Enniskillen’s Claire Jardine has been a teamster for 80 years

Kathy Ehman/The Independent

As Canada emerged from the trials of World War ll, Claire Jardine was just beginning a 79-year career as a teamster. He already had several years experience driving his grandfather’s team of draft horses.

“I was a week off 13. I drove horses from the time I was 7 or 8.” Claire says. “In those days everything was done with horses.” They were the horsepower for farms and for commercial transport. They carried people. They moved buildings and goods.    

The first hay rides he gave in Petrolia were for a high school dance. The drive in with his grandfather’s team took an hour and he worked from 8pm until shortly before midnight and earned four dollars, double his highest previous wage for rides.

His first steady job, scraping snow off the ice-house floor and the ice pond, paid a dollar an hour. 

The first draft horse he ever bought was Dolly, a pretty mare with four white legs. He thinks she was a Clydesdale mix.

Teamed with one of his grandfather’s horses, Dolly paid for herself as Claire put the team to work preparing gardens, cutting hay and giving wagon rides.

“There was no trucking them; you drove them wherever you went,” he says.  Traffic was light and drivers were used to sharing the roads with horses.

Folks growing up in Sarnia in the fifties and sixties may have memories of Jardine horses – dark Percherons and the Belgians with their fair manes and tails, drawing the Silverwoods Dairy wagons to home deliver milk in glass bottles.

“I guaranteed all the horses I put in there.” In the seven or eight years Claire was contracted to sell draft horses to the dairy, only one horse ever came back. He says they never figured out why the otherwise perfectly behaved horse would come to a dead stop on the tail end of her route and refuse to go ahead.

“She worked so nice but come the last of the route she’d stop and stand fast.”

His all-time favourite mare, Peg, claimed her own moment of fame “when she was ‘disappeared,” he said.

A magician had just learned how to make an elephant appear to vanish and was looking for a big animal to do the trick with at the Sarnia Arena. The act called for a steady horse, one who wouldn’t be upset by having wooden walls suddenly hide it from the audience’s view.

Peg was last on and first off when the teams were trailered, so she wasn’t bothered by cramped enclosures, Claire says, and a rehearsal went off with only one problem. “They could hear her hooves on the wooden floor.”

The innovation of rubber horseshoes, like Silverwood’s put on their hooves to walk the city streets, kept Peg’s big hooves silent for the trick.

“I just lost her,” Claire says, the warmth and admiration obvious as he speaks of the grand old girl who passed not long ago. 

He’s also sure he’s the only teamster to back a team into the pipe shop at Shell Oil in Corunna.
The idea was to give his father, Jack, an escort out of the plant on the occasion of his retirement. His boss thought it was a great idea.

Claire offered to “go one thing better,” and so he, his son, who was around 12 then, and his grandfather, in his nineties and himself presented four generations of the family for Jack Jardine’s sendoff. 

“It was a bigger farewell than the president got,” Claire says.

Claire’s teams are still a familiar sight in downtown Petrolia, especially during town celebrations. “I gave my last ride (for the season) Sunday (Jan. 19). “I don’t have anything booked after that.”

“I still have most of my equipment,” including a show wagon for weddings, and an attractive people carrier that has put smiles on countless faces as riders enjoy a comfortable tour around town.

Claire’s son Todd shares his father’s passion for the big horses. The outstanding Belgians Claire and he have raised and sold have gained recognition across North America, with one of Todd’s horses named top over all breeds for North America last year. “It’s a great way to be recognized,” Claire says.

“It’s a different world now,” Claire says, but some things don’t change, and with his 94th birthday coming up February 3, Jardine can’t imagine quitting.

Four cows with calves and three Belgians are under his care in his barn. Claire does the daily mucking and feeding.

“’Why don’t you quit,’ people ask… Why would you quit something you did all your life?”

“My life has been horses.”