Moths Fly Where Cutters Ploughed: Schooner Days DCLXII (662)

by C. H. J. Snider

Continuing the Exploration of FRENCHMAN'S BAY Then and Now

As said last week the harbor of Frenchman's Bay may have been formed and named long after those first Frenchmen came near the spot, in the 17th century. Duffin's Creek mouth, a mile east, is marked and named in an old American map of 1813 based upon Governor Simcoe's surveys, but neither the enclosure nor the name of Frenchman's Bay appears. The bar from Duffin's Creek, which now encloses the Bay, may not have been in existence when the survey was made. When it stretched across to the high shore near Petticoat Creek, to the west of the present harbor, Frenchman's Bay became a landlocked pond. The water from the other creek at Dunbarton, to the north trickled through the sandbar, but apparently there was no navigable entrance from the lake until two men with a crude elevator worked by horsepower scooped away a channel and cribbed it to keep it from filling up again. This was in 1843.

Frenchman's Bay was one of many "private harbors" provided by nature, developed by personal pioneer enterprise, and treated like orphans by politicians. Even the coal oil for the green light had to be paid for by "harbor dues" wrung with difficulty from stonehookers who entered and cleared between two days. Coming in from the lake you had to steer north till you were through the piers and then break off sharply to avoid the sandspit and make your way eastward to the timber crib in the middle of the harbor, and so over to the big red elevator, coal sheds and ice houses on the east side of the bay which provided the wharfage of the port from the 1870's onward.

It was at the Bay head, where the old Grand Trunk culvert of stone still spans the feeding stream, that the first wharf and warehouses were built, below the village of Dunbarton, on the Kingston, highway. The Bay was fringed with settlements. The town of Pickering, a mile and a half north of the lake, almost fastened its name on it as Pickering Harbor, but it did not stick. Fairport, the hamlet on the east side of the Bay, where the old elevator stood, never got its name on a ship's stern, as far as known. The Fairport from which many American schooners hailed is in Ohio. The Belle, built in the mouth of Duffins Creek, a mile east of Frenchman's Bay, was registered as the Belle of Dunbarton.

The Dunbarton warehouse was removed in 1853, according to Rev. W. H. Wood's "Past Years in Pickering," and the wharf there fell into decay. You can still find its piling in the marsh. Another wharf and warehouse appear to have been built "directly across the entrance from where the lighthouse stood." This would place it either on the west pier or on the tongue of sand in the bay, which always made the harbor difficult of access. "A plank road along the beach from the wharf (apparently the second wharf and warehouse 'directly across the entrance') led to the lower end of the sideroad just east of the village of Dunbarton," says Mr. Wood. "Later the business of the bay found a third location on the eastern shore."

It found a fourth location, though the "business" was by this time almost gone. The old red elevator and ice houses were torn down so long ago that few in their thirties can remember them. Another elevator or storehouse for sand or gravel and crushed stone was built on the east pier itself and some traffic in these commodities resulted for a short time twenty years ago, while a construction company used or marketed the gravel of the beach.

But all this has vanished. The piers themselves have fallen. Their timbers have been washed away. The stones that filled the cribs and tempted stonehookermen to steal them and sell them over again have fallen into the channel or remain like half-tide rocks, washed over every time it blows. The channel has filled up until even with this season's fairly high water you are lucky to get in without scraping if you draw more than four feet.

Launches pass in and out and the skimming dishes of the lively Frenchman's Bay Yacht Club—ideal craft for their purpose—flutter back and forth like butterflies. Frenchman's Bay boys will be the first to hail you if you are a stranger and they see you standing in—"How much d'ye draw? If you need more than five feet we're sorry, but——."

Frenchman's Bay is an ideal playground for small yachts of the centreboard type, as its present abundance of moths, sunrays, nationals, dinghies, catboats and (prospective) kittens, testifies. In olden times, when there was ten feet of water in the channel or better, large deep draught keel yachts used it. The Churchill brothers' Medora, still afloat, was probably the last cutter to enter the port, but one recalls Commodore A. A. Macdonald cruising there when he had Vivia I., the deep 40-foot cutter designed by G. L. Watson for Geo. H. Gooderham. Another larger cutter, W. G. Gooderham's Aileen, tried to take Frenchman's Bay in a storm and bumped hard on the bottom in the heave of the seas running into the channel. She drew over 10 feet. Capt. David Reynolds, one of her pros, often told afterwards of the hard time they had heaving up the lead pigs of her inside ballast to lighten her enough to drag her through the piers to safety, and how they had to lighter her ballast out to her again before they could sail her home when the gale died down.