family, manufacturers. Three generations of the Coulthart family were involved in the GC area in the manufacture of cheese boxes and, more generally, in the sawmill business. The cheese boxes were the large, circular boxes, constructed of thin strips of elmwood, which were used for the transport and merchandising of the big blocks or “loaves” in which the cheddar cheese was manufactured. Designed for use–and even for hard use, in a trade that sometimes led them to the other side of the Atlantic– and swiftly and cheaply mass-manufactured, they nevertheless had their own elegance, and for those who are lucky to own them, a few old cheese boxes make a handsome addition to a home office to this day. Jonah Coulthart, a native of Scotland, began the family’s cheese box business at Northfield, Stormont County, in 1890. His son Byron Coulthart (J. B. Coulthart) operated the same manufacturing business at Apple Hill, GC, for a few years around 1900. Byron then moved his family and his manufacturing business to Monkland, just west of GC, where he and after him his son David (David I. Coulthart) operated the Coulthart Cheese Box manufacturing Company. Stiles, 1920, says that “The Coulthart Cheese Box Manufacturing Company is one of the largest in Canada, supplying boxes to about forty large factories on the Cornwall, Alexandria and Finch Cheese Boards. A staff of ten hands are constantly employed for six months of the year in supplying the trade. The output of boxes annually is over 60,000.” The Coulthart mill at Monkland, which also operated part of the year as a sawmill, was destroyed by fire 7 Sept. 1950. It was soon rebuilt, but with the decline from this time of the old Eastern Ontario cheddar cheese industry, and the appearance of other, more “modern”-type, containers for the merchandising of cheese, it must be assumed that at least the cheese box manufacturing part of the business did not survive for long. There is a fine article on the Coulthart family and their plant at Monkland by Vera C. Reid (1918-2002) in the 1985 Reflections on Monkland & District. She gives a valuable description of how the boxes were made, with some details on the methods of distribution, and a valuable list of cheese factories in GC and the area around it to which they were sold. For the GC-area manufacture of cheese boxes, for so many years vital to the old, local cheddar cheese trade, see also Duncan James Macpherson.

Reflections on Monkland & District (1985) 16-20 (illust.), repr. without illust. Manor Chatter Sept. 2003 * Stiles 90-91 (illust.) * Glengarry News 15 May 1985 (illust.) in Angus H. McDonell’s historical series on Monkland