Wee Brown Hen of Hay Bay: Schooner Days DCCCX (810)

by C. H. J. Snider

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HAY BAY, a 10-mile bight into rural Addington, off the Long Reach between Deseronto and Picton, is one of the less known bywaters of the Bay of Quinte. It is a cul de sac which takes you to cows and coves, fields and fish, grain ripening on golden slopes and tomatoes reddening in the sun.

Scenery, history and sport fishing is all it has to give now. Once it swarmed with country commerce, steam, sail, oars and poles, for rafting and seine hauling were among its industries. Now only the song of the selfbinder is heard in the land, and the purr of the trolling reel. Canadian charts show soundings at the Bay mouth, then break off abruptly as though the surveyors had run hard and fast aground, having no micrometer and nothing to measure with it.

GOING IT BLIND

Last month a combined Kingarvie-Yolanda expedition looked in. Drawing eight feet, at the entrance we were rejoiced with "By the deep FOUR!" from the leadsman. The bay varied from half a mile to near three in width. In general we kept to the middle. When we had sailed five or six miles and were rewarded with "By the mark FIVE!" so far in, we felt like sailing on to the very end of the widening blue vista which had opened up four or five miles still farther ahead. This was after rounding islands and squirming through fish stakes and narrows. Almost on the horizon could be seen a deep area of vivid green marsh against a background of crop.

It all looked sweet as an Italian lake. Of course there was not four fathoms all over the place, but thanks to the sounding lead and the high water of 1947 we did not touch once.

MYSTERY OF THE BAY

In two fathoms off a point about three miles in from the entrance we put the longboat out and pulled towards a curious shuttered barn which drowsed among the willows on the southern shore like a rusty brown hen taking a dust bath.

It was two-storied, gable ended, clapboarded, and had a flagpole. And shutters, double rows of three on each side. Its back, with the flagpole. was turned on the Bay. It was blank, with old-fashioned returns under the gable eaves. The front, facing a secondary road, had three shutters across the top, under a pediment, and two shutters below, flanking a doorway big enough for a barn, but carefully paneled in plain carpenter's moulding. The threshold was hidden in high-grown hay and weeds, no approach was visible under the roadside grass. The door was padlocked. Above it a faded sign said: "Key with W. Reynolds 1/2 mile west," which was true. Mr. Reynolds proved courteous, and so tried we to be. At least we carried the key back to him. He said, complacently, most people did.

SHRINE IN THREE CENTURIES

The old brown hen was no barn, whatever its sometime uses may have been. This was none other but the house of God, this was the gate of heaven, for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of God's children through three and, four, yes, six and seven generations.

It was so old that U.E.L. great-grandmothers could say without parody or paradox, "Arise daughter, go to thy daughter, for thy daughter's daughter hath a daughter, and she should be christened with Hay Bay water where the first Loyalist generation was baptized before Colonel Simcoe christened Toronto York."

For this was the famous and forgotten Hay Bay Methodist Chapel, built in 1792, eight years after their arrival, by New Englanders loyal to Old England to the point of leaving home and friends and all they possessed to live and die under the Union Jack.

Enlarged in 1834 when York became Toronto. Abandoned in 1860 when Albert Edward Prince of Wales paid his visit to Canadian wilds. Used as a horse barn and grain storehouse, from which schooners loaded barley for Oswego breweries after 1864. Restored in 1912. Since neglected fifty-one Sundays in the year. Ten dollars a year does not pay for much caretaking. The key keeper does all he can for that, but who is there to pay him?

The chapel is a national monument and should be preserved as such at national cost. If Canada is too divided, too bigoted, and too poor, Ontario is rich enough, loyal enough, and broad-minded enough to pay the shot and make a provincial park of the old camp meeting ground.

LET ONTARIO PONDER

Here is one of the finest living memorials of the English-speaking people in Canada, surviving work of loyal hands and hearts of a century and a half ago, who hewed out a fane for their inspiring faith even while they were clearing their fields of the forest and finding roofs for their shelterless heads. Living memorial, not arty replica or architect's fancy. For miraculously this priceless relic had been preserved intact as to setting and was still almost physically perfect.

A boy had burst in the door panel and smashed forty-five window panes, necessitating the shutters, the shutters themselves swung loose in the wind and one was off. Other morons had scrabbled their names with jackknives on the clapboards, horses' hooves had scarred the broad pine flooring, and loose hay not inappropriately littered the vestibule. There was hay around the cradle of Him who said "Suffer little children." To be considered when tempted to take comfort in the doctrine of infant damnation in view of this outburst of Old Nick against the pioneer glass panes and the missing panel. But the three slope-floored galleries, stairways, and replaced pulpit, were all in excellent condition like the stout pine pillars that uphold them and the roof, and there was even some of the hard bottomed, hard backed, stiff and narrow pews of pioneer hardwood left.

What hallelujahs of rejoicing, what groanings that could not be uttered, have rung around these walls!

Here were held the great camp meetings of pre-rebellion times, by sunlight, moonlight, finally by torchlight, when the preachers' whiskers caught fire and hellions made off with the candles. The crowd of two hundred and fifty had grown to twenty-five hundred by the fifth night of these showers of blessing.

Here mustered the militia who defended the Bay of Quinte in the War of 1812 when Chauncey's water spiders chased the Royal George and burned the schooner at Ernestown.

Lem the Dreamer who conceived the supership St. Lawrence which ended that war, may have worshipped here with Masterbuilder Dennis on their way to Navy Bay.

Here were wedded the pioneer couples who married in their teens and had stalwart sons and daughters in their thirties, who were christened here and married too, and reaped where their fathers had sown. Tears in these pews mingled with the drip from the hasty coffins in the great Hay Bay drowning which is still talked of in Quinte though a century old.

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Excuse it, please, but there will be more of this.

INLAND SEAS

For years I've been a-sailing,

Though I've never seen the sea.

The Great Lakes and their shipping—

They are sea enough for me.

I've sailed these lakes in summer,

When the soft sou'westers blow.

I've sailed them in the winter

When near twenty-two below.

I've sailed on golden pathways,

Which the moonbeams laid before.

I've weathered many blizzards

Mid a wild nor'easter's roar.

I've shot St. Lawrence's rapids

And I've grounded at the "Soo."

When Welland's locks were opened

I made sure my boat first through.

From Quebec to Fort William,

From Chicago to Duluth—

Knew every light and channel

'Fore I'd cut a wisdom tooth.

I've "lain to" of Point Edward,

When the blinding fog was thick;

While Thunder Cape and Pelee

Have taught me many a trick.

Ahoy! You salt-sea sailors!

You, who boast about the sea,

If you would know real sailing

Sail these inland seas with me.

—T. B. GLEAVE.

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QUIZ as to where Bear Creek is produced a spate of answers, plus the above very good poem from a High Park neighbor, Mr. Gleave, of 12 Alhambra avenue, whose two books, "Vistas Grave and Gay" and "Here's to Happiness," have been published most attractively by W. T. Kirby Company, and met a good reception. If "Inland Seas" is auto-biographical, Mr. Gleave ought to know the compass course to Bear Creek.

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Capt. Walter Kirk, of Cat Hollow, came across with latitude and longitude for Bear Creek mouth right out of the box. Dare say he could find it with his eyes shut, counting the engine revs, and using the hand lead. He's a sailor.

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H. C. Joslin, 158 Macpherson avenue, made a very reasonable guess that Bear Creek was the Etobicoke, and the "long dock" mentioned was the one at Long Branch, where steamers used to land excursions 40 years ago. Various members of the Smith family, who seem to have spread all over Lake Ontario and the Bay of Quinte, hazarded guesses all based on the assumption that Bear Creek was an alias, or disguised name. The most interesting was that the photo shown was a section of one of the lagoons at Toronto Island, probably based on the small craft and the high water.

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The answers—all, wrong but Capt. Kirk's—emphasize the general similarity of lagoons and creek mouths and such natural harbors and of the small craft that frequent them. There are few distinctive or purely local types left on this lake.

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Bear Creek is a real place, and that is its real name, and the only one the writer has ever heard for it. It is 107 miles ESE of Toronto, on the south shore of Lake Ontario, some 20 miles east of the port of Rochester, better known as Charlotte, and five miles west of Pultneyville. Furnaceville is the real name of a real village, two miles inland from Bear Creek mouth. The "long pier" was known as Dan Grant's.

Don't attempt Bear Creek in the dark or in anything but smooth water. At times it is completely barred over, with gravel piled on grounded tree trunks. This year's all-time high water won't last forever. On our island shore Monday night, even after heavy rain Sunday, it was noticeable that the weed line on the rocks was showing 12 inches above the water level. An ebb has started. We read recently that between 1830 and 1835 the lake levels rose seven feet above what they had been, and the plague of fever-and-ague followed in Ontario What goes up must come down. Diversion of a watershed like the Ogoki will have some permanent effect on lake levels below—but we repeat, high water won't last forever.

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GRASS-GROWN THRESHOLD OF THE HOUSE OF GOD

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WATERSIDE METHODIST CHAPEL OF 1792 AS FOUND