Ups and Downs of a York-Built Hooker: Schooner Days MXXIV (1024)

by C. H. J. Snider

ABRAM BLOCK, SR., who came to this country in 1834 and founded the Block dynasty of Port Credit, got the 36-foot schooner Ann Brown, surviving from Mackenzie Rebellion and fur trading days, in 1854.

She was considered an old vessel then, but sound as a nut, stubby and black, with a yellow stripe along her side, and a tiny square fore topsail and tinier topgallantsail. She had a long bowsprit and one big jib, the common rig for small schooners when Toronto was York.

Abram used her in the local coasting trade to the growing Queen City of Canada. None of the Port Credit stonehookers, however wild, ever worked on Sunday, and no wind that blew could prevent Abram from bringing the little Ann Brown home Saturday night, wherever she was, so that he and the family could attend church Sunday morning. He was a devout Methodist.

The Ann Brown was employed in carrying grain and farm produce, tanbark, shingles, staves — which lined the Stave Bank Road in Port Credit with each winter's cutting — cordwood for Toronto stoves, and Toronto steamers, for they burned that instead of steam coal. Then there was building stone, sand and gravel, and paving stone for city streets and houses and the new fort, and cribstone for the multiplying wharves and breakwaters. This stone trade, or stonehooking as it was called, was the ultimate employment of all the little coasters.

Abram Block's eldest son Jim succeeded him, and then Abram Jr., and then Tom Block, a nephew, but it took four Blocks and three or four earlier masters to wear the Ann Brown out.

SHORT TRIUMPH

Abram Sr. wasn't satisfied with her weatherly qualities as compared with her centreboard rivals, and one quiet day when the Port was empty he and young Abe took the ballast out of her and hove her down until her keel was out of water like it was when she capsized off Manitoulin and wet the $500. To the exposed keel they spiked a 20-foot oak plank, eight inches deep and rounded at the ends, and then let her up on her feet again. Next day, in a brush with the best of the fleet, she beat them all going to windward. But the next day, anchored too close in on shore while stonehooking, she got aground on a boulder bar when the afternoon wind came in fresh. She bumped and pounded until the whole 8-inch shoe had been chewed off. When they got her afloat she was no better at beating to windward (unless she was loaded) than she had been thirty years before.

THE GREAT REBUILD

In 1876 Alex Blakely, the ship-carpenter who kept one of the five Port Credit hotels, rebuilt the Ann Brown for the Blocks, from a design suggested by a bright young lad named Abe Ferris, a good sailor and handy with tools. She was now in her forties, and showed it. Her transoms, the corners of her stern below, were pretty deep anyway, after the old style, and they had sagged until they dragged in the water. Her stem was a stout thick timber, rounded away in a sweep at the forefoot, but still heavy enough for an icebreaker. She had been painted black from the beginning, and was now pretty dingy.

Young Abe or Alex or both fitted a new false stem, with a neat little knee atop, widening below to meet the thickness of the old stem, so that she was lengthened a little on the bottom and had a sharper entrance, which gave her a better grip on the water. They tore out the old stern and shored the quarters up to give her a better clearance. And they spiked and strapped a rocker-shaped arrangement, a foot deep below her sound old keel which gave her an additional grip to prevent leeway. They also raised her rudderstock up to take advantage of the heightened stern.

ANN IN A CANOE

The greatest transformation was in her paint. They painted the bottom and up above the turn of the bilges, following the sheer of the plank at both ends, with the lead-color, a mixture of black, white, and blue, which the famous America had made popular. She won her Queen's Cup, the famous mug, painted that way. Above this they painted the Ann Brown's sides pure white, with three stripes of red, one for the rail cap, one for the coveringboard, and a third or quarter stripe, for where the coveringboard of her little raised quarter deck gave 6-inches more space over the cabin bunks below. The difficulty of bending plank to fit the quick turn of her bulwarks in the bows was met by fitting in short diagonal planking. So transformed, this was the Ann Brown which, anyone now alive can remember, a different creature from the tiny blackbird that went to Manitoulin after furs.

Her whole rig was modernized with three headsails in place of one and two gafftopsails. Square sails were abandoned.

But there was another improvement for which Abe Ferris was solely responsible. On the new surface of the improved stern he painted a "scene"—-the original Ann in all her beauty, seated in an Indian canoe. This was doubtless a delicate reference to the former fur trade in which the little lady prospered. The scene was revealed by the parting of painted crimson curtains, looped back by golden cords and tassels, "with a fringe on top" under the taffrail. The background for the lady in the canoe was an Upper Lake sunset above a blue lake with an evergreen shore, perhaps that of Manitoulin Island. On the archboard, which crosses the stern above the rudder-port, was painted in black letters on the plain white band:

"ANN BROWN of TORONTO"