Lights of Bronte 50 Years Ago--and Now?: Schooner Days DCCCXXIX (829)

by C. H. J. Snider

This was the old port in 1943,—and how we came out of it, half a century after our first visit. That year's high water took a yacht drawing 8 feet clear of the shoals at either side of the entrance. The high water also submerged and destroyed the south pier. Restoration work for this fine little harbor, which has been in continuous use for a century should have been begun ten years ago.

SO Bronte lighthouse is gone, gone as it should, dying in battle with the first gale of the new year, only giving up its gallant ghost when the navigation season was closed.

Its death was due to malnutrition by the Dominion government, which treats all lake lighthouses like foundlings and gives them their begrudged dole too little and too late. Reconstruction work was started in Bronte harbor last fall. It should have been started ten years ago and completed the same year. We hope the lighthouse will not be succeeded by one of the skinny skeletons or spindly poles such as replaced Nigger Island light in the Bay of Quinte, but by a good substantial citizen built in stone or concrete like the Americans do with their lights.

But what about Bronte itself?

Bronte was begun as a "private harbor" more than a century ago, when the Crown left it to individual enterprise to develop Upper Canada transportation. R. K. Chisholm, of the nearby port of Oakville, was the principal stockholder in the first Bronte Harbor Company and owned one of the three grain warehouses. P. A. McDougald owned another and W. E. Hagaman, of Oakville, the third, and the three handled 80,000 bushels of grain a season—a small canaller's load today, but then providing cargoes for ten good-sized vessels such as the harbor could accommodate.

Bronte boomed until the Hamilton and Northwestern Railway was constructed from Barrie and Allandale. It was expected to fill the Bronte storehouses with grain and the Bronte lumber mill with logs and Bronte harbor with rafting timber, from the north. But it did none of these things, for Hamilton, not Bronte, was chosen as its terminus, and so the grain "elevators"—really storehouses—moved away from the mouth of the Twelve-Mile Creek.

For a century Bronte has been a fishing port—and at one time much more—at the mouth of the high-banked Twelve. The miles are measured from Burlington Heights, the real Head of the Lake. The creek may be the remains of one west of the Credit which La Broquerie called Riviere des Deux Folles, river of the two mad women; although what they were mad about tradition telleth not. Bronte became a big schooner port, building many vessels and shipping out great quantities of grain and lumber and fruit and fish and stone. It is a fish port yet, though power has replaced sail and the fish goes away by truck. It was the fishermen who put up the fight to save their menaced boats and houses when the gale got the lighthouse New Year's night.

WHEN every port was "foreign parts" it was our ambition to sail to Bronte. After many efforts we shipped in Toronto for that distant bourne, with an old sailor named Charlie Giles, and a young one named Johnny Macdonald, in the good ship Mary Ellis. The year was 1896.

This Mary of many deserves description. Once a smart small trader, she had degenerated in forty years into a third rate stonehooker. She had been built in Bronte in 1855, a short sharp deep little vessel with a big rig and a good turn of speed. She was little over 50 feet long. She used to make voyages as far as Oswego, and came home from there one year with a cargo of salt on the last trip of the season, when big three-masters had to give up and strip for the winter wherever they were sheltering.

She had a tiny quarterdeck, raised about eight inches above the main deck, so as to give headroom for the two bunks in her little trunk cabin. They were under this deck, and built in the rise of her quarters. Another berth ran thwartships across the transom. Her bulwarks were high originally, 18 inches, but as the rail and stanchions rotted and had to be renewed they had been cropped until the rail was only 12 inches above the deck and in places the bulwarks had been stripped away completely.

The great gale of 1885, which destroyed the northeasterly pier of Bronte harbor, drove her so far up the marsh that it took a steam shovel to dig her out. By 1896 she had lost both topsails and jibtopsail, and her "four lowers" remaining were in rags. She was going back to Bronte for another reduction in the height of her bulwarks and a refit of very vague outline which never took place.

Mary had been good, but that was in the long dead days before centreboards were common on the lakes. She had one now, but it went on one side of her keel, instead of going through it, having been added during one of several rebuilds. These had not always been improvements, and still another was overdue. She never got it, for Giles sold her for $65 to be blown up to represent the USS Maine, at the Exhibition. She was then so ripe that she had to be frapped in her old foresail well filled with horse manure, to float her from the Queen's Wharf to her place of execution.

The first day Bronte bound in the Mary Ellis we got from the sheltering slime of Jarvis street slip, which kept her bottom tight, as far as the Garrison, when the wind came ahead. The day being far spent we ran back to the Queen's Wharf for a quiet night, having no coal oil for the one lantern and no sailing lights. Next morning there was very little wind and we floated westward as far as Oakville by evening, with the sky all black for a summer squall. So we ran in there and moored. The third day we made Bronte, 25 miles from Toronto by water, though the hooker men always called it thirty.

Bronte opened up to us like the pages of a picture book as we came in. The piers ran almost east and west, for the lake shore here trends southerly, and we sailed past the squat white lighthouse with its red cap, straight into the setting sun.

Sixteen lapstreaked fishing boats, all mackinaw rigged with three sails and pole masts, nuzzled the north pier. The southerly one ran from a sand beach filled with willows, forming a cool village park and picnic grounds. At the foot of the high bank to the north were long rows of fish shacks and net reels, creaking gently with a peep-peep-peep-peep and the swish of drying net winding on and off.

Four gaunt stonehookers showed their weathered and unslushed spars all golden against the mellow red background of the old mill — old then, much older now and used as a chaplet foundry.

At this auspicious hour of entrance the fleet consisted of (besides the Mary Ellis) the Defiance, which also antedated the centreboard, "Teeter" Mitchell's saucy little Minnie of St. Catharines with a lame side and a standing keel, the ancient square ended scow Brothers and an equally ancient squarehead, the "Brig Rover" painted on her side.

Inside the pier the river formed a pool or basin, narrowing again to the old Lake Shore road bridge. Across the neck of the pool a scow ferried one free to the picnic park, provided the ancient ribs of the Bismarck did not interfere. This Bismark, unrelated to the big Garden Island timber drogher of the same name, had been a small lake schooner, sunk in the creek years before. Wrecks or abandoned hulks abounded around Bronte. The bones of the Elizabeth Ann, of pre-centreboard times, and so old her register could not give a date for her, lay on the shore of a farm a mile southwest of the port. Nearby the lake busily gnawed at other bones, human. There was a cemetery, south of the road and close to the water and skeletons slipped into the lake from the crumbling bank when high water came.

In the marsh at the end of the piers, under the shadow of the mill, lay the Pine and another vessel, perhaps the Peerless, former pride of Bronte, buried under bulrushes. Farther up, near the bridge, the Lillie of Port Credit rested on the creek bottom after a disastrous attempt to rebuild and enlarge her by shoving out her old sides and putting in new decks on beams just as they were cut in the bush, bark and all, except for the upper faces. The Maud S., commemorating a horse, world famous in the 1880s, also departed this life in Bronte, either in the rebuilding process or the need of it. The hulks sunk near the bridge were removed by dynamite years ago. But contractors' plant soon filled their vacant beds.

Nineteen forty-eight cannot conceive how dark these little lakeports used to be at night. When darkness fell in Bronte at this time it was that thick darkness which could be felt. The only gleams of light came from the big coal oil lamp in the lighthouse, which burned thirteen gallons in a season, or the other coal oil lamp with the reflector behind it over the bar in "Uncle Joe" Triller's hotel, where that old lake captain kept anchor watch for customers.

Or there might occasionally be a third from the little frame church, if Organ Bob Osborne, who built boats six days in the week and played the organ on Sunday, was I practicing the forthcoming hymns after a ten-hour day at his trade. There was no Hydro in those days, no movies, no radio, no Petrillo. Coal oil cost money, a scarce article, and many went to bed with the hens to save lighting the lamp. They got up with the sun, and did not know what nerves were.

But the moon did better in those nights, perhaps because she had no competition but coal oil. When the moon rose that first night in Bronte I sat with old Ike Picket, fisherman, on the high bank overlooking the lake, and heard about the port below. It was drenched in silver light so strong you could read by it. Ike's huge, high-hunched shoulders seemed mountainous under his heavy blue knitted sweater. His iron grey thatch of hair and old fashioned side whiskers sparkled in the moonlight like frost flakes. His talk was better than good dandelion wine.

ORGAN BOB OF BRONTE

Dear Mr. Snider:

Sir,—I have had in mind for quite a while to drop you a line, but it has been very much like one of my visits to an old sailor living at Meldrum Bay, Manitoulin Island, who said they never did today what they could leave till tomorrow.

Reason for writing now is to question you (and it is not a life or death matter) re your writeup of Bronte of January 10th, last section, second paragraph. You state Organ Bob Osborne, was it not Organ Bob Joyce? Right or wrong?

I may state that I have in my possession quite a number, if not all of Organ Bob Joyce writings. Incidentally, I am one of the stable boys taken off the Ruben Dowd on her last trip. —J. W. JOYCE.

Danforth Press Limited

Both. That is, you are right and I was wrong. There were two Bob Joyces and one Bob Osborne, and Organ Bob Joyce was meant. Incidentally, there are two e's in Reuben in my Bible.

GORE AND WHITEWASH

I have just read a sea story in Argosy Magazine, January, 1948. "Rebel Guns and Yankee Guts," by Millard Ward.

He describes a stranger hove in sight was a four-masted, full-rigged ship with whitewashed sails.

The writer sailed before the mast in the late nineties, during that time I have seen many types of ships but have never seen one as described above much less with whitewashed sails. How about you, Old Timer?

— F. J. LEWIS.

130 Maplewood avenue

Would the whitewashing be to camouflage the viscera, entrails or internal fortitude mentioned? Or perhaps the stranger was manned entirely by darkies and the sails were symbols of their former calling as kalsominers? Anyway, like you, we have never seen such a marine monster, but we are young yet, having only started sailing in 1891.

--SCHOONER DAYS.

Picnic Park

Submerged South Pier

Basin

Old Mill

Fish Reels and Shacks

High Bank Village

Light Destroyed 1948