Chronicles of Gone Port: This was Grafton Harbour: Schooner Days DCIV (604)

by C. H. J. Snider

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WHAT is this? An earthwork, a battery bastion of the war of 1812? An Indian burial mound, or long barrow, somehow split fore-and-aft? A railway cutting where there never was a railway?

"A good place," said Murray Smith, ace reporter from Cobourg, "to find the body of old So-and-So who disappeared last winter."

"A good place," thought Schooner Days, "to look for Goneport," which is a generic name for the so-many vanished ports and havens and little burgs that have grown only to wither along the thousand-mile bluewater highway of the Great Lakes.

The hummock does not seem to belong to the Northumberland County landscape. It would be an unusual feature anywhere — a knife-edged hump of clay on top of the flat shingle and gravel of the lake beach.

It is perhaps a hundred yards long, but so narrow there is barely room for the crowded cedars which hold it together to get their toes in. It may be twenty feet high. It is certainly little wider. The front or lake face of it is shorn off as by a blade. The back of it drops steeply down to a large slough, which in this year of high water is a little lake bristling with green rushes and coral tinted weeds.

Yes, we are still at the peak of a highwater cycle. But Lake Ontario is going down. Through the diagonal cut in the gravel bar just east of this curious cedar crest the water of the slough is pouring out in cheerful gurgling rapids, to find the level of the lake again, as the lake ever seeks the level of the salt sea.

To the west Chub Point's shaly fist pokes towards the United States. Beyond it one sees the great white car ferry, Ontario No. 1 or Ontario No. 2, bulky as a battleship, ploughing into Cobourg from Rochester; startlingly plain, because so big, though eight miles distant. To the east sweeps the sickle of McGlennon's Cove, marked by shingle and gravel, towards long-vanished Colborne Wharf and long disused Lakeport Pier.

Behind the ridge two wheel tracks in the shingle mark what has been a beach road. They disappear in the high water of the slough, but ordinarily they could be followed all the way along the beach to Colborne and Cat Hollow.

Within the memory of living men——among them Mr. Joseph White, now eighty, still farming in Haldimand township like his father and grandfather before him—this surviving furrow of glacial clay was once a lakefront farm, large enough to support a family. Perhaps before it was this tongue of land it was an island. Island or headland, Lake Ontario has chewed and worried at it until it has been cropped short down to its very roots. The glacial boulders once bedded in its fertile soil may be traced for a quarter of a mile out in the clear water, and perhaps one would find the roots of old apple trees or the bricks of a chimney or a dismantled grindstone. Chub Point would go in the same way, but its clay topsoil is on a limestone ledge above high water mark, and the limestone breaks the lake's teeth.

The lovely spire of St. Mary's Church in Grafton village, a couple of miles inland, points to a cloudless sky. The countryside is very quiet in this August sunshine. Quiet, but not abandoned. A few farmhouses converted to summer homes sprinkle the lake margin sparsely, but the most noticeable crop is summer fallow.

The apple trees surviving are woody and windtossed. Cultivation seems to have retreated from the gnawing lake towards the streaming highway—No. 2. the old Dundas road across the province to Kingston and below. Agriculture continues but the lake has swallowed more than just this one tongue of land. A whole community has vanished or been transformed.

Here, last century, were mills and wharves, warehouses, industries, homes and happiness. One hundred years ago this was Grafton Harbor. A diligent search of the shoreline last week revealed only three relics of this now unknown port:

One splintered fragment of wharf timber.

One single-sheave block of ancient pattern, used in hauling out boats.

The old Customs House.

The weathered clapboard building, and the vanished wharf in front of it which once thrust out into water 10 feet deep, did a prosperous business long ago, lading and discharging a hundred sailing vessels and steamers, feeding and enriching a thousand homes in high-rising Northumberland. The names of many of the schooners patronizing this "gone port" have been lost, but Schooner Days discovered dozens of them on the old harbor books, along with records of families, firms and individuals who built up Ontario before the name meant a province as well as a lake. When our part of the Dominion-to-be was Upper Canada, and, apart from Canada Bas, all the rest was a vague Northwest from which came buffalo robes, and an equally vague place called Halifax which had a "currency" and to which the more ribald consigned those with whom they disagreed.

Schooner Days will endeavor to tell some of the stories of the old customs house and its customers next week.

St. Mary's Church, Grafton Village. below No. 2 Highway, the old Kingston Road.

All that is left of a lake farm of a hundred years ago-a claybank held together by a clump of cedars. Hey and elsewhere erosion has been halted by the good limestone foundation of Northumberland county.

One fragment of wharf timber and the ancient lilac planted by the first harbormaster, are all that remains of Grafton Harbour which handled a million dollar commerce last century. A lake farm which once extended from the distant point as far as the extreme right of the picture has also disappeared.

Farmer Joseph White's homestead of three generations still stands, sturdy and smart and provides comfort for the eighty-year-old occupant and his friends the field birds and martins.