Pubdate: Sat, 11 Feb 2012
Source: Montreal Gazette (CN QU)
Copyright: 2012 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/letters.html
Website: http://www.montrealgazette.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/274
Author: Susan Mcguire

HEMP HELPED BRITISH COLONIALISM TAKE ROOT

Hemp breakfast cereal, hemp clothing, hemp hand cream - all available
in perfectly respectable stores. Is this the same hemp that is illegal
to grow in Canada? No, not at all.

These products come from what is called industrial hemp (Cannabis
sativa L), a distant cousin of the marijuana plant. Both are part of a
diverse plant species of more than 500 varieties that includes the
hops used to make beer.

Farmers have been cultivating industrial hemp for 10,000 years,
starting in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and in China's Yellow River Valley. For
centuries, people used hemp fibre to make clothes, rope, sails and
paper; they stewed, roasted and milled the grain for food; and used
the oil for cosmetics, lighting, paints and varnishes.

In the 1660s and 1670s, Jean Talon encouraged the farmers of New
France to grow hemp by giving them free seed, which they had to plant
immediately and replace with seed from their next year's crop. So
important was hemp that he confiscated all the thread in the colony
and gave it back only in return for hemp. Women needed thread, and he
knew that would put pressure on their husbands to grow the crop.
However, production collapsed when Talon went back to France.

Just after the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson
said that hemp "is of first necessity to the wealth and protection of
the country." A few years later, George Washington said, "Sow it
everywhere."

At about the same time, the British government and local governments
in Nova Scotia, and Upper and Lower Canada were making serious efforts
to promote the growing of hemp. In the Quebec City area, a notice in
French from the Quebec Board of the Agricultural Society in Canada in
March 1790, asked parish priests to co-operate in encouraging hemp
culture.

The following year, circulars advertised that free hemp seed was
available in the area to farmers recommended by their parish priest.

However, hemp was not a popular crop among farmers.

In the Hull area about 1801, American =E9migr=E9 Philomen Wright
experimented with hemp as a commercial venture. He soon discovered
that harvesting and processing it was a nasty business, and that
labour costs were too high.

With embargoes on U.S. trade and wars in Europe looming, the huge
supplies of hemp needed for sails and rope to supply the British navy
were in danger. Optimists thought that the North American colonies
could become suppliers of hemp, or at least not be importers.

London decided to send several men to promote hemp farming in Upper
and Lower Canada.

One was Charles Frederick Grece, who arrived in Montreal in 1804 with
his wife, Susanna Feniah Strong, and a young family, and soon after
bought a farm in Longue Pointe. He had an advance of =A3400 and was
promised 150 acres of cleared land. He was to receive =A3200 and 75
bushels of seed yearly.

Grece seems to have been in continual disputes with the authorities
about cleared land, financial compensation and poor-quality seed.

Even so, the London-based Society for the Encouragement of the Arts,
Manufacturers and Commerce awarded him a silver medal in 1809 for his
efforts in Canada.

Another American =E9migr=E9 who experimented with hemp was Jesse Pennoyer
,
a surveyor, farmer, militia officer and father of 12 who lived in
Waterville near Sherbrooke. In 1809, the government granted him an
annual salary of =A3200, plus =A3100 to defray the cost of promoting and
growing hemp for five years. The War of 1812 ended his experiment,
which had proved ruinous financially.

In 1817, Grece authored a brochure entitled, Essays on Practical
Husbandry, which included a section on hemp:

"Some years ago, a trial was made, under the protection of the
Government, to introduce hemp as a staple commodity for this and the
sister province (Upper Canada). Unfortunately, political events
obstructed that effort; the American embargo gave so great a scope to
mercantile enterprise, particularly the Lumber Trade, that there was
scarcely any bounds to the price given for labour. Soon after, the war
ensued (War of 1812), which gave a death blow to agricultural
pursuits. The present offers fairer prospects, by the general peace
now taken place."

Grece was right. For a period in the late 1800s, Canada produced most
of the hemp England needed, and at the time England was the largest
hemp consumer in the world.

In the 1930s, nylon was introduced in the U. S., and a concerted
effort was made to use wood pulp for paper instead of hemp. Public
worries about the use of marijuana as a drug led the U.S. to outlaw
the growing of all hemp in 1937. Canada followed suit the following
year.

In 1998, it again became legal to grow industrial hemp in Canada with
a licence. By 2010, some 26,800 acres of industrial hemp were
cultivated in Canada, about 800 acres in Quebec and the rest mainly in
Manitoba.

Susan McGuire is the historian at the Atwater Library. In 1829,
Charles Grece was a member of the Montreal Mechanics' Institution, the
library's precursor.
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