Village Seaport of Old Ontario: Schooner Days DCCC (800)

by C. H. J. Snider

Would you call Coldwater, Ontario, a seaport?

Toronto, though five hundred miles from salt water, may be fairly called an ocean roadstead, for Dutch, Norwegian, French, Danish and English bottoms come here from time to time from their native ports and we ship goods by water to Vancouver without breaking bulk, which means traversing two oceans. In a hundred and fifty years Toronto has built a hundred seagoing ships, for war or commerce, besides much lake shipping.

And Kingston, Oakville, Port Dalhousie and Shipman’s Corner or St. Catharines built ocean ships, sent them over, and brought them back.

But Coldwater—

THE SEAPORT

Coldwater is a charming village with the contented, well-settled appearance which comes from minding one’s own business for a hundred years. It has half a dozen good stores, two hotels, one or two small mills, two railways, and a river purling through it between clean grass-grown banks. The river is high now, in this year of high water, but in normal summers sometimes drops to two feet average depth. Some of the shops and houses are of stone or of red brick with cream colored corners, mellowed by sun and frost since 1830, when the government established the Indian agency, mill, store, and houses, one every mile along the Coldwater portage road from Orillia. These were intended for the noble red man, but formed the focus of a thrifty hard working settlement of Irish, Scotch and English — Blaneys, Rainbirds, Brechins, Caswells, Loverings, Rutledges, Spences, Walkers, and so on — who came to Simcoe County in the 1830’s, 40’s and 50’s, either from the Old Country direct, or from the earlier settled counties in Ontario where their forebears had tried pioneer farming.

BIT OF OLD WORLD

Coldwater today might be a village on the canals of the Netherlands or on the Norfolk Broads in England. It has no brick towered windmills with broad vans such as dot the Broads but it has typical Norfolk meadows filled with wide-spaced elms a hundred feet high and hundreds of years old. The comfortable brick and frame houses on the west bank of the Gissinausebing are each approached by its own private bridge of Medonte township logs, and grassy lawns and flower beds make gay the margins between river and house and barn. Giss, etc., means cold water in English, for that is what the Indians told the settlers the river was and the settlers agreed with them. It’s cool even in summer’s heat. It flows on for another mile after passing the village bridges, before it reaches Georgian Bay, near the mouth of the Severn.

The Coldwater River flows north through the village, with the main street on its east bank. Below the last bridge to the north is a wharf, with three mooring hooks, which makes one think of the mooring stones with their iron eyebolts on the Norse fiords, or the iron hook in the staithe at Burgh Castle, that ancient Roman fortress where the Waveney joins the Yare. This wharf is for the convenience of the launches that came up from Matchedash Bay off the Georgian to shop.

COLDWATER KEELS

It takes more than an atmospheric resemblance and three iron hooks to establish an inland Ontario village in seaport status, even in the distant past. Coldwater, ancient, unassuming, and temperate as its own name, would be slow to advance such a claim. And yet it might, without doing violence to its own modesty, point out that it built one barque, two barquentines and one schooner, ninety years ago, and that some of of these were designed for the Liverpool market and found ready sale there, sailing thither on their own bottoms, with Ontario produce, and the others were all fit for sea. The others may or may not have gone to salt water, but all were able to cross the ocean and may have done so. In addition tugs, scows and rafts were built on the river and for years a thriving export trade was done in logs, lumber, shingles and staves, cut in the merry mills whose sawdust waste flared like lighthouses by night, and loaded at the village wharves or from the shores of Matchedash Bay which is an inlet of the Georgian.

In addition to local small craft, four seagoing or lakegoing vessels known to have been built at Coldwater were:

The barque Reindeer, 1854.

Schooner Sardinia, 1856.

Duke of Argyle, barquentine or schooner, date unknown.

Barquentine Silver Cloud, 1863.

We’ll talk about the Reindeer next week.

In Good Shape 35 Years After Launching

NINETY-ONE YEARS AGO the schooner SARDINIA (right) was launched in the Coldwater River near the village mill. The picture shows her and the American three-master LYDIA RAESSER at Sheboygan, Wis., on Lake Michigan, in 1891, in good shape thirty-five years.

OLD ELM (centre), survivor of a pair of centenarians plus, marks the site of shipyards and mill wharves where vessels were launched and loaded almost a century ago.

COLDWATER’S PRESENT PORT FACILITIES provide a landing for shopping launches and sportsmen’s craft at the Government Dock.