Raw Life. J. Patrick Boyer
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Muskoka was keeping several thousand hard at work logging, droving, and milling. In the process, Muskoka was achieving a diverse mixture of peoples with a wide range of skills and aptitudes, many with strong backs, a large number with intelligent minds, all propelled by stubborn determination.
Although people enjoyed robust life in a natural setting, fitting their activities rhythmically with the district’s alternating seasons, the ever-present hardships and toil made Muskoka an inhospitable and unnatural home for malingerers. People did not come to the frontier to claim land or work in a mill expecting a frivolous escapade. A few were able to get by doing little work; these were rich rascals, the “remittance men” sent to Muskoka by socially prominent British families to remove their embarrassing presence from respectable society, but at least the money sent out, or remitted, to them in the distant colony helped Muskoka’s cash-short economy. Another plus was how a number of these dandy misfits added lustre to the community’s arts and letters clubs and early drama societies.
England also contributed to Muskoka’s population mix from its poorest classes. Here again the British adopted an out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach, “solving” their social problems by merely shipping them overseas: prisoners to the penal colony of distant Australia, orphans and street urchins to the farms of Canada. Thousands of “orphans, waifs, and strays” were shipped to rough and rural pioneering Canada where struggle awaited them. Muskoka had the highest concentration of these “home children” child labourers — so named because they came from homes for orphans — thanks to the district’s settlement and development between 1870 and 1930 coinciding exactly with the duration of a deportation program emptying out the orphanages, poor houses, and slums of the “Mother Country” into Britain’s colonies. Many fetched up as indentured child labourers on the farms of Muskoka’s townships, most badly exploited, unschooled and unsupervised, overworked and underfed, melding into the economic underclass that was forming in rural Muskoka on farms that barely sustained those living and working on them.
Decades later, William E. Taylor, himself the son of an eleven-year-old orphan who laboured as an indentured home boy on a Canadian farm, explained that these youngsters were sent “in a mixture of intense confusion, terror, child courage and, occasionally, optimism. They absorbed the shock of early Canada, cultural and geographic; lived a grinding pioneer life we can now barely comprehend; fought, died, or somehow survived the holocaust of trench warfare; struggled through the Depression and in turn, watched their own children enter another war.” Taylor noted how greatly “their lives and thinking contrasts with the current Canadian mood of self-pity and dependence.” These world-wise and stoic children, who grew into adulthood and in most cases formed Muskoka families of their own, constituted another component of the human wave that reached the district during its settlement years and melded into the hard-love sentiment typifying Muskokans.
Wherever or however they lived, Muskokans needed goods and services, and enterprising settlers were establishing a supply to meet demand. By the early 1870s, services available to people in Bracebridge and its surrounding townships included those of a doctor, notary public, conveyancer, druggist, music teacher, and several land surveyors. Among the community’s tradesmen could be found a house builder, carpenter, window glazier, butcher, and baker. There was the post office, a newspaper, a blacksmith, the stage coach service, and hoteliers, each in their way helping people communicate and travel.
This rutted mud roadway had pole fences to keep cows out of gardens and people walking in the darkness of night on the path. The log barn at right would have been damp and dark, with its flat un-drained roof, tiny window, and dirt floor. The cabin, with chimney, sloped roof, and boards covering the dormers, was a typical dwelling of Muskoka homesteaders.
A number of retailers had also opened their doors to offer specialty lines of furniture, musical instruments, boots and shoes, leather supplies, groceries, dry goods, and clothing. In the heavier end of things, still others offered threshing and separating machinery, shingle making, lime and lathe sales, grist milling, and the services of a sawmill. For those who suddenly packed it in, coffins were available in Bracebridge, “made of the latest style and on short notice.”
Such enterprises and services were also emerging in Huntsville, Gravenhurst, and other comparable Ontario towns of the day. Something rarer in Bracebridge was its woollen mill, established at the falls by Henry Bird in 1872. It rapidly became an important part of the town, helping to guarantee the progress of Bracebridge and the success of the many hard-pressed Muskoka farmers who’d discovered with chagrin that their patch on the Canadian Shield was too rocky and swampy, with soils too thin, to serve for traditional farming.
Some other towns had woollen mills too, but two things that gave Bird’s Woollen Mill a unique place in Muskoka’s development were its added impacts on agriculture and resort vacations. The booming mill needed huge supplies of wool. Rocky Muskoka farms, unsuitable for crops, were ideal for grazing sheep.
Bracebridge industry soared when Henry Bird built this woollen mill by the falls in the early 1870s, giving a lift to Muskoka farming in the process. Sheep on the district’s rugged lands produced wool for his mill and famous “Muskoka Lamb” for the dining rooms of summer resorts and big city hotels.
Henry Bird made generous arrangements with financially strapped Muskoka farmers to raise sheep, provided they sold their wool only to his Bracebridge mill. At the same time, Muskoka was experiencing the emergence of hotels and lodges for visitors. Distinctive and handy, “Muskoka Spring Lamb” became a menu specialty in their dining rooms. Muskoka’s new sheep farmers made lucrative arrangements with the district’s enterprising hoteliers to supply both fresh lamb and mutton. As soon as train service connected the district to the country’s larger centres, these born-again farmers began meeting the demand for Muskoka’s now-famous spring lamb in major hotels across Canada too.
Bird’s Woollen Mill also became a major manufacturer of woollen products, selling its famous “Bird Blanket” across the country and abroad. The mill’s substantial stone facilities would be expanded a number of times, the company remaining a large employer and economic mainstay of Bracebridge for the next eighty years.
An equally crucial industry that came to both Bracebridge and Huntsville was leather tanning. Once Bracebridge became incorporated, elected representatives began exercising their new ability to speak officially for the village with interested businessmen about establishing new factories and manufacturing arrangements. As a result, within just three years the Beardmore tannery was up and running, giving Bracebridge a still larger base on which to continue building up its substantial economy.
Once again, Muskoka’s farmers benefited enormously. Companies operating Muskoka’s tanning businesses became major buyers for their animal hides and an equally ready market for the vast quantities of tanning bark they stripped from hemlock trees and shipped by wagon and barge to the riverside facilities in Bracebridge. As with those now raising sheep, the fact many of these hardscrabble farmers lacked rich soil or flat fields was beside the point for this kind of “agricultural harvest.”
Economic development, with parallel growth of community services and facilities for the people, had, like Muskoka itself, many ups and downs and rocky patches. One early setback came with a blighting economic downturn in the mid-1870s, a by-product of the significant recession that gripped the U.S. during those years. In 1874 the council of Macaulay Township (in which Bracebridge was located) attempted to overcome the stagnation by granting a five-year exemption from municipal taxes to sawmills, flour mills, woollen factories, and foundries. Such extraordinary measures were needed as incentive for economic development in Bracebridge, for, as author W. E. Hamilton, taking stock of the community in March 1875 said, circumstances had “knocked the bottom out of the institution of Bracebridge.” This activist response by local government leaders showed that Muskokans were not content to be passive. They believed the new society they were creating in the district would be what they made it, and that its success depended on their resiliency.
It had only taken a few years of the government’s