Raw Life. J. Patrick Boyer
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on Bracebridge and its jail facilities, not its own hometown hospital and medical staff who had washed their hands of responsibility for the local man with a convenient diagnosis of mental instability and sent him away to another municipality and its rudimentary facilities. Still, even given that fact, it was true that the jail in which John Eastall died did not meet expectations. Bracebridge, after all, was not just a neighbouring municipality; it was the capital town of Muskoka, and, as such, had, or might be expected to have, public facilities commensurate with its role.
Whether in Huntsville, Bracebridge, or elsewhere across Muskoka District, the absence of adequate facilities made a mockery of the rule of law, and rendered hollow even the minimal sense of compassion in that day. Muskoka historian Susan Pryke relates how cases like John Eastall’s “haunted” Huntsville’s police chief, William Selkirk, causing him to recommend in March 1906 that town council petition the legislature to build a house of refuge. Muskoka’s member of the legislature, A.A. Mahaffy, became champion of the cause, calling a meeting of reeves, mayors, and other interested parties in Bracebridge to discuss establishing a home for the aged and infirm in the district.
“It was not as easy as Mahaffy hoped,” Pryke concluded. Even by 1921 nothing had changed. That year, at the inaugural banquet of the Muskoka Municipal Association, Mahaffy again urged Muskoka’s elected representatives to secure a house of refuge. But no home for the aged would be built in Muskoka for almost a half-century more, when one of Mahaffy’s successors as MPP for Muskoka, Robert J. Boyer, a grandson of James Boyer, spearheaded the creation of The Pines Home for the Aged in the early 1960s, facing defiant opposition from two township councils. Muskoka was last of all Ontario’s counties and districts to have such a facility. For a very long time, tough love and self-reliance endured as Muskoka’s way, the remorseless culture of people who had themselves struggled in harsh settings to make their own way.
Spending money on convicts and “lunatics” was seen as unnecessary, and referring to people who might occupy such facilities in derogatory terms seemed to make it easier to discount the need. Even after Muskoka’s imposing new district courthouse opened for business on Bracebridge’s prestigious Dominion Street in 1900, improvement of jail facilities still languished on the public agenda. Instead, the government simply leased the conveniently close stone-walled basement of the Muskoka Herald Building on Dominion Street from the newspaper’s proprietor, Edgar Bastedo, for use as a lock-up. The building, though constructed only for a newspaper and printing operation, was at least considered more secure than the earlier jail. Yet repeated damage to the newspaper’s premises by prisoners trying to break out, as earlier noted, led Bastedo to end the arrangement. Helping the community in its time of need had been instinctive for public-minded Bastedo, but his building was suffering physical damage and the reputation of the premises as a place co-occupied by feisty criminals was not helping Herald business.
This turn of events propelled Bracebridge council to get a better local lock-up. It secured a patch of land for sixty dollars from S.H. Armstrong at the rear of the town hall, where in 1904 local contractor John Baker constructed a more secure facility. It was massively built, with thick walls of stone, a sturdy door with heavy hinges and a strong lock, three cells inside, plus a stove, toilet, and small washbasin. Its few small windows, on the south side, were closely barred.
The town’s constables used these cells to detain individuals charged with an offence until they could appear before the magistrate the next morning, to house prisoners convicted and sentenced to serve jail time, and to shelter vagrants and sometimes others who were mentally ill. Beside the structure stood a stable for the town’s team of horses, which stood until 1934 when trucks replaced horses and the building was demolished. In 1967 the stone jail itself was purchased by Bracebridge lawyer H.E.S. “Bert” Sugg and razed to make way for a parking lot behind his law office. Asphalt then covered over both the space where prisoners had once paced out their days and the hollyhocks beyond their windows that had grown tall and bloomed in summer.
Whatever causes people to employ euphemistic phrases for reality, it was certainly at play in Bracebridge to describe the various lock-ups over the years. At first, to some the local jail was “the Bastille,” a humorous pretense that the town’s lock-up was on a par with the infamous stone prison in Paris. In the long era of Queen Victoria’s reign, another name for the place housing criminals, charged and convicted and sentenced to be confined in the name of the Crown, was “Her Majesty’s Cottage.” After the queen’s death, and with construction in 1904 of a new jail from local-cut stone, the popular name became, more simply, the “Stone Cottage.” Once Duncan McDonald was appointed in 1909 as warden of the district jail in Bracebridge, that centre for incarceration would become known by yet another euphemism, “Dunc’s Castle.” Adding humour or using euphemisms may have assisted to diminish reality in the minds of some.
Prisoners in Bracebridge were not always behind bars. Sometimes they were outside working, sometimes they simply escaped, and occasionally they were brought out for execution.
The new district jail was to the north of the courthouse, built at the corner of Dominion and Ontario streets in 1900. Behind the courthouse the land sloped away and a vegetable garden was created to help supply food for prisoners. Prisoners themselves tended the garden. They did more, too, recalled Magistrate Redmond Thomas, as part of their sentence of hard labour, “mowing the lawn and shovelling the snow and doing all the janitor work.”
The record of Bracebridge jails serving their intended purpose of retaining prisoners in confinement was not outstanding. One of the reasons for this poor record was the inventive determination of the prisoners, of course, but one also has to wonder about the implicit complicity of Bracebridgites themselves. The villagers had created a fund to pay the bail of the first prisoner, the authorities had dragged their feet in upgrading facilities, and if a prisoner escaped, the townsfolk would not have to pay for his food. It can be safely said that secure incarceration was never a big deal locally.
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