Port Credit Post Card -- Turn of the Tide After 200 Years: Schooner Days DCCCLXXXIX (889)

by C. H. J. Snider

SOME say one thing and some say another, and they may all be right, but Schooner Days would like to put an X on the point when Port Credit, after dragging out a vegetable existence for two hundred years, commenced to pulse with 20th century life. Now it is bursting at the seams with vigorous growth, and there is every justification for Gordon Graydon's urging that half a million dollars be spent on devoloping its long neglected harbor, for the benefit of modern commerce, including oil tankers and tourist trade.

Named in La Broquerie's hazy map of 1757 as "Riviere au Credit," between Riviere Toronto, (the Humber), and Riviere des Deux Folles, River of the Two Mad Women — why only two? — supposed to be the Sixteen Mile Creek at Oakville, Port Credit had been a fur-and-brandy trading place in the 17th and 18th centuries and become a government post, Indian reserve, and busy little port shipping ashes, cordwood, staves, lumber, apples, grain, brick and stone in the 19th.

Stave Bank road in present Port Credit commemorates the mile-long piles of cordwood, lumber and stave-bolts (barrel staves in the raw) which used to line the harbor in winter, waiting for the opening of navigation.

But Ben R. Clarkson's grain and apple warehouses were burned, and floods swept wharves away, and the lake chewed up a waterfront road, and Goose Point and the two houses on it, and the surrounding forests dwindled to bits of bush, and the steamers which called daily and the grain carriers which needed 10 feet of water, couldn't get in any more—and the port relapsed into a haven for the shallow-draught stonehookers. Forty at once would harbor there, raking their cargoes from the surrounding shale-beds of the lake shore.

After the Great War poor Port Credit was perhaps at its deadest, lighthouse and piers destroyed by government neglect, harbor barred at the mouth, and choked with sunken contractor's plant and outworn stonehookers whose occupation had ceased because Toronto's street were all paved and harbor works all completed. Only one industry survived, the St. Lawrence Starch Works, and it did not need many men at this time.

Then arose the Blowers boys of the third generation, in particular young Abe, now superintendent at the Port Credit electric plant. With Harry Fowler, Al Hare, Fred Block and a few other graduates of Lithophone University, alias the departed stonehooking trade, he concerted measures for its resurrection.

Sand and gravel by the thousand cubic yards was needed for the new harbor works at Port Weller and Port Dalhousie and the completion of the new Welland canal. Abe's father's hooker, the Reindeer, once a saucy little thing called the Ida May, with a perky sheer and good lines, and his uncle George's hooker Coral, bigger and boxier, were lying in the mud below the bridge, so far abandoned that bulrushes and water-lilies had seeded in their holds and grown up through their hatches. They were the last remnants of the 103 stonehookers which had used the port.

Abe and his associates rooted out the marine forests, bailed out the water and fitted the sparless hulls with jury masts and enough ragged sails to make them manageable. Topsails and fancy kites were of course out of the question.

They floated them out of the bar-bound creek-mouth on a heavy dew, and got them across Lake Ontario to Port Dalhousie on a zephyr. They never came back. By the time all the concrete work was done they were done too, and finally.

But the venture paid good dividends. If it did not make the adventurers rich it made them men. And it meant much to "the port."

This was the turn of the tide for Port Credit. Individual enterprise had been rewarded. It gave the place hope. It need no longer be known as "the place where the French gave credit to the Indians," "Hardscrabble," "Port Starvation"— envious sobriquets produced in the last half of the 19th century, when every striving town and hamlet wasted its energy calling other striving towns and hamlets names, and it was the habit to pull a poor mouth and depreciate, and bemoan the good old days of Crimean War wheat at $2 a bushel and whisky at 25 cents a gallon. Thank goodness we have got that out of our system.

Port Credit looked around and said, why, yes, young Abe Blowers and the boys had made a good move—and they were taking on hands at the starch factory—and city folks were buying lots where the bush was being cleared—and the Mississauga Golf Club was certainly better than the old Indian huts—and more motor cars crossed the crick than buggies used to in the best of times—and here was an oil refinery or something coming where the old brick works used to be—and danged if the place was goin' down hill any more, in fac' it was growin' at last.

They were right. It had been all the time. Only a third-generation flash of enterprise seemed necessary to emphasize it. Now the sleepy little farm port has been completely submerged by an urban generation with urban demands for amenities and facilities—including a modern harbor.

LAST FLARE-UP OF STONEHOOKING

"So far abandoned that bulrushes and water lilies had seeded in their holds, the CORAL (above), and the REINDEER put life into the old port." This picture was taken in 1916.