Grit Light and a Lost Graveyard: Schooner Days CMXI (911)

by C. H. J. Snider

Nevertown Chronicles

IT was probably Capt. Charles Selleck and his father-in-law, George Gibson, with artificers from the royal dockyard at Woolwich, Who built the almost legendary courthouse and the other earliest buildings on Presquile Point, intended for the new capital of the new District of Newcastle when the 18th century was turning into the 19th. But it was certainly William Thomas Atkinson who had most to do with making Presquile Point what it is today, the happy summer home of a thousand people old and young.

Dropping the hook off Brighton Wharf - old Gosport — recently, not far from the fantastic "Grit Light," it was a groat pleasure to count a hundred and thirty new buildings on the Point, where within memory were only scattered farmhouses, and the half-dozen homes of lakefaring captains like Steve Taylor and Hank Maitland and Mack Shaw. They had their own private wharves where they laid their tall-sparred schooners up each fall, free from the winter's ice, after ranging all over the lakes with them in the navigation season.

Mr. Atkinson could not have built all of the tasteful new homes, for he folded up his carpenter's rule to the "Well done" of the great master builder recently, in his eighties. He came to the Point in the preceding century, when a good sympathetic house carpenter was very much needed for the faded attempt at settlement, and his talents found employment there, and on public work elsewhere, for sixty years. He was of great assistance to the government in laying out the provincial park and in developing the present home sites. Mr. Atkinson would succeed in any community when he entered, for he was a man of warm interest in his surroundings and of sympathy with their history. His family has the same characteristics.

When he came ashore this time in search of his son Fred we found him astride of a neighbor's roof amid a tat-a-tat-tat of shingle nails being driven home. He was one of a "bee" of four Presquile neighbors who were making a lady's roof tight in the cool of the evening, against the long-promised thundershowers of the prolonged heatwave. The family continues the Atkinson store and post office on Presquile Point, and have developed it into a general summer emporium the equal of anything between Cobourg and Belleville and the pride of the colony.

Some time ago, when one of the daughters was in the Brighton post office, she received an almost indecipherable letter from Vancouver begging the postmaster to look in the "old Presquile Cemetery" for a date on a tombstone which would determine the time of the death of either the sister or the mother of the sender, evidently a very old man.

No one at that time remembered that there ever had been a Presquile cemetery, beyond the obliterated one away up the isthmus where, according to a marker:

"In yonder sand dune lie the remains of the first settlers of Brighton district, Obadiah Simpson of North Carolina, 1755-1809, and his wife, Mary Lord, of West Chester County, N.Y., 1760-1808, U.E. Loyalists, DeLancey's Regt. Settled on Lot 4 Con 2, then Tp. of Cramahe, now Tp. of Brighton , March, 1796. Erected by their descendants, 1933."

Miss Atkinson knew of no other, but her father had told her of an old burying ground which had been abandoned after the first few discouraged settlers had removed to Gosport. He had seen a dozen inscribed stones in it. It was off the road to the Point, in an empty field. Miss Atkinson followed his remembered directions and, after careful search, found the place. Only one of the twelve stones was standing, all others, buried or removed. The remarkable thing was that this solitary remainder contained the name and the date for which the old man had flung his SOS to the winds of the postal service. Further correspondence revealed that he was over ninety, and the date was of importance in determining title to a little property. A singular instance of the working of the sympathetic Atkinson. interest.

IN the long delicious July twilight, bathed in the benediction of the summer stillness which is the sweetest memory of Presquile, we walked down, walked down, that lonesome road till we came to a nursery field of seedling firs, and across that to a high hank of sumachs and other shrubbery overmounded by wild grapevines. About them orange lilies and bluebells, self-seeded for a hundred years since escaping from pioneer gravesides, bravely blew their trumpets and made their silent music against him of the scythe and hourglass. Almost concealed by them stood the one remaining tombstone, yet testifying in lichen-muffled lettering:

"In memory of PARMELIA, wife of Alexr. Sutliff, died Sept. 4, 1865, aged 34 years 1 month and 3 days.

"Farewell my friends and children, dear,

I am not dead but sleeping here.

As I am now so you must be

Prepare in time to follow me."

THE GRIT LIGHT? That was one of the markers in the three-mile channel up to Gosport from Presquile Point in the ancient days. Its other name was The Dummy, indicating that it was only an unlighted beacon or day mark for the westerly limit of the long channel in from Lake Ontario to old Gosport and the later turnoff for the Murray Canal. Perhaps it was one of those pre-election harbor improvements which fizzled through a change of government or a too successful election appeal of the existing government. It vanished long ago, and its old stone filled crib, covered by six feet of water was a menace on the channel edge until recently.

The Presquile lights are among the oldest on the lake, planned in 1797, both the main light and range lights for Salt Point and the Carrying Place.

The main light, which has been shining since 1840, would still be an impressive monument of national development if the Trinity Brethren of Ottawa would put back its proper lantern room and give it a powerful distinctive lamp. Amid a multitude of blinking highway headlights and tail lights a flashing light-bulb, whether red or white is about as helpful as cigarette lighter.

"AN OLD PRESQUILER" LOOKING OVER HIS WORK

W. J. ATKINSON, master carpenter who built many of the 130 buildings on the peninsula and was the beloved postmaster when the Point took on its new lease of life as a desirable summer resort. In his eighties, Mr. Atkinson, who had made a long study of the earliest and later Presquile surveys, told Schooner Days that he believed the courthouse originally planned for Presquile stood on the site upon which Capt. Malcolm Shaw in 1885 had built the only brick house upon the Point, and that the open space immediately south of it was the Intended barracks square or parade ground, or public square. The house, modernized and improved, is still standing, but cottages march across the projected parade. Both these views below look north, the chimneys of the old Shaw house showing beside the poplars. In the foreground was the site of one of the range lights and the harbormaster's or light keeper's house. Right here "Yankee Martin," on a hen-roost raid, burned the schooner Grandfather Gibson and the Widow Selleck's boys were building in 1813. The Americans proclaimed the destruction of a new British man-of-war pierced for 14 guns.