Smoke Over Jordan: Schooner Days DCCLXXX (780)

by C. H. J. Snider

Reverting to the vanished Canadian port on the south shore of Lake Ontario, here is something of its steamer trade.

TO BEGIN at the ending, the last clearance from forgotten Jordan Harbor on Lake Ontario was in 1912 when the final cargo of fruit was picked up by some small steamer, possibly the City of Owen Sound.

Fifty or sixty years ago, when Vineland was beginning to specialize in fruit farming, a curious trade progressed between Toronto and the big pond there on the south shore of the lake.

In the Queen city horse cars and livery hacks were the only means of public transportation. Thousands of horses were on the streets of Toronto daily. Cleaning the street car stables was an Augean task, for twelve to fifteen hundred nags lived there. S. W. Marchment and Co. held contracts for removing street sweepings and unwanted material from the car stables, livery stables, cattle byres and ten thousand “outside plumbing" edifices which then decorated the rear portions of otherwise highly desirable residential properties. The surplus of their takings, after supplying the adjoining farms of York County and the market gardens and goosepastures of Parkdale, Riverdale, Brockton, Seaton Village and The Annex, went across the lake to enrich the great garden of the Niagara district surrounding Jordan Pond.

SAFE CARGOES

For this purpose they used steam: and sail. Sometimes a fragrant cargo would be shipped per the square-ended schooner scow Mary Ann, then owned by Wm. Goldring. As late as 1904 the old clipper-bowed schooner Eliza White, once a lake queen, was carrying fertilizer to Aldershot for Burlington Bay farms. All the hookers got the occasional jag of manure or processed fertilizer for Jordan. Applied externally it was an excellent poultice for their own leaky seams, for the inward pressure of the water sealed the crevices with particles that became firmly bedded. The process is described in John Hamilton Moore’s instructions for young naval officers in the 18th century, on how to stop a secret leak with a thrummed sail.

THE MAYBIRD

The Marchment firm also owned or chartered steam barges for their praiseworthy purpose. First there was the Honeydew or some such name, a scow built for the trade, with a boiler on deck. She was followed by the Maybird, a shoal scow which could be beached and loaded or unloaded without reference to wharfage. She had en engine and funnel at the stern and a sort of bunkhouse and steering box forward, with a folding mast which spread a very dirty tattered sail. In the 1890s she was to be seen up the Don river, close to the Gerrard street bridge loading coal oil and other supplies for Jordan.

The Maybird’s folding mast enabled her to negotiate the Don bridges. Possibly her funnel folded down too. Her sail was of material assistance to her two horsepower engine, but sometimes it took her far off her course. The crew consisted of the captain, a fireman-engineer, and a deckhand or two whose chief duties were with fork and shovel. When they became weary they would go to sleep, leaving the sail to do the steering. Their normal course was to creep around the north shore till they came to Jordan, but one morning the Maybirds woke up to find the sun shining on the east side of the lighthouse at Niagara, and the Maybird skimming the Niagara Bar, twenty miles out of the Toronto-Jordan course.

FATE OF AN OLD BRIG

The other steamer in this salubrious trade was the Gordon Jerry, eventually burned in Toronto Bay. She was a big V-bowed scow, once the sailing vessel Grace Amelia, brigantine rigged, on Lake Huron, but converted to steam at the foot of West Market street, Toronto, in the winter 1891-2. For a while she retained her lower masts, and the sails on them, and was painted copiously in white with green ribbons and red bottom, with her name large in umbra type in two colors on either bow. But her trade — stone and fertilizer—soon took the shine, and sails, off her. The greatest excitement in her career was when she got a cargo for Tonawanda or French Creek or some place on the Niagara River, and after laboriously getting nigh unto her destination could not stop because the current was too strong for her half-lung engine. She had to be run ashore to save her from going over the Falls.

OTHER JORDAN STEAMERS

This happy team fertilized most of the farms in the Jordan district in the horse-car age, and brought back return cargoes of dried apples or fresh peaches or gravel or cribstone or ice, it was all one in that halcyon time of the Naughty Nineties.

They were not the only steamers plying to Jordan, for the old Louth Harbor was re-organized in 1899 by the Jordan Harbor Co. and became a port of call for the Dominion Express Co. Fruit shipments from Vineland and the Jordan district were made by the small ferry steamer Ongiara, of the Niagara River Line, which took them to Niagara for transfer to Toronto, and by the steamer J. W. Steinhoff, which became the Canada and was again renamed Queen City. Originally a passenger steamer she may have carried excursions to Jordan, for Jordan Beach was becoming popular as a bathing resort. The tug Nellie Bly and other small tugs plied to Jordan Beach, towing scows. Some of the “park route” steamers of the end of the century, such as the Greyhound, Chicoutimi, White Star, and C. H. Merritt which called at Long Branch and Lorne Park at times occasionally took excursions to Grimsby and may have called at Jordan Beach. The A. J. Tymon, later renamed Jasmine, did an extensive business between Toronto and Jordan Harbor under her first name, carrying excursions occasionally and fruit and farm products regularly in season. She was also on the Grimsby run in the 1890’s.

"OVER JORDAN" HISTORIC HOUSES FLOURISH

This charming early 19th century home of mellow red brick is said to have been built by one of the second generation of Secords in Canada who was a captain in the War of 1812.

ONCE THIS PIER WAS CROWDED WITH STEAMERS AND SCHOONERS

A FEW STOUT OAK PILES in a broken line is now the only indication of the piers of the harbor at Jordan Beach which the Louth Harbor Company began a hundred and twelve years ago.This is on the south shore of Lake Ontario, thirty miles across from Toronto lighthouse.