W. L. M's Type at Van Wagner's Beach: Schooner Days CMLXXX (980)

by C. H. J. Snider

"A wet sheet and a flowing sea

And a wind that follows fast..."

IT was all that and then some, last week end's winter preview, with homes washed away at the head of the lake, and the package freighter Weyburn rolling in to Toronto, rail under and with her stokehold flooded waist deep.

Capt. Lepine and Chief Adams deserve medals for bringing her in at all. So do all the crew, and especially the "black gang," who wouldn't have had a Chinaman's chance in that bargain basement if she had gone all the way. "We hadda stay with her," said one of them, deprecating praise, "there wasn't any place else to go." Heroes for all that.

It isn't often we get gales of hurricane force from the east, on our lake. Hurricane force is 65 miles an hour and up. This snorter was going 80.

There may have been other east gales as heavy, but the only one Schooner Days recalls was in April, 1907, when linemen and troubleshooters in Toronto were routed out of their beds to save the power lines at the Burlington Beach cutoff. They fought all night under the swaying poles, building up ramparts of sandbags to keep back the monstrous waves, and they won. But what a fight!

MAN WHO MADE MILLS GO

Van Wagner's Beach, which took such punishment, has been Van Wagner's for 150 years or more.

It is about four miles east of the swing bridge that crosses the channel into Burlington Bay.

At the end of the 18th century, Henry Van Wagner, master millwright—that is, an expert who locates and builds mills—rowed all the way from Syracuse, N.Y., to Lake Ontario and came on to Niagara and around the head of the lake, locating and constructing mills for settlers. His own farm was back from the lake on the Stoney Creek road. Here his son, Peter S. Van Wagner, was born in 1818.

When 8 years old, Peter and another boy came down to the creek mouth to fish. They saw a smart white schooner at anchor off the bar. Boats put off from her, carrying heavy boxes to the beach. It took several men to lift each case on to the farm wagons that backed down to the road end. One of the boxes split. Some shiny things fell out into the sand. Peter and his chum picked them up afterwards. They were "half as long as a finger, no thicker than wheat straws, but square in shape, with a letter on the end, only whichever way you looked at it the letter seemed backwards."

Printer's type.

PRE-REBELLION DAYS

Wm. Lyon Mackenzie had been printing the Colonial Advocate in York since he lost the libel action brought by Wm. Hamilton Merritt at Queenston, but, as the author of The Golden Dog said, savage feelings were evoked by every issue of Mackenzie's paper.

So savage that on June 25th, 1826, while the Mackenzie Lyon was away, two of the Babys, Charles and Raymond, a Mr. Lyon, of another species, secretary to Sir Peregrine Maitland, lieutenant governor, and Charles Richardson, James King, Charles Heward, Peter Macdougall, Samuel Peters Jarvis, and other young Tory bloods and scions of the Family Compact, broke into the Advocate office. It was at the northwest corner of Frederick and Front streets. They could not find the little rebel-to-be, but they made a mess of the place and threw the press into the bay, from the Merchants' Wharf at the foot of Frederick street. The wharf owner was inspector of flour, pot and pearlash, shop, still and tavern duties, and collector of customs. A sound government man: Mr. Allan.

The young gentleman had to pay £625 damages later, but the friends of Mackenzie feared another raid and tar-and-feathering for their beloved leader should he return. Gathering together what was left of the printing plant ashore and fishing up what they could from the harbor, they loaded all at dead of night aboard the fast sailing schooner Britannia, then lying in port.

OLD TIME CLIPPER

This Britannia, a topsail schooner of sharp model and notable ability for windward work in heavy weather, had been built by Capt. Roberts of Wellington Square in 1819, and was the property of Matthew Crooks, Niagara merchant. A this date she was probably commanded by Capt. Miller of Oakville, or Capt. Boylan. Little Peter Van Wagner was too young to master such details when he saw her, for th the first time, the following morning, dipping and curtseying at the bar off Van Wagner's Beach, while boats alongside ferried heavy boxes to the shore. But, an observant child, in manhood he confirmed every detail of her description and was, in turn, corroborated by Alexander-the-Great Muir, who later sailed the Britannia, and by a very ancient tintype in the Wilson family of Oakville sailors. This is one of the earliest photographs of an Ontario sailing vessel, taken at Chippawa long afterwards.

Mackenzie's supporters came with their teams—he was solid with the farmers—and the uprooted plant of the Colonial Advocate was distributed piecemeal in various haymows and feed bins, and at length reassembled at Thorold.

Peter Van Wagner long treasured these half-finger-length souvenirs. He was Staff Sergt. to Col. Macnab in the Mackenzie rebellion, eleven years afterwards.

WRECKED AT THE BEACH

Forty years after the Britannia episode, the same spot was the scene of excitement similar to last week end. Two piers had been built at the beach, with a horse-operated grain elevator on each, at the foot of the Stoney Creek road, one on each side. Squire Williamson of Stoney Creek was one of the proprietors. Here grain was shipped out for Kingston, or to go overseas.

Iced to the crosstrees and unmanageable in an easterly gale and with less chance of making port than the Weyburn had last Saturday, a three-masted American schooner drove in where the Britannia had lain at anchor—a helpless wreck. She wag the C. G. Alvoord, rebuilt from the California in 1863 at Sackets Harbor, and at this time owned in Detroit. She did not break up at once, and the crew were all taken off safely, leaving her to become an iceberg from the bursting spray. She was grain laden, from the Welland Canal, and had been trying to get to Oswego before the freezeup.

For weeks, on into the new year, Peter S. Van Wagner, then a man of substance, with a farm and storehouses, was busy selling the salvaged grain for the owners, or storing it, as fast as it could be taken out when the hatches were pried up.

Teams came alongside the schooner where she lay in the ice that had formed around her. But a mild spell broke up her protection, and an other gale finished her. Somewhere near Van Wagner's Beach her name board still decorates what was driving shed on the old Van Wagner farm. Her main mast long lay buried in the sand, far above low watermark, and her rudder slowly rotted away down to the pintles, farther along the beach.

Through the kindness of Chester B, Hamilton, Jr., of Toronto, Schooner Days has been favored with a copy of the diary Peter S. VanWagner kept of that exciting winter eighty odd years ago.

NATURAL AND UNNATURAL CAUSES

High wind and high water in Lake Ontario since the Ogoki diversion are, of course, the immediate causes of last week's destruction at Crescent Beach and Van Wagner's, but older residents with good reason put the primary cause farther back.

Pavement and drainage improvements have materially altered the relationship between Lake Ontario and the inpouring creeks. They no longer enter the lake with the same volume of water and silt as formerly. Some, like Stoney Creek, do not enter the lake at all, except in spring floods, but die in ponds behind the gravel bars and causeways which have choked them.

Up to 1907 centuries of steady flow built up and maintained a substantial buffer bar of sand, a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, at some distance from the true beach. In that year along came large dredgers and pumped away the whole bar in one season's operation.

So now the lake billows roll in like tidal waves, instead of spending their force on the buffer beyond.

With historic irony the sand dredger that took away the protecting bar forty-three years ago was named the Commodore Jarvis— after the grandson of Samuel Peters Jarvis, who paid his share of the damage to Mackenzie's press a hundred and twenty-four years ago.

SHIP THAT BROUGHT IT—the "BRITANNIA", of all things!—From a very old photograph belonging to the Wilson family of lake captains out of Oakville.