Under Long Point: Schooner Days DCCCLXIX (869)

by C. H. J. Snider

AROUND the table in the neat parlor of the lightkeeper's house on Long Point, Lake Erie, we got talking again about the wrecks with which the Point was lined in schooner days.

HOW LONG WILL FLOUR KEEP?

About sixty years ago, Lorne Brown, keeper of the main light said, a wreck came ashore "near the Post shanty at Nigger Pond" on the south side of Long Point. She was flour laden, "and Sam Pittman, father of Reeve Jack Pittman, teamed flour in bags as it was salvaged from the frozen in hull. The vessel may have been the Newburg. Keeper Brown was reminded of the incident by the fact that some five years ago a neighbor named Lambkins, exploring an ancient cottage on the Anderson deer preserve, which had been occupied by an old man named Stickney, found thirteen bags of flour branded "Lake-of-the-Woods" in the cottage loft. The flour was still sweet inside, although if, as was supposed, it had been salvaged from this wreck, it must have been milled fifty-seven years ago.

THE WOMAN WHO WAVED

Of another wreck "with a name like the Conductors", (possibly the Commodore), Mrs. Brown, the keeper's wife, had heard a curious story from Mrs. Isaac Becker, widow of the captain of the well-known Port Rowan scow-schooner Bay Trader. It appears that this vessel, barley laden, drove ashore in a gale, and all her crew were rescued with difficulty, but the cook was missing. The vessel had been grain laden and the cargo got wet and swelled and burst the hull. The grain was removed during the fall, leaving the shattered hull full of lake water and bedded in the sand of the shore. The Becker family, living nearby, found the wreck a convenient well or reservoir, because getting water on Long Point in winter time always presented a problem. One had to walk out a long distance on the ice hummocks on the lake side of the point, to get water clear of sand, or a long distance on the bay ice to get water clear of weeds. So they drew water from the wreck night and morning, it being close to their cottage.

One morning one of Abigail Becker's brood—that noble woman mothered seventeen fine children in all, two adopted, six step children, and nine of her own—came running back with her little bucket empty, crying, "Mother! Mother! There's a woman in the schooner waving her arms at me!"

Brave Abigail, who feared God greatly and the living or dead not at all, strode up the ice banks to the mounded wreck, and looked down the open hatch through which the winter sunlight beamed. She had airways told her children never to tell a lie, and her little daughter had not disobeyed her. There in the clear green water in the hold stood or floated a woman, her arms waving gently as the level changed with the heave of the lake waves outside.

She was the schooner's cook, drowned in her berth next the galley when the vessel waterlogged months before; released now as the lake, ebbing and flowing in the empty hull, gently removed the bulkhead which had separated hold and cabin.

OLD TIMES IN THE BAY

MR. C. L. SAXTON, of Port Rowan and Long Point Provincial Park, where he has a cottage, said that it was Wm. Dickenson who kept the West End lighthouse at the cut on Long Point and that his son, Egbert Dickenson, now 87, was able to give some "real history." Wm. Dickenson had a 35-foot schooner named the Col. David Tisdale, after the Conservative member for Norfolk, and Mr. Saxton and Egbert have sailed her across the Inner Bay from Port Rowan to the Cut light with supplies.

Many schooners passed from Port Stanley and Port Burwell and on east to the Cut, into the Inner Long Point Bay, across to Port Rowan, and on down the Outer Bay to Port Dover, and so to Buffalo, which was the goal of most of Ontario's export traffic that Lake Erie bore.

"I can remember these vessels leaving Port Rowan, loaded some with grain and some with lumber, shingle bolts, stave bolts, and timber. There were large sawmills at Port Rowan and at the mouth of Big Creek, one mile south of Port Rowan (and at Port Royal, three miles west). A goodly part of Buffalo has been built of lumber coming from the vicinity of Port Rowan.

"Inner Long Point Bay, at the west end of Long Point Bay, was much like Toronto Bay," he went on, "with eastern and western channels into the Outer Bay and Lake Erie. The Inner Bay's western outlet has been closed up for years, but I can remember as a boy of sixteen going through that channel in a sail boat drawing about 13 feet of water. At one time this channel had 21 feet at the Lake Erie end and 11 feet at the Bay end, but that was before my time. Our eastern channel into the main bay, corresponding to your Eastern Gap, has never closed. It runs between Ryerse Island and historic Turkey Point, where Dollier de Casson landed in 1669 and Simcoe built Fort Norfolk in 1794, and it gives access to Outer Long Point Bay. We call the island Ryerson's, for it was named after Dr. Egerton Ryerson, the great minister of education. The family name was Ryerse when they came to Canada.

THE BAY TRADER

"There were quite a few schooners built at Port Rowan. I remember Capt. Isaac Becker's Bay Trader, flat bottomed and two-masted, plying out of here. It was she that rescued the Mackie family and crew of the J. R. Benson when she capsized in Lake Erie."

"Yes," Harry-out-of-Picton would have interjected had he been there, for he was one of the rescued, "I remember how glad we were when we saw the Bay Trader drop the peak of her mainsail, to jibe around to pick, us up, after the Benson had lain for hours on her side with the seas washing over her. And I remember that schooner's cook who snapped she was hired to cook for one crew and wouldn't cook for two, and made us go without breakfast next morning."

"Women," Mr. Saxton might have cautiously admitted, "can be peculiar." But not having heard Harry's contribution he merely continued:

"I also remember the Twilight, a round bottomed fore-and-after, owned and sailed by Capt. John Collett, which carried bolts, ties, lumber and grain to Buffalo. The first steam tug I remember was the A. H. Jennie, Capt. Isaac Becker. She carried lumber and towed large hewed timber to Buffalo, N.Y."

The Jennie was wrecked at Frenchman's Bay on Lake Ontario forty-eight years ago.

LONG POINT LIGHT, LAKE ERIE, at the east end of the great peninsula enclosing the Inner and Outer Bays.