McCallum, Lad From the Hebrides: Schooner Days MXVII (1017)

by C. H. J. Snider

Idyll of a Lost Port - II

STROMNESS is a saltwater seaport in the Orkneys. We've been talking of its freshwater namesake in Ontario.

Lachlan McCallum was born in the Isle of Tiree, in the Hebrides, March 14, 1823, but he had Stromness of the Orkneys in his mind when he came to Canada in 1842 to seek his fortune in Canada West.

He found it at Broad Creek in Haldimand County, Ontario, where the Feeder Canal forked, one branch going west to Port Maitland, the other north to the Dunnville dam, where a lock lifted it to the Grand River. The Feeder Canal not only fed the Welland. A hundred years ago it was an essential part of Grand River navigation between Brantford and Buffalo, with regular steamboat service for passengers and freight.

Broad Creek was at this time a hamlet which fed on the Feeder. The pioneer steamers panted from woodpile to woodpile, and here, at the fork in the canal was one of the places where they fueled. They all burned cordwood, and the country round about had still to be cleared of its original growth of hard and softwood. It was good farm land.

Like other Scots, Lachlan knew opportunity when he saw it. He began by cutting firewood, but ended by possessing farms that grew it, steamers that used it, timber limits, lumber mills, stores, a seat in two Parliaments and a desk in the Red Chamber at Ottawa and a mansion on the Dunnville fork of the Feeder.

He earned them all. He became the main stay of the Broad Creek hamlet, made it a port, sending vessels all over the Great Lakes, and renamed it Stromness after the headland of storms or headland of the stream, whichever the original Norse word means.

This crossroads corner supplied at least five entries—a barquentine, a river barge, and three steamers for the first Register of Shipping set up by the new Dominion of Canada. Now it is only a one-street hamlet on a gravel road again, fronting a ditch filling with bullrushes and water lilies, navigable with difficulty by a canoe.

Canada's No. 1 registration was the tug Mary Ann, built by Lachlan in his shipyard at the forks. Her sister the Jessie was another of his early tugs. Under the name Philadelphia she was still puffing and panting in 1931. The R. L. Howard, built for him by D. McSwain in 1856, was another. And another, which should be well known to Torontonians, was the Walter T. Robb, built for him by George Hardison in 1864.

The tugs were for the purpose of towing great rafts of timber towards the sea, or vessels laden with lumber piled as high as their sheerpoles or river barges without sails, which handled Canada's increasing grain crop.

The river barge Moderate, 320 tons register and 18,000 bushels capacity, which Lachlan built in his Stromness shipyard in 1863 — John Robinson was the master carpenter —- was the largest yet attempted. She reaped a harvest in the American War.

In 1874 the canal-bank yard turned out its masterpiece, the three-masted "barque" M. C. Upper, or Mary Upper, 140 feet long, 26 feet beam and 11 ft. 6 inches deep in the hold. She may have been a barquentine or a topsail schooner, square rigged forward. She was registered in Hamilton, which had, in 1874, this one "barque," one "brig," the Cambria (really a brigantine), 23 schooners, 11 steamers, 2 barges and 2 scows, 7,861 registered tons of shipping. Stromness never had as much shipping as that but the feeder canal was then crammed with a continuous flow of traffic—fishboats for Lake Erie schooners and barges for plaster stone, wheat, lumber, tanbark, stavebolts, shinglebolts, and long rafts of big timbers—the big vessels could only half load, for 7 feet was the greatest depth of water and that was cut down to four or five in the new century.

The other vessels built at the crossroads were registered in Dunnville, the nearest port of customs entry. All six should have had "of STROMNESS" on their sterns, for the valiant Lachlan had had the port at the forks so renamed before 1864. Lachlan is said to have had another Jessie, a large two-masted schooner. This may have been a purchased or chartered vessel, the Jessie of Port Stanley, 250 tons register which was lost with all hands on Wicked Point on Lake Ontario, Oct. 31st, 1870.

Lachlan may have built other vessels at Stromness for himself or others and owned many, but he was not one to put too many eggs in one basket. He did build a fine three-story mansion of white brick, with tall chimneys of three moulded brick flues each, half a mile west of the shipyard, with a farmhouse of cement block nearer the roadway, and a carriage house and stables and barns behind the mansion. In Stromness he had a large hotel moved bodily across the town line. And he built the finest corner store in the county - 50 panes of glass in its front windows, inside it the post office and the telegraph office, and long counters and shelves filled with dry goods and groceries and hardware; all the necessities of country life, and many of its products, cheese, butter, eggs, meat and vegetables. These last all came by farm wagon, the first by canal boat, steamer and schooner.

The telegraph clicked all day, three blacksmith forges glowing all night, for there was always a nag needing a shoe, or a barge needing a pump rod, or the shipyard clamoring for chainplates or capstans, or shipnails or timber toggles.

Lachlan died Jan. 13, 1903, after having been in Parliament thirty-six years, five years in the first House of Commons after Confederation, two years in the Ontario House of Assembly, thirteen more in the Commons, then sixteen in the Senate. After him Stromness subsided to its Broad Creek beginning. It wasn't the railways only. It was good roads and rubber that strangled the Feeder. Its once thronging highway, jammed with slow-moving traffic, became a grassed-over farm lane.

The last little tug was built in the old shipyard thirty years ago. There was then so little water in the Feeder that it was hard to get her out. Now there is so little water that it is hard to find the Feeder at all under its bridges, bulrushes and lily pads.

The big store is silent, empty of most everything but a great collection of calendar tops and framed photographs. Very large ones of the Senator and Sir Wilfrid Laurier hang side by side. Arthur Clarke gives courteous service at the gas pump at very reasonable rates. And the black spaniel sleeps on the doorstep.

The Feeder has been filled in here and there, and buried under bridges of all sorts, from planks on sticks to solid concrete. One might still get through the bulrushes and white waterlilies with a canoe, and it might be a lovely twenty-mile trip to take.

Senator the Hon. Lachlan McCallum