The story of Cecil George Harris's historic will is also a chilling lesson in farm safety
CBC
It was a will that would go down in history.
Shortly after lunch on June 8, 1948 — exactly 75 years ago — Cecil George Harris went out to work on his farm in the McGee district in the RM of Pleasant Valley near Rosetown, Sask.
The plan was to take his Model C Case tractor to a quarter section a few kilometres north of the home farm to work on the field with a one-way plow.
A one-way was a typical piece of farm machinery: a heavy plow used for tillage. Farmers would devote long hours to dragging it back and forth to plow the fields and cultivate the land.
With the distance to the field and the long June day and evening, Cecil told his wife Bessie May that he did not expect to be home before at least 10 p.m.
When the 56-year-old British-born Saskatchewan farmer didn't return when expected, Bessie May left their two young children and drove up to the field to see what was happening.
What she found was a nightmare.
Soon after he got to the field, Harris had a terrible, lonely farm incident.
The Case tractor didn't have modern rubber tires. It had old-fashioned steel wheels with V-shaped lugs. It was a heavy beast, capable of working hard.
No one is quite sure what happened, but the local paper, the Rosetown Eagle, reported that Harris was between the tractor and the one-way, possibly to fix or set something, when the tractor rolled backward.
Bob Hannay, who was 15 years old at the time and part of that night's terrible rescue mission, thought that Harris was likely greasing the one-way and had reached up to engage the left-hand clutch to 'jockey' the tractor backward a little to help the procedure.
It's the sort of thing that farmers do. Harris had probably done it many times before.
This time, disaster struck.
The tractor engaged and rolled backwards. Harris was immediately rolled under, pinned by the tractor's huge left rear wheel, sitting upright between the one-way and the tractor.
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