Gone Port Chronicles--Old Customs House--Its 100-Year Story: Schooner Days DCV (605)

by C. H. J. Snider

_______

THERE it stands on the lake bank, eight miles east of Cobourg, now a "summer cottage," once a little farmhouse, as shown by ancient apple trees around it and, in front of it, the ancient lilacs growing right down to the shingly beach.

This is, or was, the Custom House of Grafton Harbor.

Fifty miles of clear blue Ontario water stretch from the worn doorstep across to New York State and the Genesee. Behind it, lush green waves of foliage chase yellowing fields of ripening grain up the rising ridges of Northumberland to the heights far above, where fossil shellfish mark the prehistoric beach of that fabulous body of water, known to geologists only, Lake Iroquois.

Grey and brown as a barn sparrow, the old house is a precious bit of Victorian Ontario, as typical as maple syrup, butternuts, overalls and top boots with red or blue leather facings and copper toes for gentlemen.

"Grafton harbor was built forty-two years ago," said Belden's Atlas in 1878. The year of its founding would be 1836, "The original incorporators were Henry Ruttan, Benjamin Ewing, R. Hare, E. Barnum, John Arkland and John Grover. The company had fallen away in 1857, when Mr, Chas. E. Ewing became possessed of the stock. He is now the sole proprietor, Josiah Gillard the wharfinger being his lessee. There are storehouses and plaster mills. About 100,000 bushels of grain per annum are exported."

The first harbor master and customs officer we do not know; possibly Josiah Gillard, for Gillard and Gillespie leased and operated the first wharf, and the little old house is still in the family. But Jock Munro, frae bonny Scotland, soon succeeded to the dignity, and his neat hand o' write, in ink now brown, appears very early in the harbor books, preserved by his grandchildren or great-grandchildren, Mrs. Jenks and Mrs. Cunningham. The first entry, May 18th, 1843, is as legible as if written yesterday. It concerns storage charges on 103 barrels of flour at one pence ha'penny, amounting to twelve shillings tenpence ha'penny, which John Taylor was shipping from his steam mill, east of the pier.

You'd never think it, but through this twenty-by-thirty house—still owned by the Gillard family of Cobourg, and now summer-used by Mr. Reynolds and his brother-in-law from the Danforth in Toronto—passed goods worth hundreds of thousands of pounds and millions of the new Canadian dollars. They passed to and from the grandparents and great-grandparents of the Northumberland lads who are fighting in Sicily or waiting in England, and the Northumberland lasses who are Wrens and Cats and Waifs in the present battle for world freedom.

If the goods did not go in one door and out of the other, they did go through the harbor master's books, kept in this little frame house. And they did feed and clothe a thriving countryside for three generations, and provide the sinews of peace and war which built the railways and highways and cities and homes and factories and schools of the Ontario of last century. This little bit of sylvan shore, now so secluded and serene, was for fifty or sixty years a bustling shipping port, with steamers calling daily, sailing vessels coming and going eight months in the year, rafts forming and getting wrecked and salvaged, whiskey, flour, grain, lumber, groceries, machinery, plaster stone, arriving and departing.

When barley was the bearded king of the county as much as 60,000 bushels would cram the Gillard and Gillespies' twin warehouses on the 200-foot wharf with 10 feet of water alongside, which meant Grafton Harbor. So great was the strain on the storehouses that long iron bolts had to be run through the sides and screwed tight to keep the walls from bulging and splitting. Sometimes teams would be lined up all the way back to the Kingston road, waiting to deliver their barley to the warehouse, or directly into the holds of schooners. Sometimes the grain waggons creaked back home, fresh laden with gypsum rock or plaster stone brought in by the schooners that came for the grain or lumber or apples. The gypsum was ground up and ploughed in as fertilizer.

John Taylor's steam mill panted on the shores of the slough behind the eroded farm point. John Taylor is the first name in the first harbor book begun in 1843. His mill shipped flour and oatmeal and pot barley to the United States and Europe from the little wharf in front of the customs house. Benjamin Clark's name comes next, shipping flour and fish, then W. H. Kiltson and Ephraim Doolittle, and E. Perry, shipping out lumber.

Farther up the creek a distillery produced whisky so smooth you could skate on it (or thought you could) all night, and so genially potent that if you fell down in the process you got up next morning with the smile of a babe and a head as clear as an income tax return. Form T-eye, T-he, T-her, or what haven't you, Mr. Illsley, or Mr. Issley —well, you know whom is meant, or is it who? Or what?

Whisky was a shilling a pailful at first, later 5 cents a glass, and look at it now. If you can. Barley in the good old barley times only brought the farmer 70 cents a bushel. A thousand bushels of barley was a big crop—$700, and that was a fortune to the pioneers, whose first grain sold for 25 cents a bushel, and would not be accepted in trade for sugar or salt or such imports as demanded "cash money."

Grafton village, two miles inland, was and is north of this old harbor. Like Cobourg, Grafton was famous for its distilleries. There was something in the water, perhaps the limestone base which crops out like stairsteps at the lake shore edge.

Perhaps it was the limestone bottom which made Northumberland county barley in such great demand for the Oswego breweries. Ontario was fairly mined for barley until the McKinley tariff shut it out of the United States in 1891.

"A blessing in disguise," said Joseph White philosophically. He has looked on the lake from Grafton Harbor barley fields since 1863, his own, his father's or his grandfather's. "It taught us farmers not to put all our eggs in one basket, but to grow apples and pigs and turkeys and wheat and oats as well."

Mills, mills, mills, water power or steam, lumber, grist, carding, planing, abounded in Northumberland then. Their castings, cogwheels and grinding stones are frequent import items on the old Customs House books. They came by steamer and schooner from Kingston or Rochester.

The mill products went out from the stubby wharf in front of the customs house, one of dozens which have vanished from the shores of Lake Ontario.

Out of vanished Grafton Harbor in Victoria's days went exports of timber, hop-poles, fence posts, pulpwood, lumber, shingles and shingle bolts, stave bolts and bolts of elm and basswood for baskets. The bolt is the short standard length into which the log is sawn to yield the required material. From the port also went cordwood in the holds and on the decks of schooners, stoking the hall burners and cookstoves of thousands of city homes; and in the fireboxes of paddle-wheel steamers and propellers, which, like the locomotives up to the 1870's, raised steam by wood exclusively.

Two steamers called as regularly as clockwork up to 1876 and later, the Corinthian and the Rochester, docking for passengers, freight and mails, one on each side of the little grain pier promptly at 8 o'clock every morning. Another regular caller, though less frequently, was the steamer Norseman, which had on her paddle-boxes or arches—it is forgotten which—the heroic motto: "Let us Live and Fight and Die like Norsemen." She later became the North King and kept on calling.

Earlier, beginning a hundred years ago, 1843, steamers and propellers calling at Grafton Harbor were the propeller Western, which freighted away thousands of barrels of flour from Cramahe and Haldimand townships for W. H. Kittson; the steamers Union and Princess Royal, which Benjamin Clark patronized; the Princess and the Sovereign, in which E. Perry shipped out lumber and flour, and John Montgomery Campbell, the Grafton distiller, sent away hogsheads, casks and barrels of whisky, and high wines, and cattle, on the hoof or in carcasses.

There were also lake tugs, like the Georgiana, or the big W. T. Robb, Fenian Raid veteran, which came for the rafts of timber, moored to Grafton Harbor pier, or boomed in McGlennon's Cove to the east, or in the slough behind the vanished lakefront farm. The rafts were formed from logs or timbers cut in the Haldimand Township and brought down the narrow road underslung on great timber drays with wheels six or seven feet in diameter. Timber crews from Quebec used to form these logs into rafts wherever there was a place to moor them on the shore, and the tugs would pick them up and marshal them in to a great serpent which would crawl down Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River to the timber coves at Quebec. The raft crews lived on board in shanties they built, and they used to set sails when the wind was fair to help the laboring tug. The rafts towed very slowly, sometimes a mile an hour.

Grafton Harbor's greatest wreck episode was not when the steamer Corinthian got ashore or a schooner was lost, but when a great raft, worth thousands of dollars on the beach, and hundreds of thousands by the time it would get to England in the timber ships, would get adrift from its booms or its tug and break up and be scattered for miles along the shore. The softwood timber would float and wash up and could be salvaged by shore farmers, but the oak sticks might waterlog and sink. Salvaging timber was sometimes more profitable than growing barley, and sometimes a thankless task.

Dr. Baker was one of the first importers recorded. "Dr. Baker, 29 brooms, 1 box pipes," is an entry in the book's second year, 1844. Cleanly man, if he did smoke, he evidently believed on keeping his pipes clear of nicotine, no matter how many broom straws he used.

The vessels which carried away the fish and flour, lumber, whisky, apples and grain and livestock brought in machinery, sugar, salt, tea, household furniture and all the stock of the general stores at the crossroads. Very little coal, for the countryside was not coal-burning in schooner days. We shall tell about those Grafton Harbor customers next week.

SHIP-RIGGED CORVETTE

Sir,—Last fall, you featured in "Schooner Days" an article on the brig, "Sylph." As one of the illustrations for the text, you gave the lines of a ship-rigged corvette of thirty guns. I am anxious to make up a model from these plans, but cannot find any contemporary rigging detail, save a very badly engraved plate in Chambers' "Cyclopedia" of 1752.

After seeing your model in the Royal Ontario Museum, I wondered if you might have any data regarding the hull construction, rigging, framing, etc., that would be useful in constructing an accurate model of a ship c. 1799.

I would appreciate very much any information you could give me.

165 Ronan avenue.

Have you tried the Public Reference Library, John? There are many well-illustrated books on the history of ships and on model making which should give you what you require.—Compiler Schooner Days.

"Grey and brown-as a barn sparrow, this Customs House of old Grafton Harbor carried a million dollar commerce."