Recently my friend Francis Peter Vink sent me a copy of a photo that recently emerged from a storage period of more than one hundred years; it was a photo of a man known as Charles Green.

Charles was born at, I believe, Cambridge, England on March 22, 1826. In 1947, he married Susanna Crowder, who was born on June 4, 1831, most likely, at Cambridge.

In 1852 they migrated to Albany, N.Y., where Charles became a shepherd for two years.

The Greens then settled in Howard Township where they took up farming until 1857 when they moved to Chatham, where Charles became a teamster.

One of his functions was to sprinkle water, from a horse drawn tanker wagon, on Chatham streets to keep down the dust. This was in the era before any sort of paving became common and the problem with wind blown sand and dirt would have been acute.

The dust, however, would only have been a problem in the hot and dry times of summer;........

© Sarnia Observer