Beehive on Lake Erie: Schooner Days CMXXXIV (934)

by C. H. J. Snider

SAWMIILLS ringing, gristmills singing, shipyard mauls and mallets thudding—raft and scowmen hauling, bawling — sleighbells jingling, wagons creaking—day and night and night and day—the three miles along the Big Otter between Vienna village and Burwell-on-Lake Erie were the maddest and merriest in Elgin County, eighty years ago.

Port Burwell had swallowed Estherville and was bursting at the seams with 700 population. Two hundred of these were sailor folk, twenty-eight captains among them. There were three shipyards right in the village and planing mills, saw mills, grist mills, flour mills and plaster mills to load the vessels. Schooners were in such demand that they were sometimes bought and sold on the stocks three times over before launching.

The Youell brothers and W. Y. Emery had flour and grist mills and a shipyard on the east side of the creek above the bridge. Big Dan Freeman's yard was on the west side, below the bridge. He was a young lawyer from Simcoe, in Norfolk County, who made the chips fly and ships fly when he laid aside his gown.

BIG DAN

Six-foot-six and weighing three hundredweight, Big Dan always did things in a big way. He had a country law practice, and this shipyard, and a bog-iron "mine," and a mansion unfinished, in Iroquois Park on the west hill. He built the Lady Dufferin, the Lady Macdonald and the Edward Blake, big three-masters of over 300 tons register and fit to cross the ocean. The Blake did, two or three times. When iron, lumber and shipping slumped off he went to the Golden Gate, and made another million, and endowed the University of Southern California.

PINCER TOES

Capt. David M. Foster, one of Port Burwell's twenty-eight vessel captains, and also a master shipwright, had his yard farther down on the east side of the creek, below the new brick hotel. Like George W. Pontine, and Lemuel McDermand, and the McDurward brothers, who were master builders, too, Capt. Foster would build you a schooner where you wanted it, in his shipyard, or in your barnyard, or on the beach, or anywhere on Lake Erie where the good white oak and white pine grew It was this splendid timber which "made" Port Burwell. The little place built schooners for all over the lower lakes.

Capt. Foster, nicknamed "Pincer-toes," was breezy as Big Dan, and as much given to jokes. He sailed his own vessels, and sailed them barehanded and barefooted. He could pick up a match from the deck with his toes and light his pipe with it. His favorite table trick in the cabin was to start yarning about the rats in his ship, if he had a new hand in his crew. Looking the newcomer in the eye, he would expatiate upon the rodents' ferocity while he was quietly extending his bare foot under the table towards the fleshy part of the man's leg. With his prehensile toes he would give him such a nip that he would yell "One's got me now!"—and all hands would turn to to capture the phantom.

HARVEST OF THE BEARD

Pincertoes was as good a talker as Big Dan, and once won a bet from the latter by persuading a local bluebeard, inordinately proud of his acreage of whiskers, into giving him an option on his frontline foliage at a high figure. Getting him into the barber's chair, he shore away the starboard section, and then said: "That's all I can take now. Keep the option, and I'll crop the port side when I feel like it."

The victim, seeing himself in the glass, gave him double the option to complete the harvest at once. A torchlight procession took him home.

SCHOONERS THE BIG EXPORT

Yes sir. Port Burwell was a lively place in schooner days, and known all over the lakes. The good white oak and white pine and the good workmanship that went into Port Burwell vessels made them wanted wherever they went—and they went everywhere even to Europe and South America. Of fifty-four vessels built in the port twenty-six found owners on Lake Ontario. Very few ended their days on their native Lake Erie.

WHAT IS IT? WHEN? WHERE?

NOT PORT BURWELL ON LAKE ERIE, nor Barrie, nor Orillia on Lake Simcoe, but - "all you young fellows who follow the lake" have until next Saturday to get your guesses into Schooner Days.