Watermelons to Wilson: Schooner Days DCCXXV (725)

by C. H. J. Snider

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PERHAPS enough or too much has been said already about the vanished port of Wilson, N.Y. which accidentally popped into the story of some newspaper cubs' adventures of 40 years ago, but so many friends of Schooner Days have asked about it, and added their quota, that we feel like having just one more before swearing off, which is an admittedly dangerous frame of mind.

Chief of Police Tom Mowat of Oswego, N.Y., stirred up the old yearn with the story of his own first and last trips into Wilson. Like the compiler of these chronicles, Chief Mowat, although not Toronto born, but a graduate of the Toronto waterfront, and like the compiler made the acquaintance of Wilson through that grand master of ceremonies, the late Capt. Pat McSherry of the little lumber-hooker Marcia A. Hall.

On this occasion the "Marshy Haul," as she was called, lay at the Queen's Wharf laden with cedar posts for Wilson, and the usually genial Patrick was ready to swallow tacks without chewing them, because he had a fair wind but couldn't use it. While he was away getting the clearance, his mate, an old retainer, had taken it into his head that it was a good time to mend the foresail and had stripped that essential sail from its mast and had it hauled out on the dock for general repairs, including re-roping, patching and banding. The crew, smelling a hard day's work, followed by sailing all night, had quit. The future chief constable of Oswego and a boy chum were watching the mate pottering with palm and needle when Paddy hove in sight with the clearance in his hand and fire in his eye. He took in the whole situation at a glance.

"Wanna trip?" he suddenly demanded of the two boys, "a trip to Wilson?"

DREAM COME TRUE

Of course they did. Hadn't they gone to Sunday school religiously for three months so as to qualify for an excursion, the annual Sunday school picnic at Wilson?—and here it was being handed to them on a platter, without even being asked for a golden text. Of course they'd go. They helped the old mate and the captain roll the detached foresail up as it was and drag it back on board and stretch it along the foreboom and foregaff.

"How about grub?" demanded Capt. McSherry, as he sweated on the clew earing.

"Provision box chuck full," grunted the mate from the tack shackle at the opposite end. Between them, with the boys' help, they got the footstops knotted and the head hauled out to the peak and secured with robands to the gaff, and slowly seized the luff to the greasy masthoops that encircled the blackened foremast, all four pulling on the halliards every time they raised her another hoop.

The sail had to be slab-reefed to let the foreboom clear the deckload of posts, and the same had to be done for the mainsail, but before 6 o'clock the old Marshy was rounding Gibraltar Point and on her way to the promised land, blowing light as a thistledown before the summer nor'wester.

DINNER IS SERVED IN THE DINING CAR

"Now see about supper," said Capt. McSherry from the wheel-box, to the puffing mate, "the boys'll give you a hand."

"Come and git it!" said the mate at once, lifting the lid of the provision chest, nested among the cedar posts of the deckload.

"Yum! Yum! Yum!" yelled the boys.

"Suffering snakes of St. Patrick!" yelled Capt. McSherry. "Do you call them groceries?"

The provision box was crammed to the lid with great green footballs; watermelons looted from a box car on a siding at the foot of Bathurst street.

"They're cheap and fillin'," said the mate defensively, "and besides, the box car was a whole lot nearer'n the grocery store."

So they all ate watermelon from ear to ear for supper and nothing else, for there wasn't anything else. But Providence looks after kids and sailors, especially if they're Irish and have saints' names, like Patrick McSherry. The northwest air held steady and not too strong all evening and by midnight the gallant "Marshy Haul" had completed the 40-mile voyage to Wilson and was nuzzling the pier in the lee of the little red-capped lighthouse. They had bread and butter and eggs for breakfast, and coffee with milk and sugar in it, for Niagara County was, and still is, a land of plenty.

Chief-to-be Mowat got home none the worse for his trip, and made many more excursions to Wilson. Some with the Sunday school, and one with a dredge, when he went tugging with Hunky Scott out of Oswego, and Wilson had to be dredged out, perhaps for the last time, in 1900. At that time the harbor had fallen into neglect and was usable only by fishboats, but the dredge's ministrations gave it a lease of life for another decade.

There was one particularly hectic picnic with the foundrymen and rivetters of the Doty engine works at the foot of Bathurst street, when half the brawny steel workers got lost on a voyage of discovery up to Wilson village, which is a mile and a half inland, and the old Argyle, which had been the Empress, and before that the Empress of India, left them behind, and they had to hoof it to Youngstown and come home by the Niagara boat. But like all the recollections of Wilson, this, too, has taken on the golden and rainbow tints of Eunoia, that land of happy memories which rises above the dark forgetful waters of Lethe.

There is certainly not much to see of Wilson Harbor now. The creek mouth is still there, of course, and one big fishboat and a small launch were chugging around in it when we were there last year. But it was just a hole in the bank, picturesque and ideal for canoes and summer cottages, but a port—no. You can look with a telescope and a microscope and fail to find a trace of the red-capped lighthouse and entrance piers which brought in the Sunday school scholars or the boilermakers or the shingleshovers and lumber hookers earlier in this century; or which, earlier, sent out American schooners swimming scupper-deep with Niagara County apples and grain. Gone, gone, all gone.

Looking through the tangle of drowned or bare-rooted trees on the old shore line, where the piers once ran, one can see the odd stub which may be the remains of vanished cribs and piling, or may only be stranded stumps. A little to the east of the old harbor entrance a fat black pier of solid concrete juts from what looks to be the lake terminous of an old shore road. It is not a boat pier or harbor work, just a good groyne to split the assaults of the waves marching in endlessly from Canada.

Here the south shore of the lake has suffered terribly from the erosion of three seasons of north wind and high water. Apple trees, once blushing pink and red amid their milky whiteness hundreds of yards inland from the billows' strife, now perilously overhang the crumbling cliff, their roots bared to the blast. Giant masses of stone have been dropped over the bank to save it, and much concreting has been done with the same object, but the work is too great for individual efforts. There is hope of the U.S. government restoring Wilson Harbor as a coast conservation measure. Amen and Godspeed! And may our remaining little Canadian lake ports, like Bronte, Oakville, Port Credit, Frenchman's Bay, Darlington and Newcastle, be saved or restored from a fate similar to Wilson's present state.

TAIL OF A TOWLINE

Chief Mowat chuckles as he recalls putting one over on that wideawake mariner Capt. Johnny Williams, who is still able to chuckle with him. Capt. Williams was then sailing the big three-master Sir C. T, Van Straubenzee, and the coming chief was with Hunky Scott in the Oswego tug John Navagh. Capt. Williams always wanted a good long pluck out of the harbor, for the Oswego approaches were then a great peril for sailing vessels and Hunky was willing to oblige. On this occasion, towing out one dark night, the Straubenzee's raffee and gafftop-sails caught the freshened breeze sooner than Capt. Williams mad expected, and the Straubenzee, gathering way rapidly with 700 tons of coal under her hatches, began to run away with the little tug. She blew to cast off the towline, but the way the strain was now coming on the towing-bitts the line could not be started.

"Give it the axe!" yelled the tug captain as his little vessel, laboring under a full head of steam, heeled over dangerously to the drag of the ramping schooner.

Young Tom Mowat knew the towing law which made the tug liable for property damage to the tow, and at the risk of capsizing the tug he took time to avoid the telltale marks of an axe cut on the big and valuable line. Picking up a handsaw he rasped it, strand by strand until it stretched out and parted finally with a whisk of stringy manila like a horse's tail. The tug righted, with her scuppers sobbing lake water, and the Straubenzee vanished into the dark.

Next time she came to Oswego Capt. Williams seemed to be in the best of humor, and Tom ventured to comment: "Darn poor gear you're getting from the Canada chandlers, captain. That towline of yours parted when you were towing out, last time."

"I thought it was a little short when we pulled it in," said Capt. Williams mildly, but I can't believe it parted. It's still the best line in the vessel, and almost new."

He was so reasonable about it, and paid his towbills so promptly, that at the end of the season the tug captain broke down and confessed that the line had indeed been cut to save the tug, and gave him a rebate of $8 on his bill, to make up for shortening his dog's tail.

WILSON HARBOR ENTRANCE, NOW — Up to 1910 There Were Two Good Piers, a Lighthouse and Storehouses

A dozen schooners were built in Wilson, N.Y., and it was a port for Toronto Sunday school picnics in the days of such excursion steamers as the old Argyle, Greyhound, A. J. Wyman, White Star