Junior League of the Gay Nineties: Schooner Days CCXIX (619)

by C. H. J. Snider

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UP to and past the turn of the century there existed in schooner-dom around Toronto a sort of junior league of vessels of about 100 tons burden, too small to profit much by continuing to carry grain, coal or lumber, in competition with the senior league of "Old Canallers," which ran up to 800 tons.

There was the saucy Highland Beauty, often black with a red petticoat, sometimes white and green, sailed by Capt. Jas. Quinn and later and longer by Capt. Tommy Williams. And the Snow Bird, about the same dimensions but bluff and of greater carrying capacity. She was owned by Capt. Andrew Beard and sailed in turn by him and his son, Young Andy, later lost with the Mary. There was also the Marcia A. Hall, brought from the west by Capt. Maurice Fitzgerald of Oakville, and the Jessie McDonald, which divided with her honors as leaking champion of fresh water. And the Newsboy, a low hulled little vessel in 1890. flat and fast, but dragging her transom when loaded. She was enlarged in 1899, and the fault was remedied. And there was the Flora from Picton, black topped and green bottomed, rebuilt with straight stem and schooner stern from the scow Flying Scud. And the half-scow P. E. Young from Port Dover, with spoon bow, square stern and high poop-cabin, and the Bronte-model Madeline from Frenchman's Bay.

All were capable of making long voyages, and often did so, all over the lake for cargoes, and some of them seemed too good for the stone, sand and gravel trade, known as stonehooking, to which they finally turned. This was the preserve of little fellows of 20 tons and up, some of them ex-yachts, many scows that carried most of their cargo on deck, and a few of them larger schooners too feeble to be trusted with full loads of more valuable freight.

The stonehookers, to continue to talk basic baseball, were the sand lotters or bush leaguers. They formed a taterdemalion company with sails which looked like last winter's overcoat after a hard summer with the moths, or which had been patched so much that their original texture had disappeared. The hulls of these relics were often held together with strips of tin tacked over the leaky seams to keep the oakum in and water out, and the only paint some of them knew was what was put on with a tarbrush.

In shining contrast were those half-dozen hundred-tonners hailing from Toronto, which did not disdain to compete with the ragamuffins for the stone trade when they could not get the odd remaining freight of lumber, grain or coal for some little out-of-the-way port, or a picric party to take away for a fortnight cruise. These little beauties were not in the hands of big-vessel men who had come down on their luck. Invariably they were owned and worked by men whose boyhood had been spent in the simplicities and hardships of stonehooking. We believed in such a thing as progress in Queen Victoria's days, and these were good advertisements of it.

Noticeable for smartness even among the junior leaguers in 1900 were the three or four vessels which then formed the Goldring fleet. This was not a corporation unit. It was a monument to individual enterprise and hard work, and its history winds through a century, via Toronto, Mimico, Etobicoke, Toronto again, and ultimately Port Whitby. William Goldring, Sr., came to Toronto from Sussex in 1823 when he was a lad of 14. He learned shoemaking and liked shoemaking all his days, but he became a vessel owner. He had a wharf in Toronto at the foot of Frederick street—Currie's wharf it was called—with warehousing and storage space on it, and thither the Goldring fleet plied their trade. He had also a 10-roomed house at 75 Duke street, which is now a factory. After his death, about 1890, his sons, Edward, Richard, Frank and Charles, concentrated on Port Whitby with their vessels. An elder son, John, who had settled in Toronto a long time, continued to use this port for his schooner, named Helen. He had a home here and a farm near Bowmanville.

The "Goldring fleet" at one time numbered five vessels, the Mary Ann, a scow schooner built in Port Credit, the Helen, the H. M. Ballou, the Northwest and the Maple Leaf, which we started to tell about last month. That was the greatest number in the fleet at once, but several other vessels were in and out of it.

For a long time it was a one-ship fleet, starting with an American schooner named the Ploughboy, which had been seized and sold as a smuggler in Toronto in 1836. She was through with all that before the first Goldring had anything to do with her.

Later, there was the scow Betsey, a floating home for a family of eight, and the Jenny Lind with a square topsail as typical of her time as Jenny Lind's own crinoline. Then John, the eldest brother, struck out on his own, and came back from Lake Erie in 1872 with the two-masted 60-foot scow John Pugsley, which he rebuilt as a schooner, and renamed the Helen. William Goldring, the father, exchanged the old Jenny Lind for the new Mary E. Ferguson, and young Dick, seventeen, but already twelve years a sailor, walked her deck as captain.

Brother Ted, a few years Dick's senior, had in turn the Belle of Dunbarton and the Marcia A. Hall and the H. M. Ballou, and possibly the Mary Ann or the Parthenon, whose place in the Goldring cycle is unclear. By the end of last century, the Parthenon had been bought by the McDonald family, well known on the west shore of Prince Edward county, and rebuilt, until, according to the late Amos McDonald, county warden, "there was nothing left of the original but her hickory jibboom." She was renamed the Robert McDonald, but she still looked very much like the smart Maple Leaf or the H. M. Ballou or Northwest, in the Goldring fleet of the gay '90s.

John Goldring - steered a course pretty much by himself, from boyhood on. He often sailed the Helen alone. He put a raffee on her forward, and a gasoline engine aft, for easier handling. He was sailing the Helen single-handed—although he was then over seventy, and she was a handful for three—when he lost her between the rocks on Bluff Point at Port Oshawa in 1922, fifty years after he brought her down from Lake Erie.

The Northwest, built in Bronte in 1882, according to the register, was sailed for many years by Ted Goldring and his brother Frank. She was about the same size as the Maple Leaf, 75 feet on deck, 20 feet beam, 6 feet depth, according to the book, but she registered 57 tons to the Maple Leaf's 59. She was straighter in the stem, less of a clipper, but sailed well.

There was always great rivalry among the Highland Beauty, H. M. Ballou, Northwest, Maple Leaf, Parthenon, Newsboy, Madeline and Rapid City, no matter who owned or sailed them, for they were all built for speed, most by the Dorland brothers in Bronte or James Andrew in Oakville. The Highland Beauty was an ex-steam yacht, and the Ballou, an American bottom, built at Oak Orchard.

The Rapid City, a Dorland number, named for a little place in Manitoba to make her go fast, was sailed at this time by Charlie Goldring, the youngest of the family. The Helen was not a clipper like these, but a good carrier, and as said, usually ploughed a line furrow. She got a freight of grain out of Whitby as late as 1893, and barley from Burlington, and occasionally apples, or the odd jag of coal, but usually her cargoes were stone or gravel.

The North West, last heard of in Chicago as a camp cruiser, is the sole survivor of the junior league, and is believed to be positively the last of the lake schooners which were once a thousand strong.

The Maple Leaf was wrecked in the St. Lawrence in 1926. The Helen went out in '22. The Newsboy was by that time a hulk, and was broken up in Ashbridge's Bay, where she had been a boathouse.

The Rapid City, with a new gasoline engine, and new ownership, went down off the Highlands in 1917. The Madeline had been sunk in Port Credit by this time. The Ballou was burned at Belleville, about 1907. The Snow Bird sank in the ice in Toronto Bay in 1904, and is there yet. The Highland Beauty, sold to the eastward burst with a cargo of swelling peas when she hit the breakwater at Cape Vincent, about 1903. The Robert McDonald was burned. The P. E. Young was blown up at the Exhibition in 1898. The Jessie McDonald mistook the light at Whitby and left her bones beside the breakwater in 1893, and about the same time the Marcia A. Hall sank on the south shore or crawled into the boneyard at Port Dalhousie to die. The Mary Ann, not a junior leaguer but an out and out scow, was dismantled at Whitby, and the Flora was wrecked at Oakville in 1894. That's how the league crumbled.

LAST SURVIVOR

NORTH WEST after she was rebuilt at Midland and became SHEBESHEKONG, a cruise ship.

NEWSBOY about 1910, after enlargement

WILLIAM GOLDRING, Sussex lad who became a shipowner and wharfinger in Toronto sixty years ago. He was founder of a respected family in Ontario, and grandfather of Dr. C. C. Goldring, Superintendent of Education and Chief Inspector of Public Schools in Toronto. The picture is from an interesting oilpainting in the possession of his son, Capt. Richard Goldring, Port Whitby.

H. M. BALLOU (left) and SNOWBIRD In 1904. when they were both showing their years. Snowbird's rig had then dropped to half-pint proportions.