Quinte Idyl of a Hundred Years: Schooner Days DCCCLXI (861)

by C. H. J. Snider

COLE'S FERRY in Prince Edward to HUFF'S WHARF in Addington, and some of its bygone COMMERCE AND CALLERS

Durward Cole came to the family ferry on the Long Reach when it was more like the Queen Elizabeth highway than a silent side street of Lake Ontario. The family moved into the great big store John Bedford had built for the upsurge of prosperity following the development of Upper Canada. Dennis Daly had kept it and it throve mightily, for it was strategically placed at the ferry, with the High Shore road behind it and so many schooners building and loading at the Roblin's Mills in the cove below.

Cole's ferry landing was much more than just one end of a crossing. Half a dozen steamers called there regularly – the Ella Ross twice a day, the Aletha, Hero, Varuna Reindeer, Deseronto, Alexandria every day, on excursions or for passengers. Not all of these came daily, but there was as good a passenger service on the Bay of Quinte eighty years ago as there is in Toronto Bay today. Perhaps better. The Ella Ross for example, plying the ten-mile lane between Desoronto and Picton, made four stops after leaving Cole Ferry – at Huff's Wharf across the Reach, at Bogart's Wharf below, for Hay Bay, at Roblin's Cove, at Thompson's Wharf on the other side, occasionally at Hallowell Mills or Glenora, and then into Picton.

These stops give an idea of the extent of traffic on the Bay then. It was a thronged highway for steam and sail. The bulk freighting was done by the sloops and schooners. Durward Cole recalls twenty-eight schooners under sail at one time in the ten-mile Long Reach; a glad sight with their fluttering pinions of new blue-white linen or yellow cotton duck, or all the shades to which wind and weather, graindust, coal and iron ore bleach or blacken canvas. The sails would be crowned by long colored masthead flies like whiplashes, above hulls black and white, green, red, leadcolor or yellow or all these in combination, with contrasting stripes and gay hawsepipes, figureheads and quarterboards with the vessels names enscrolled.

Farmers drove in with their butter, (15 cents a pound, top price retail) eggs, (10 cents a dozen if good big ones), cheese, apples, peas, oats and barley to trade for dry goods, hardware, groceries, coal oil and all the growing luxuries of life brought from Kingston or Oswego. Sloops and schooners of the 30 to 300 tons burden brought them in, and took away the farm products; principally to the Richardson grain elevator and the market square at Kingston or the Oswego breweries. Though some went to England and South America. At any rate the schooner Pacific built at Roblin's, did. She carried bones and rough lumber to England and nitrates from South America to Boston, and was lost on the coast of Newfoundland coming home with a cargo of coal.

The store was a substantial structure, stonewalled below, timbered above. It stands solidly yet at the water's edge, after 104 years, although the wharfage which once surrounded it is gone. What memories it must have; of crinolines and Grecian bends, of Crimean War prices and Reciprocity; good times and hard work; of hard times and no work; of prosperity coming back and motor horns replacing steam-boat whistles, and steel trucks, the broad-beamed sloops and schooners of local oak and pine!

In the stone part of it the exports were stored and the imports were received, to be retailed over the fine cherrywood counters in the storey above. Remaining arches and joiner work show that the store must have been an attractive one, with its shelves and drawers laden with prints, cotton and woolens, hats, caps, boots and shoes, parasols, paper collars, macassar oil, crockery, china, tinware, spices, tea, coffee, cocoa, groceries, dried fruit, biscuits and sweetmeats – including conversation lozenges, cough drops, bullseyes, sugarsticks, licorice, Godey's magazine, family bibles, and Currier and Ives prints.

With the growth of general stores at every four corners the retail feature of this ferry emporium contracted, but the wholesale expanded with the big barley business, the building was devoted to the storage and shipment of grain, hay, apples and root crops.

The Coles operated the grain warehouse for years, charging 2 cents a bushels for "weighing" – unloading, reloading and tallying – the farmers' grain. A million bushels of Prince Edward County gold went in and out through those limestone walls by bag and barrow, shovel and spout, for the ferry wharf was a shipping place up to the time of the Great War.

Some of the vessels Durward remembers his father loading were:

The graceful Acacia when Capt. Byron Bongard sailed her.

The Baltic of Wellington Square, lost at Oswego in December 1894.

Round sterned Delaware hard to steer that had been the Dave Andrews.

Kate of Oakville, capsized 3 miles below the ferry in the mouth of Hay Bay by a night squall of the high shore, drowning two of her crew.

Also the first Ariadne lost on Stoney Point's drowned island in a snowstorm in 1886, and the second Ariadne, much smaller, a converted Cuthbert yacht which went to pieces at Port Credit in 1910; and perhaps the third Ariadne, a scow sloop built at Stella in Amherst Island about this time, one of the last Bay trading sloops.

Other callers included the schooner Mary of Napanee, young Andy Baird's pride and joy, which carried him and his crew to their death off Oswego, 45 years ago.

The Snow Bird formerly the Minnie Proctor a little smaller than the Kate and the Mary and with a long non-tragic history.

Probably the Flora rebuilt from the Flying Scud, which ended at Oakville. And the Highland Beauty when Capt. Billy Lobb took her to the Bay of Quinte from Toronto in 1900.

The white D. Freeman built in Port Burwell, which became a black floating elevator at Kington after 50 years afloat.

Occasionally the Oliver Mowat one of the few three-masters to call. She was run down by a steamer off the False Ducks, Capt. T. L. Vandusen and half his crew were drowned. And the steamer captain went to jail. The little Lizzie Metzner small, but full rigged three- master, was another.

The Lyman Davis last of the lakers, burned at Sunnyside, 1935.

These were all lake schooners of fair size, ranging from six to sixteen thousand bushel capacity, or from 200 to 700 tons deadweight. The Mowat might carry more grain, but as a rule these vessels would be picking up only a 1,000 bushels or so at the ferry to finish out cargoes that had been gathered here and there for Kingston, Oswego or Ogdensburg down the St. Lawrence.

Then there were the small fry of from 100 tons down to 30, or a bare 1,000 bushels, like the schooner-scows Two Brothers of Picton, the Maggie L. and Laura D. of Kingston, the John Wesley that they nicknamed the Punchy, and the Madcap and the Idlewyld and the scow sloops like the Gull and the Granger and perhaps the Trent and her two sisters brought up from Quebec, although these specialized in the bunchwood trade. The other would load baled hay or grain or apples from whatever wharf had them, or even from the banks of the Bay fields, for their light draft and flat bottoms allowed them to moor to the trees. Their market was Kingston, the Richardson elevators there or the Montreal Transportation Company's barges for down the Saint Lawrence.

One little sloop, perhaps it was the Madcap came to grief within an hour of loading her thousand bushels of peas at the Ferry. Running down the Reach with a fresh breeze, she nipped the corner too close, somewhere near Trumpour Point where the Adolphus Reach runs east from the long one, and struck a rock there. It went through her and she filled with water. The peas in her hold swelled so quickly that she burst like a paper bag.

Cole's Ferry.

Typical Bay of Quinte scow sloops - right, the GRANGER, astern probably the MADCAP, left schooner GREAT WESTERN later called the F.H. BURTON.

Huffs Wharf. Above, another barrel-bodied Quinte sloop, either the GULL or the ARIADNE. Vessel pictures from the collection of J. N. Baillie, Picton.

Steamers calling everyday.