It was the dead of winter: the first week of January 1854. Somewhere on the snowy country roads far to the northeast of Toronto, a horse-drawn sleigh rushed away from the city. On board were two old friends. Jeanie Hall was in her early twenties, energetic and a bit of a tomboy, the daughter of a politician. Over Christmas and New Year’s, she had come to Toronto to visit family friends — including a promising young engineer called Sandford Fleming. Now, with the holidays over, he was escorting her back home to Peterborough in a small, elegant sleigh with just enough room for the two of them to bundle together against the cold.
But as they slid across the snow, they were, perhaps, going a bit too fast. Somewhere outside the town of Lindsay, the sleigh hit a bump in the road hidden by the snow. The curved runners were pitched off balance. The sleigh toppled over. The two passengers were thrown into the road. Jeanie wasn’t hurt, but Sandford slammed into the stump of a tree and was knocked out cold. She rushed to his side, watching over him as he lay there in the snow, unconscious.
That accident was about to change both of their lives.
They’d first met nine years earlier — back when they were teenagers. Fleming had left Scotland with his brother at the age of eighteen, sailing across the stormy Atlantic in search of a new life in Canada. He settled in Peterborough, living with his father’s cousin and family in a grey stone house that is still standing today (now run as a museum called Hutchison House).
Jeanie Hall lived next door. Her father was a prominent figure in the community; he served time as the mayor, a member of Parliament, and the sheriff. He also owned a store, and when the adventurous young Scot moved in next door, the Halls offered Fleming a job working behind the counter until he found his bearings.
And so, Sandford and Jeanie began to spend time together. But it wasn’t love at first sight. Jeanie was just fourteen when they met, and Fleming was looking ahead to his ambitious professional plans. He would soon leave Peterborough for Toronto, where he quickly established himself as one of the city’s most promising young intellectuals. He apprenticed as a surveyor and co-founded the Royal Canadian Institute — one of the country’s leading scientific societies. Within a few years, he’d worked his way up to becoming the chief civil engineer for the city’s very first railway. The Ontario, Simcoe & Huron Railway connected Toronto with Collingwood and the ships that sailed the upper Great Lakes, bringing wheat and timber from the West. The new railroad helped to cement Toronto’s central role in the Canadian economy.
It had only been a few years since he’d left Scotland, but Fleming had already made a mark. He was twenty-six years old and quite a catch: a tall and adventurous young man, with long hair, an impressively bushy beard, and a wildly successful career.
That’s certainly how Bessie Mitchell saw him. By the summer of 1853, she and Sandford were courting, taking frequent walks together around Toronto. It looked like things might be getting serious. But Fleming had gnawing doubts. He clearly cared for her, but he wondered if she was really the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. As a decision about their future loomed, Fleming decided that he didn’t want to decide at all. Instead, he would leave things up to fate.
One autumn evening, he invited Mitchell on a long walk. As they strolled out north of the city toward the village of Yorkville, he revealed his bizarre plan. Their future would be decided by a sunset. In exactly four weeks, on the evening of November 2, they would have their answer. If the sunset was clear and bright, they would get married. If it was cloudy and overcast, they would break up. Mitchell was appalled by the idea, but she went along with it.
Four weeks later, the fateful evening arrived. Fleming recorded the results in his diary. “Cloudy all day, drizzly rain, sun never appeared,” he wrote. “Poor Bessie!!! … I had fully made up my mind for either way. Hope she has. Indeed, it may be best for both parties — we must hope so!”
Bessie Mitchell was heartbroken. She returned his love letters and cut off all contact. Meanwhile, Fleming was free to pursue a new romance and to see what fate had in store for him next.
The holidays arrived just a few weeks later. And so did his old friend Jeanie Hall. They’d kept in touch over the years; she was a regular visitor to Toronto; they hung out when she was in town, sometimes visiting with mutual friends or taking walks together (on the nights he wasn’t already seeing Bessie).
It was during the last few weeks of 1853 that their friendship grew into something more. They saw a lot of each other over the holidays that year, attending Christmas Day services together at St. James Cathedral, going to the same dinners and parties. By the time the year drew to a close, it was obvious something had changed in the way they felt about each other. But even then, it wasn’t entirely clear what that something was. Fleming was feeling cautious, still reeling from his bad breakup with Bessie.
On New Year’s Eve, he made another entry in his diary. “An intimacy growing up with Miss Hall of Peterboro,” he wrote. “How it may terminate I don’t know. An amiable well-bred woman with her own peculiarities. Poor Miss Mitchell but it cannot be helped — have done everything for the best.”
As it turned out, fate would make this decision for him, too.
With the new year underway, it was time for Jeanie to return home to Peterborough. Sandford offered to escort her. They took a train partway and then, for the next leg of their journey, hired a horse and cutter. Sleighs had long been popular with Canadians during the winter months, when the rough and muddy roads were transformed by a thick blanket of snow, making travel much easier. With the harvest done for the year and the frigid nights getting longer, settlers were free to spend more of their time having fun. They headed out in their sleighs to visit family and friends, threw parties and dances, drank and laughed and sang until the spring came, the snow melted away, and the roads became nearly impassable once again.
But the young couple’s cutter would prove to be more than just a mode of transportation. When it hit that bump outside Lindsay, it changed the course of its passengers’ lives. As Fleming regained consciousness in the snow, he found Jeanie hovering over him, worried. His chest had been seriously wounded; it would take a while to heal. Jeanie helped him to a nearby farmhouse, where they called for a physician. The doctor took Fleming home with him to Uxbridge, where the patient spent a week recovering from the crash. And all the while, Jeanie stayed by his side, helping to nurse him back to health.
It was during that long week together that Sandford Fleming and Jeanie Hall fell truly and deeply in love. For someone who clearly believed in the power of signs as much as he did, the overturned sleigh must have been a blatant omen. When he returned home to Toronto, Sandford wrote a letter and sent it off to Peterborough; in it, he asked Jeanie to marry him. She wrote back quickly; her answer arrived in the very next post. She said yes.
They were married a year later — nearly on the exact anniversary of their wintry accident. They began their honeymoon by heading back out onto the snowy roads, heading to the doctor’s house where they’d fallen in love. On their way, they passed the same fateful stump where their sleigh had overturned. When he spotted it, Fleming stopped their horses and leapt from their wagon, a saw in his hand.
He began to cut away at the stump. But it wasn’t easy work; the stump was stubborn. It was very slow going. As Fleming sawed away, his bride teased her new husband. “Sandford, why on earth are you wearing yourself out on that wretched stump?”
“Be patient, Jeanie,” he promised, “I’ll have a use for it, I expect.”
It took him an hour to finish, but he finally did defeat the stump that had once defeated him. And with the wood safely secured in their wagon, the newlyweds continued on to their honeymoon and then to their new life together in Toronto.
It would be a happy one. Soon, Fleming’s work had made him famous not just in Toronto, but around the world. He helped build the railway across Canada, designed the country’s first stamp, and united the British Empire with a network of underwater telegraph cables stretched across the ocean floor. Most impressive of all: he convinced the world to divide the entire planet into time zones. He would eventually be knighted for his life’s work; he would go down in history as Sir Sandford Fleming.
Through it all, he remained a devoted family man. He and Jeanie would have nine children together, and although two of those children died tragically young, the Flemings were a close and loving family.
It was years later, long after their wedding day and their fateful sleigh ride, that Sandford Fleming finally did find a use for that troublemaking stump. He carved it into a wooden frame, one of the world’s most famous engineers using his hands to create a deeply personal ornament. Inside that frame, he placed one of their most precious possessions, still a rare and wonderous thing in those early days of photography: a picture of their children. And so, the family they built together stood forever framed by the stump that had made that family possible — a wooden souvenir from one truly lucky winter accident.