennell then, and the Davies home was just south of that. Edna says there was nothing between their house and Mohawk. Directly across the street, just fields that were her playground.
And she loved to roller skate on the road out front. Tough to do today, what with six lanes of traffic to dodge. And those fields became the Mountain Plaza mall. The Davies house, directly across from Walmart, is now a dental clinic.
There weren’t many shops on the Mountain in the early days. Sometimes Edna, still a toddler, got to ride the James Street incline railway with her mother for an outing to the Robinson’s department store downtown.
School was the one-room SS No. 5 Barton. Today it’s a museum, located next to the board of education’s new headquarters near Lime Ridge Mall. But in Edna’s day it was on Mohawk near Garth, and she and Billie walked there in all weather, about a mile and a half.
“But sometimes the bread man stopped and gave us a ride,” Edna says. “There was no place to sit. We had to hang on to something.”
Edna did have to go to the lower city for high school, Central Collegiate. And then she met a boy from Westdale Secondary, Clyde Dobbie. He was a huge big-band fan. Edna loved him and he loved her. Fortunately, he decided he could love the Mountain, too.
He worked for Bell and was all over the city, including the Mountain. “It’s the nicest place,” he told Edna.
He had a house built for them on West 24th. They moved around the Mountain a few times, raised three kids.
Edna lost Clyde 15 years ago. She’s lost her sisters and her brother. She is the last.
She now lives with daughter Ruth Dobbie in Twenty Place. It’s quiet and the fields are not so far away.
Edna’s parents died many decades ago. There was no place on the Mountain to bury them then, and they are in Hamilton Cemetery on York Boulevard. Since then, Mount Hamilton Cemetery opened on Rymal. Edna’s husband Clyde is there, at a peaceful place on the back stretch. When the day comes, she will go there to be with her beloved, on her Mountain.
Edna and her brother walked a mile and a half to school. “But sometimes the bread man stopped and gave us a ride. There was no place to sit. We had to hang on to something.”