Battle Creek Comes to Bat: Schooner Days DCCCLXXVIII (878)

by C. H. J. Snider

Sir -

You may be surprised to know that an old and faraway Toronto but is still interested in the old waterfront and Toronto Bay of years ago. Yes, as far back as 1870. I have in my scrapbook the names of many sailing vessels or "Schooners" also a good list of passenger boats long forgotten, "Southern Belle" for instance, another blockade runner before the "Chicora" came to town.

But what I have on my mind is your picture of the Trade Wind with the squire ports in her stern. I remember her, and a lot more. If I am not mistaken where she is shown in this picture was down around the foot of Sherbourne st. There was a long breakwater at-the mouth of the Don, and several buildings, all destroyed at the time of the Esplanade fire. These men are standing on one of the several steps once used for wagons to get water out of the bay. I can tell you a lot about the bay.

Yours sincerely,

G. H. BENNETT.

15 West Kingman ave.,

Battle Creek, Mich.

P.S.: Are you referring to the original old Oriole, or the new one which was built in the late 80's or early 90's? I knew them both, and sailed with Capt. Dick on the new Oriole on a racing cruise. I saw her built, every step of the way on or near the mouth of the Don River.—G.H.B.

"USED for wagons to get water out of the bay."

When was that? We recall twice when "the conduit" rose, in 1892 and in 1895, and the big blue white-hooped water carts used for street sprinkling were sent from door to door with drinking water, which had to be boiled before using. The conduit was the pipe or pipes which carried the water across the Bay floor, from the intake in the lake off Gibraltar Point to the pumping station at the foot of John st. Actually there were two pipes, one of wood and one of steel. The steel pipe, insufficiently ballasted, had been choked by weeds or sand and pumped empty. The air in it made it rise.

It was on one of these historic occasions that the mayor of the city, absent on some mission in England, cabled the inspiring solution: "Act promptly." The electors did, and elected someone else. The conduit played Santa Claus and came up for air on Christmas Day, 1892. We were hazy about germs in those simple times, and believed that frost was all the purifier anything needed. The bay used to freeze three feet deep then, and ice for domestic purposes was harvested from it all winter long. We lived on melted snow and bay water and what the old wooden pipe could supply all winter, those of us who didn't die of colitis or typhoid fever, and by March, 1893, a new steel pipe had been laid.

It stayed down for three years, but on the 5th of September, 1895, sections of it bobbed up, and it was back to bay water for six weeks. But we had a vigorous young Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Charles Sheard, to whom typhoid and smallpox were kindred hates. He believed in antiseptics and vaccination. and his left arm was cicatrized from shoulder to wrist with self-inflicted vaccination marks. He insisted "Boil the water or bury the dead!" and all Toronto obeyed him when the blue watering carts again appeared with our drinking supply.

We flocked to them as we flocked to milk wagons in those unpasteurized days, and the wagoner, filled the tea kettle with the same nonchalant grace with which the milkman, dipping his long handled pint measure into the can for all comers, filled the cracked pitchers or chipped bowls held up for milk.)

The water ration was two pails a day per household. It came from the Reservoir, which held a two days' supply, and from Blockhouse Bay at the Island, supposed "relatively pure." It was pumped through the old wooden pipe. We were really more concerned about fire hazards than about water risks in those days, because the pressure was very low before the conduit was repaired. The fire engines prepared to pump directly from the bay. For the last forty years we have been getting water through tunnels bored through the rock and clay, and no conduits have come up for Christmas or other festivals.

We do not recall waterloading steps or slips or platforms being built specially on the occasion of the conduit's inflations, though they may have been in use. Or perhaps Mr. Bennett, who goes back so long before we were born, refers to places where in earlier days barrels were filled for fire-fighting, when there was a dollar prize for the first man to the fire with a barrel of water.

There were platforms like the one pictured, at the foot of Frederick street and at the foot of Sherbourne in the 1890s, but some of them were the racks or floors of boathouses which had been ruined by the Esplanade fire of 1885.

THE "NEW ORIOLE" mentioned by Mr. Bennett was the second of the name, built in 1886 at the foot of Berkeley st. by Melancthon, Simpson, for Commodore Georger Gooderham. This was the one mentioned in Schooner Days as appearing in Rowley Murphy's fine picture of the Luella and her island passengers.

The first Oriole, also a two-masted" schooner, was built by Louis Shickluna, at St. Catharines for W. C. Campbell, Robert Hunter, and the late Sir William Mulock, in 1871. Her designer was Commodore Fish, who also designed successful New York pilot boats, remarkably fast and able schooners of that time.

This first Oriole cruised the Great Lakes from Pullman's Island among the "Thousand" in the St. Lawrence to Prince Arthur's landing in Lake Superior, and burst her heart trying to get her owner across the lake from Niagara on the night of the great Esplanade fire in 1885.

John Leys, one of the Gooderham partners, was her amateur captain (Capt. Peter Lawson was sailing master) in a long cruise by 1876, and two of the Gooderham boys, Albert and Edward were in her afterguard. It was in 1880 that Commodore George Gooderham bought her, and founded the "Oriole" line of yachts with which the Gooderham name has been long associated. The second Oriole, built in 1886, was broken up 20 years later, after Commodore George Gooderham's'death. The third Oriole was a manganese-hulled three-masted schooner, owned by Commodore George H. Gooderham, younger son of the first Commodore Gooderham. When he sold her he built the steel Oriole IV, a large ketch, now in the hands of the Navy League. Her mainmast, originally 101 feet long, and shortened to 85 feet and snapped in the long-distance race around the lake last summer is being replaced this winter at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club., for she is still going strong and as good as new, although built in 1921.

ANYWAY it is a great pleasure to hear echoes of Schooner Days reverberating from Battle Creek to British Columbia, whence came one about "Rattlesnake Pete" the other day, the poet with the camera, who used to take pictures at the Eastern Gap. It shows how far the little lads who haunted the old Toronto waterfront have fared.

It is pleasing, too, to get Mr. Bennett's confirmation of the identification of the Trade Wind in her earlier days, while she still had square sternports. She was an ancient vessel, built by Lummeree [Peter Lamoree], an itinerant shipwright from Oswego, at Colborne, or "Cat Hollow," in 1853, ninety-five years ago. The sternports may have been to light the cabin, or for loading timber, for even vessels of her size were used as timber droghers. She was deep, and crank, and registered high tonnage, 190 tons, but that was two-thirds of her deadweight capacity. Her old-fashioned sternports disappeared in a rebuild before 1890, and her transom was replanked diagonally. Thus we show this later picture of her, taken by the late E. J. Guy, of Oshawa. She was burned at Kingston in 1909, so she had a run of 56 years.

For the earlier "stereopticon view," in which the Trade Wind figures in the old scene on the Toronto wraterfront, we are indebted to Wm. A. McDonald, 3303 Vicksburg Avenue, Detroit. He came across it in Washburn, Wis.—and thought of Schooner Days. It was made in St. Paul, Minn., whither this topic, like the weather, also penetrates.

"STEREOPTICON VIEW" - The old waterfront picture which may show one of the water loading ships.

The TRADE WIND, of Port Hope, built at Cat Hollow 95 years ago at a cost of about $8,000.

ORIOLE IV, latest of a great line, waiting for a new mainmast to replace her original 101-ft. spar. She is a steel hulled cruiser of about the same length as the TRADE WIND and cost $125,000 when built in 1921.