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The Pumpman of Skye

part I

I owe the following account of John Norman MacLeod, once known far and wide as the “Pumpman of Skye,” to his son Neil D. MacLeod. He wrote it while a resident in the Maxville Manor as his contribution to the Dunvegan Women’s Institute’s “Tweedsmuir Histories.”

John Norman and his brother, Duncan, were raised on a farm on Skye Road. For blow-ins (and residents of Alexandria), Skye Road lies just north of Dunvegan. Like so many young men at the time, they left home to work away. John went to Boston where he was hired as a gardener’s assistant. And Duncan went to Manitoba to apprentice with a man who made wooden water pumps.
Back in the days before rural electrification, there was no indoor plumbing. If you wanted water, you used your dug well. So a pump, even a wooden one, was a huge technological leap forward over a bucket at the end of a rope.
But right about now you’re asking yourself, if Duncan was the sibling who left to learn how to make water pumps and returned home with the knowledge and the machinery required to manufacture them… how did his brother, John Norman, end up as the Pumpman of Skye?

Nobody seems to know. Unfortunately, those who might have had the knowledge have long passed to the other side. Bottom line… it was John Norman who started the pump business, while Duncan started an apiary and produced honey.

John Norman acquired land for the new venture by buying the west quarter of Lot 15 in the 9th of Kenyon, which was near the Skye Road cheese factory and the one-room Skye School. I believe it was this latter structure that Dr. Burt Ayre and his wife Amelia bought in the late 1970s and moved to vacant land on Dunvegan Road, on the east side of the late René and Sherrill Trottier’s former farm. Years later, the old log Skye School (and the rest of the structure to which it was affixed) was destroyed by a heart-rending fire. But that is a tale for another day.

To return to our account of the Pumpman’s fledgling enterprise, his son recalls that a horse-driven treadmill originally powered the machinery, which must have been real slow going. Over the course of time, a steam engine, and then a small gasoline engine, replaced the horses.

There was a good reason that John Norman chose the tract he did. A generous part of it was swampy and contained an abundant stand of straight, water-resistant tamarack trees. The mature logs were harvested for the bodies of the pumps and wooden pipe extensions.

John Norman’s plan was that this bush lot, properly managed, would supply him with raw materials in perpetuity. However, this was not to be. The summers of 1940 and 1941 were extremely hot and dry and brush fires destroyed his “warehouse” of standing timber… along with his brother’s barn.
In fact, Neil MacLeod wrote that it was only the heroic efforts of friends and neighbours that saved Duncan’s house. Some also said that, if the wind hadn’t shifted, all the houses along the road would have been engulfed in flames.
The quality of John Norman’s pumps was legendary and demand grew steadily. This success, together with the need to clean up all the fallen logs in his bush following the brush fires, induced him to expand and acquire a small sawmill. Then, a year or so later, an automatic shingle saw was installed on the second floor. Naturally, the mill building was located close to the creek that ran through the property for easy access to water for the steam engine that powered the big saw blade.

I’m not sure exactly when the Pumpman of Skye closed the doors on his business, but his son fondly recalled that… “Many years after the operations ceased, I heard it said that the best wooden pumps were made by John Norman MacLeod and the best wells were dug by Rory Chisholm. In truth, they builded better than they knew.”

While the logs were being bored, they rested on a track where a power-driven auger steadily drilled an increasingly larger diameter hole through their length. The Pumpman’s original boring track was donated to the Glengarry Pioneer Museum years ago and can be seen leaning up against the far south wall of the Drive Shed. Unfortunately, no one… including the late Neil MacLeod… knows “what became of the augers and small parts.”

PS: If you’d like to see a rig like John Norman MacLeod’s in action, Clay MacWhirter from the Cumberland Museum has a YouTube video in which he demonstrates how a log boring machine and a huge lathe are used to make wooden pipes and pumps.

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