| Brandy Creek has doubtless excited the curiosity of many people as they traveled through Norfolk county or perhaps saw the name on a map. It is a name to pique the curiosity of the most indifferent mind, but it is probable that the makers of books on place names have not gone to the root as did a reader of
The Globe now living in that vicinity.
This reader, at any rate, sends a story that sounds plausible, whether further confirmation of it can be
found or not. It is given on the authority of Mrs. Mollie Armstrong, who lives at Brandy Creek, and who now at the age of
90, still raises ducks for a living on the small farm upon which she was born. Her story of the origin of the name of Brandy Creek is this:
About 50 years ago a farmer named Melton lived about eight miles up that river. He raised cattle and sheep. One day he went out to milk and the cows were dancing about in the yard, turning about in all sorts of strange positions, sitting down, and, according to the story current at the time, walking on their hind legs. The sheep staggered along too. The farmer looked up the diseases of cattle in his Farmer's Friend, but found nothing like this defined.
He was going to send to Brantford for a veterinary the next morning, but as he was hitching up to do so he found that his animals were all as well as they had been in the first place. So he unhitched and went about his day's work in the usual way. At night when milking time came, however, they were, as on the previous day, jumping capriciously and incorrigibly about the barnyard.
They behaved so like a man when he is drunk that Mr. Melton suspected that the water in the river had alcohol in it. His suspicions were doubled when he heard that moon-shiners lived on some hills not far away. So he went to the revenue officers with his story and they came and searched the hills where the river had its origin, and there found what they called the largest still they had ever seen. And there were several of them.
The water was amber-colored with the old stuff, and made a human feel funny after drinking it. They were making brandy there, and so, although until then the river had never had a name, it was called from then on "Brandy Creek." Brandy Creek is now a railway station and a centre of prosperous poultry
farming.
Mrs. Armstrong does everything according to the moon. "It is the only way," she claims, "a hog should only be killed when the sign of the zodiac is in the feet. If this is done the meat always retains its original size when cooked, whereas if this is not done the meat draws up to one-half or one-third its original size when put in the frying pan."
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