Raw Life. J. Patrick Boyer
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section to be annexed by the town, council voted money to get the necessary private bill passed through Ontario’s legislature, and also offered $150 to Macaulay Township council if its members would help lobby to get the act passed, which they did. The act passed, allowing the town to expand further both in industry and territory.
It was a fine example of a working democracy, with the local council advancing interests that benefited the town and its people, the citizens being involved by appealing for annexation and by voting in a plebiscite, and the legislature holding a vote on its interest in the matter. Time and again, across Muskoka, this thoroughgoing democratic nature was on display, a direct product of the time of the district’s political formation and the kind of people who had come to build a new society for themselves.
Fortunate settlers, winners at land-grant roulette, discovered pockets of truly fine farmland in Muskoka’s intermittent valleys and flats. They prided themselves on good animal husbandry and crop practices. Their produce was shown for prizes in Muskoka’s many fall fairs. It compared well to the best in Ontario at other agricultural fairs in populous parts of the province.
Whether as the secretary, a director, or, by 1888, president of the Bracebridge Agricultural Society, and later as president of the Parry Sound and Muskoka Agricultural Society, James enthusiastically travelled, usually in the company of a fellow officer, to display Muskoka’s prize-winning produce. In successive years he appeared with bushels and baskets at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, the Central Canada Exhibition in Ottawa, and the fall fairs at Owen Sound and Barrie, to put Muskoka farmers’ best products on show. This became increasingly important, he knew, because Muskoka was getting a lot of bad press as a stony nightmare for luckless farmers.
A good harvest of Muskoka hay required storing it from rain, wind, and animals; these men used ladders and pitchforks and piled it high outdoors to dry. For this impressive 1890s photograph, women donned Sunday clothes while men posed with a yoked team and atop a stack. The barn’s well-selected logs were squared at the corners, though not all were debarked; a fine shingle roof, and boards nailed up until the supply ran out, helped keep the interior dry.
In one letter home to Hannah from Owen Sound, James described himself as “terrifically bound up in fall fair work.” When a reporter favourably looked over the exhibit of Muskoka produce, he offered a proposition: “Good exhibit. If you pay me, I’ll write it up in the paper.” James was indignant, and “did not pay.”
It was no different in Toronto. In 1887 the Bracebridge Agricultural Society sent its president, Peter Shannon, and secretary, James Boyer, to exhibit produce at Toronto’s Exhibition. Both men were keen to show that Muskoka could be an agricultural contender despite what the district’s critics said. James, in a September 12 letter home to Hannah from Toronto, described the CNE praise Muskoka’s produce received. People discovered “a splendid exhibit” of prized entries from farms in all sections of Muskoka. “It was difficult,” James wrote, “to make some of the visitors believe that grapes (Lindley or Rogers No. 9), some bunches of which weighed 1¼ pounds each, were grown in the open air of
Livestock, baked goods, and farm produce were on proud display each September at the Bracebridge Fall Fair, as were townsfolk. The spacious agricultural hall housed prize-winning entries from kitchen and field, and offered a balcony view of the race track. The buildings at left and right are on Victoria Street, the house at left, atop the rocky hill, is on Church Street. James Boyer, proud booster of Muskoka farming, was for decades an officer of the Agricultural Society, including serving as president.
Muskoka.” One of the samples of wheat grown on light, sandy soil in Macaulay sold at the close of the Exhibition to an American for one dollar, a notable amount in that time. “Our Duchess apples are not beaten by any that are exhibited prizes. Both the Globe and the Mail wanted to be paid to puff our exhibit,” he concluded, “but Shannon and myself refused to pay them one cent.” Muskoka’s valiant farmers faced hardened newspapermen as well as hard land.
Bracebridge Public School, as it appeared in the 1890s. The windowsills and other stonework were made by James Boyer’s brother-in-law, Harry Boyer. The school bell at the top came loose one day, while being rung to call children in, tumbling heavily to the ground, missing James and Hannah Boyer’s son George by two feet.
The district was, of course, a mixture of topography and soils, and not everyone had located on good land. Some with marginal lands but an entrepreneurial nature successfully shifted to sheep rearing and wool production, others harvested lucrative tanbark and maple syrup from their trees, while still others shifted their land use to the cash crop of Muskoka’s vacation economy. Just as Muskoka as a whole had a mixed economy, most of its homesteaders operated mixed farms.
For many would-be farmers, though, the dream that first brought them into the district, when Muskoka was being promoted to immigrants for farming, had been shattered by their inability to fulfill even the minimum conditions of the free-grant system for acquiring title to their land. In 1886, although 133 persons were newly located on lots in the district’s townships that year, there were also 99 cancellations of grants for non-fulfillment of settlement duties.
Although many poor farms were abandoned, some families stayed on in unfavourable locations and sank to subsistence-level living. In this way, the agricultural experience in Muskoka over the decades of free-grant settlement was gradually producing, in addition to its success stories, an economic underclass. These people were living on poor farms but were too poor to go anywhere else. Quite a few homesteaders had
Trains running south through Bracebridge from Ontario’s northern hinterland or the Canadian West were so long and heavy they required two locomotives. At right, Bird’s Woollen Mill increases production for Canada-wide and British Empire markets.
burned their bridges behind them, in the manner of James and Hannah, so could not “return home,” but they could not afford to relocate to anything better, either. Looking beyond the front verandahs of the Muskoka lakeside resorts and tennis courts where genteel city ladies in long dresses laughed while tapping balls, Canada’s 1891 census takers found two-thirds of Muskoka’s people dwelling in rural areas, many of them destitute.
By the close of the 1800s, Muskoka, and its towns, villages, small settlements, and random, scattered farms at the southern edge of the Canadian Shield, had each assumed distinctive characteristics, attributes which contributed, as social historian G.P. de T. Glazebrook expressed it, to “the great variety that was Ontario.” Bracebridge in the 1890s was, like most of the province’s villages and small towns, intact with its own commercial and social life.
This view of Bracebridge, taken about 1902, shows the centre of town as it was by the end of the 1890s. The short-lived Hess Furniture factory, five-storeys high, on the left, is adjacent to a sawmill and lumber yard; the river is spanned by a wooden bridge to Hunts Hill; the train station (centre right) is busy with freight traffic; across the street from it is the Albion Hotel, which stood until 2011.
Manufacturing and commerce sparked life in Bracebridge as the dawn of the twentieth century approached. Here, Henry Bird’s Woollen Mill dominates the foreground, and the central business section of town stretches up Manitoba Street beyond.
Workmen and workhorses in early 1890s Bracebridge pause at a busy mill and lumberyard in the centre of town, above the falls. Log booms in the river await their fast-moving