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This section of our Book, gives us but a stark outline of the most prosperous era of life in South Pickering. The small, han-crafted industries and stores continued on into the 1900's. However, the promise of larger industries which grew about the mills during the Victorian period, was never realized. The Villages, instead of progressing and becoming more industrialized, became less so. The largest local enterprise during the 1930's was established by Mr. A. Mitchell. Lumbering and flour milling and cloth making, all disappeared, and with them, the people who worked these mills. The farmers and merchants led a pleasant life in the large, sometimes beautiful houses, some of which are shown in this section. We regret that the time has passed when a Base Line teacher could ask her dirty, older boys, to wash their feet right in the classroom. We can never recapture the small community spirit of quilting bees, or the barn raising with their sumptuous meals and hilarious jokes. Life was genuinely co-operative and the men and women who supported the roads, schools and innumerable Churches, would probably intensely dislike our modern competitive existence. We are, perhaps, more comfortable physically, but in turning over so much of our individual work to Government agencies, we have lost much of the control over Township affairs which made life in the past so interesting. Melba E. McKay, Amy C. Smith, May. 3, 1960.