Every small urban centre across Canada that services the surrounding rural agricultural industry has a restaurant/cafe with a “coffee row”. Its where local farmers meet to hash out anything and everything to do with agriculture and of course to avail themselves of a (often bottomless)cup of coffee. It may be a row of stools at the counter or a corner table by the window to allow them to keep track of all the comings and goings in town.
On the Prairies the day’s coffee row discussion might be on the benefits of a new cultivation technology such as no-till versus the more traditional practices. On the Niagara Peninsula the topic might be where everyone is planning to ship this year’s crop of Concord juice grapes given the local company that used to take them recently moved to the United States. In the foothills of Alberta, ranchers might meet at their local coffee row before or after heading over to the the sale barn.
A common refrain no matter where the restaurant/cafe, is the importance of reminding those urban folks “in the big city” that sometimes just “don’t seem to get it” that its farmers that feed them.
Hi,
I came across your website by googling the phrase “coffee row”, which I will be including on an upcoming survey of Saskatchewan vocabulary (I am a graduate student in Linguistics). I very much enjoyed your definition, and it will likely make an appearance in my paper. I was just wondering where you may have first encountered this term, and if you know it to be common across Canada. I would love to learn more about the phrase, and I welcome any information and/or insights you might offer.
Thanks!
I came across the phrase “coffee row” when I was working in the museum field in Western Canada. I found that a visit to the local coffee row in many of the west’s rural communities a really good means for someone who was not part of the immediate community to see who might have access to some historical information that I needed or for that matter who might have a piece of antique agricultural equipment for which I was searching. I should also add that it also worked the other way, there were instances where folks seated in coffee row on a particular day couldn’t answer my question but through that network on subsequent day’s discussions the answer would be forth-coming from someone else. Coffee row was also the central organizing point for many of the community aid projects common in rural Canada. One learned that one of one’s neighbours was ill and that their family was in need of help to get the crop planted or harvested. The implement dealer who might be convinced to loan a piece of equipment was “button-holed” on coffee row and the efforts of one’s fellow farmers who would donate their labour to operate that equipment were all co-ordinated and scheduled during coffee row discussions.
I would say the phrase would be most commonly associated with the three prairie provinces BUT that a similar gathering place for farmers coming into their local service community exists in all of Canada’s provinces and territories. I have heard the specific phrase used by farmers in the west to describe where I or one of their peers could find them. Before many of the country grain elevators were torn down farmers hauling grain would walk over to the local coffee row to wait out the line-up to have their grain sampled and unloaded.