FARMING IN MUSKOKA: First You Burn the Field

ByLee Ann

As I harvested the first of the lettuce from my garden this week, I thought about the pioneers living along The Muskoka Road. The first settlers to take up the “free grant lands” arrived in October 1859. They hauled themselves up the rock ridge just north of the Severn River and then scouted out an allotted 100 acres for their farmsteads. Only the lots directly adjacent to the road had been surveyed, and none of the families realized at the time that these initial 94 lots between Severn River and McCabe’s Landing (Gravenhurst) were some of the worst in the district for farming.

Near Lot 19 Morrison Twp on the Muskoka Road

Of course it was too late in the season to plant anything. The job at hand was to chop out a small clearing and build a shanty for the winter. But most settlers also cut the underbrush from the first acre or two in preparation for creating a field to plant in spring. They piled up the underbrush and then over the winter chopped down some of the large trees.  Using axes. Against old growth pines, some of which were 100 feet high and 7 feet in diameter. They cut the trunks of the trees into lengths of about 15 feet and heaved them onto the underbrush.

In May, when the brush was dry enough to burn, and on a day when the wind was blowing away from the new shanty, the pioneer collected some dry hemlock and birch bark and a piece of punk (dry, rotten wood). Crouching over this, he scratched his knife on a flint stone to strike a spark, then watched as a thin thread of smoke snaked up from the punk. With some blowing, the fire caught the bark and spread, until it was a great billowing mass. Funnels and forks of flames raced through the dry tinder. The pioneer moved carefully among the piles of brush, lighting each one until the acre blazed in one great inferno. By nightfall the fire died down, leaving the earth and skeletal stumps of trees black and scorched. The great piles of brush were gone, but charred logs remained and would have to be picked up, piled and burned again over the course of several days. Only the burnt stumps of the largest trees were left standing. It took about seven years before the roots had rotted enough to be pulled out. So wherever there was room between the tree stumps, the pioneers planted their crops of potatoes, garden produce, corn and buckwheat.

Salad, anyone?

THE MUSKOKA COLONIZATION ROAD: Tree Stumps and Ridges and Dirt, Oh My!

ByLee Ann

When we drive almost anywhere in the world today, we do so expecting good roads. Paved roads, ones that have been engineered for safety, with curves that are easy to negotiate. We are affronted by pot-holes and cracks in the asphalt. We expect that obstacles like rivers, undeveloped land or rock ridges are removed or bridged so we can get to where we are going as quickly and easily as possible.  Roads for the most part are straight, level and paved.

Until the 1930s, The Muskoka Colonization Road was anything but. Rivers and lakes, when they couldn’t be avoided, were crossed by simple wooden bridges that tended to sway alarmingly and get washed out in spring floods. Settlers hacked the road out of very dense forest, chopping down trees where the surveyors’ chains marked the route. They left the tree stumps to rot, which made for a pockmarked obstacle course that was often easier for people to walk through than for horses to pull a wagon through. There was no engineering at the time that could cut through a granite ridge, so the road went over or around these – often, since granite ridges are as plentiful as mosquitoes in Muskoka.

Here’s a view of Highway 11 just north of the Severn Bridge, heading north.

See how the rock-cut makes the road nice and flat for the cars? When you’re speeding along this stretch of the highway, almost at the cottage, I bet you don’t even notice the rock-cut. Which is too bad, because it’s gorgeous. But it’s also a feat of engineering that would stun the average Muskoka pioneer. That poor person had to haul all his belongings up the ridge and down the other side. At this exact spot – the southern boundary of the Muskoka District and near the official start of the Muskoka Road – the ridge is over 15 metres high.

No wonder hundreds of potential settlers took one look and turned around!

CENSUS INFORMATION: 1871 and 2011

ByLee Ann
Spring in my Garden

It’s spring, and the government’s mind turns to: census-taking! That’s true in 2011 and was the same in 1871. The census is of course a great source of data for a researcher like me. The census has also recently been controversial – the Chief Statistician resigned over the government’s decision to shorten the census this year and make part of it voluntary.

This week I filled out the 2011 census – online, a very cool option – and also spent time in the 1871 census of Muskoka. I noticed a few interesting differences between the two census questionnaires. Which I suppose is to be expected as they’re 140 years apart. 

For instance, we no longer ask everyone how many acres they have under crop. Or what livestock or how many carriages they own. Or if anyone in the household is “deaf, dumb, blind or of unsound mind.” Questions about “Daily Living” do form part of the “National Household Survey” (the optional part of the 2011 census,) although the method of questioning about that kind of thing is now much more polite: “Does this person have any difficulty hearing, seeing, communicating, walking, climbing stairs, bending, learning or doing any similar activities?”

The question of religion is not part of the 2011 short form census. Nor is ‘profession, occupation, or trade’. Nor is ethnic background.

Marital status has gotten quite a bit more complicated. In 1871 you were either single, married or widowed. In 2011, you could be:

  • never legally married
  • legally married (and not separated)
  • separated (but still legally married)
  • divorced
  • widowed… OR (asked in a separate question)
  • living with a common-law partner.

In 1871 there was no question about what language you spoke – fascinating for a country of immigrants. Speaking of which, I’m researching the 1871 census records of two immigrant families:

  1. The Simintons of Morrison township. They were among the very first settlers along the Muskoka Road and had been singled out in the Provincial Land Agent’s 1859 report as being “particularly intelligent and industrious.” I think by 1871 they had abandoned their land and fled to Manitoba.
  2. Ira Fetterley of Chaffey township. I found only one reference that specifies the Muskoka Road ended at his farm in 1865. All others say it ended somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Vernon. I would much rather learn about Ira Fetterley and use his story to talk about the end of the road! So I am hoping the enumerator made some kind of reference to the government road in a note on the Fetterley record.

That is another difference, 140 years later: there is no place to make a note!

IN PRAISE OF PRIMARY SOURCE MATERIAL

ByLee Ann

This week I’ve continued to thoroughly enjoy writing Chapter 5. Partly because it’s another chapter full of big developments for both Muskoka and the Muskoka Colonization Road, but mostly because I have plenty of primary source material.

Primary source material includes all kinds of eye-witness accounts, recorded in diaries, memoirs, contemporary newspaper reports, letters. It is to a non-fiction book what compost is to a garden. You can produce good stuff without it, but with it your results are stronger and more colourful.

In this chapter I’m writing about a major upgrade to the first 19 kilometres of the Muskoka Road. This topic could be kind of technical and boring – we’re talking about gravelling and planking here – except that I have the 1870 engineering specs that the government sent out and the engineering drawing hand-done by the supervising engineer. The specs include details like this for the gravelled part of the road:

  • “If broken stone is used it will be so broken that the largest will pass through a ring of 2 1/2 inches [6 cm] in diameter.” I love this! So that must mean that the supervising engineer – the wonderfully named  Thomas Nepean Molesworth – carried such a ring with him?

And for the planked portion of the road:

  • “Pine or hemlock planks 8 feet by 3 inches [2.4m X 7.6cm] resting on wood supports 12 inches [30cm] wide by 1 foot [30cm] thick, fastened thereto with five foot [1.5m] cut spikes driven diagonally at each end of a plank.”

Sounds like a pretty sturdy road, right? Not really. Because we have the letters written by Harriet Barbara King, a self-described “emigrant lady” who took a stagecoach up that same stretch of road the summer following its re-engineering. Here is what she had to say:

“Oh! The horrors of that journey! The road was most dreadful – our first acquaintance with ‘corduroy’ roads… Your brother with his arm round me the whole way (I clinging to the collar of his coat), could hardly keep me steady as we bumped over every obstacle. In the worst places I was glad to shut my eyes that I might not see the danger.”

The Muskoka Colonization Road was a bone-jarring, dangerous, painful route into the district for almost 80 years. I can tell you that, or I can show you that, through eye-witness accounts from primary source material. The humus for my story!

WRITING TIP: Play Can Result in Progress

ByLee Ann

My theme for Chapter 5 is “Don’t Work So Hard.” That’s the theme for my process, not Chapter 5’s contents. Chapter 5 is about a 10 year period that marked two key turning points for the Muskoka Road:

  1. It extended north out of Muskoka and into the Parry Sound District; and
  2. It met its biggest challenge: the railway.

My biggest challenge to date has been the tendency to work really hard and worry about the imperative of getting the first draft done. It’s a pressure-cooker of my own making; one I’ve decided to get out of. Whew! Too hot in there.

So I will write Chapter 5 in a different way, having as much fun as I can. I started by reviewing the outline – yes, that wonderful document! – and reminding myself of the stories I get to tell in this chapter: New road-building technologies.  Another harrowing description of a stagecoach ride up the road.  “Manitoba fever.”

I’ve paused to savour the richly named cast of characters:

  • Thomas Nepean Molesworth, engineer.
  • James Hankinson Jackson, storekeeper, census-taker, community-builder.
  • Anson Greene Phelps Dodge, lumber baron and railway promoter – who was known as “Alphabet” Dodge because of his habit of signing his name with all three of his initials.

And I’ve been reading late-1800s newspapers from Pennsylvania. Muskoka was heavily marketed there, to “sportsmen” looking for adventure and escape from the coal-fueled city. The personal columns carry tales of several fishing clubs and a group of judges and “other prominent jurists of the State” camping on Lake Muskoka. Not all trips were idyllic. One man was emotionally scarred by the sounds made by a bullfrog he was trying to kill for dinner. Another sustained a serious cut on his knee in an unfortunate flag-raising incident. But one fisherman vowed he had found the definitive protection against Muskoka’s black flies: forget the mix of pennyroyal and almond oil, what you really want is equal parts tar and pork fat.

Hey, cottage opening weekend is coming up. You gotta be ready!

I’m not sure any of these stories will make it into Muskoka’s Main Street. But they’ve given me a sense of the district during a certain brief time in its history. That’s fun. That’s also progress.

WRITING FROM AN OUTLINE, PART 2: The Quilt Approach

ByLee Ann

I’ve heard it said that there are two kinds of writers: planners and seat-of-the-pantsers. Planners work with outlines, index cards and detailed notes to plot out their storyline to the nth degree, then sit down and write it all up. Pantsers just start to write and find out what happens next by writing – it’s all quite organic.

I like to do a bit of both. In my last post I talked about how writing from an outline keeps me anchored in my story and focussed on what I want to say. That’s true – but I also like to dive into a topic and see where it takes me. I’d chafe against too much pre-defined structure, but just jumping into a book without any idea of how I plan to tell the story? Nope – too scary for me.

Here again is the Outline for Chapter 4 of Muskoka’s Main Street. Chapter 4 outline The outline is my high-level structure; I’ve defined the entire book to this level of detail. The elements within the outline might change a little, but basically this is the book I am going to write – and also, by the way, the book the publisher agreed to buy.

Each bullet point is a topic I want to cover in the chapter. I’m not sure yet which order these will appear in the final version, but that doesn’t matter. I will write each topic separately, using the “quilt approach.” I love this approach. It works like a making a quilt: you make separate, individual “squares” first; you sew them together later.

With this approach to writing, each bullet point in the outline – each topic – is a “square.” I don’t have to start writing in any particular order. I can write the “square” I am interested in writing that day. Pick a topic, write it. Then write the next topic that grabs my attention. Writing is more fun this way, and I think when you write what appeals to you, your enthusiasm gets onto the page.

After I’ve written a few “squares”, I figure out what order they go in. Since Main Street is a chronological story, it’s pretty easy for me to arrange the topics by the date they occurred. But I don’t necessarily write them in that order. In fact, as of this week, I’ve drafted all of Chapter 4 except the Sidebar about the Free Grants and Homestead Act and the part about Captain Hunt arriving on the scene.

I feel like writing about the Free Grants Act next. More on that soon!