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St. Lawrence River

River flowing from Lake Ontario to the Atlantic Ocean.

The St. Lawrence river showed like a streak of silver on the northern horizon and the forest trees on the Mt. slopes were a cloud of delicate green colors… – Farmer Boy manuscript, page 54

     
As the crow flies, it’s only about six miles from Burke to the Canada border, and another fifteen miles north to the St. Lawrence River in Canada. And, as Almanzo pointed out, you really can see it in the distance, if you know where to look. The photo here was taken just after a June sunrise looking northeast from the highway north of Burke. The thin, whitish line below the horizon is the river.

The St. Lawrence River begins at the outflow of Lake Ontario and runs 744 miles north-easterly to the Gulf of St. Lawrence; thus, it connects the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.

The postcard below shows the village of Malone with the St. Lawrence in the distance. In Farmer Boy, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote that the river was “a silver streak at the edge of the sky” when Almanzo was doing the spring plowing (see Chapter 11, “springtime”).

     

St. Lawrence River (FB 11)