Thornton W. Burgess

Thornton Waldo Burgess was an outdoors and nature and children’s book author. Burgess prided himself as a conservationist, naturalist, and lover of nature and the animals that make their home in it which is why he wrote about it for more than five decades. By the time of his retirement, he had written more than 15, 000 short stories for newspaper columns and more than 170 books. Thornton was born to Thornton W Burgess senior (who was directly descended from one of the pioneer settlers of Sandwich Thomas Burgess) and Caroline F Haywood. His father died in 1874, the year he was born and he would be brought up by his mother who still lived in Sandwich. With no father in his life, Burgess spent much of his youthful life working eighty hours a day trying to earn a living. Some of the jobs he took during this time included trapping muskrats, tending cows, selling candy, picking berries or arbutus, and packing water lilies from ponds. He also worked for William C Chipman a man who had a home with a wildlife habitat of wetland and woodland on Discovery Hill Road. The habitat would later become the setting of many of the tales he would pen in his later career as an author.