Suggest This Page To A Friend!

Submitted by Christine Gorman

From The Examiner, Feb. 23, 1906.

THE GOLDEN WEDDING

Of Mr and Mrs. John Lamb, Springfield.

Fruit of a Well-Spent Life in an Honoured Old Age.

Strong Proof That Farming Pays in P. E. Island.

A very pleasant event, which took place at Springfield a few days ago, marked at once the passage of tine, the changes which time brings about, and the fact that P. E. Island is a place in which farmers may prosper. We refer to the celebration of the golden wedding of Mr. and Mrs. John Lamb. Mr. Lamb left Belfast in Ireland on board the ship Rosebank in the year 1840. There were at the same time on the same ship, three hundred and fifty passengers. After a voyage across the Atlantic lasting fifty-nine days, all landed at Charlottetown, and proceeded to make homes for themselves at Fort Augustus, Millvale, Kinkora and Kelly's Cross. P. E. Island was at that time, for the most part, covered by the forest primeval. Peake, Reddin, Dempsey, McGill, McDonald, Walker and Brennan [Brenan] were then the merchants of Charlottetown. In 1856, Mr. Lamb married Miss Mullin [Bridget Mullen] a sister of the later Mr. Peter Mullen and Mr. John T. Mullin of Kensington, and, after living for some years on the Malpeque Road, nine miles from Charlottetown, they settled in 1861 at Springfield.

In the days when Mr. Lamb began work in P. E. Island, the hoe, the axe and the reaping hook were the agricultural implements. Provided with only these, the men and women who came out from Ireland in 1840, made their homes in the wilderness and conquered the forest; and the prosperous settlements occupied by them and their children are so many testimonies to their industry and economy, so many proofs of the falsity of the charge that farming in P. E. Island does not pay.

At the golden wedding of Mr. And Mrs. Lamb, sixty couples sat down to a dinner provided by those who now cultivate the splendid farm which they cleared and fertilized by the labour of their lives. With their children about them, the venerable couple presented a picture of earthly happiness as they received the address and hearty congratulations of their numerous friends, together with a purse of $50 in gold. Among the guests was Mgr. Gillis of Indian River, who celebrated High Mass in the church at Springfield in honor of the occasion. We add the hearty congratulations of the Examiner and are pleased to learn that age rest upon Mr. And Mrs. Lamb "not as a burden, but as a crown of light."