End of the "ANN BROWN": Schooner Days MXXV (1025)

by C. H. J. Snider

Fortune of a Fur Trader

IN 1902—subject to correction—arose the Belmont Yacht or Dinghy Club among Toronto's aquatic organizations. Any members surviving? If so, please give us a shout. Our impression is that this was the predecessor of the junior RCYC which now flourishes every summer with its own fleet and clubhouse, on the south bank of the lagoon.

The club we have in mind was for small sailors at the Island. They decided to have a flagship, and went out to Port Credit to buy one.

By this time the 36-foot Ann Brown, surviving from Mackenzie Rebellion and furtrading days, had been laid up for two seasons, her life's work done.

The club purchasing committee bought her for $25 as she lay on the ways in a corner of Miller and Block's shipyard.

Abram Block, Jr., to whom she had descended, had been trying for a twelvemonth to bring himself to break her up for firewood, but it was too much like, breaking up the cradle in which he had been rocked as a baby. He had sailed with his father or brother in her since he was eight years old. He was so glad to be spared the task, that for another $10 he made her tight enough to float to Toronto, gave her one coat of paint, white with red bottom, to cover her long faded finery, launched her for the boys, and helped them fit her out with what canvas was left of hers.

He had a heart as big as a barrel, and he liked boys. Before he would take a dollar from their treasury he made sure that their elders understood their investment and its hazards, and approved, of all.

So one fine summer day they sailed the Ann Brown, with her patched and ragged sails, down from Port Credit in a spanking sou'wester. Six chosen argonauts of the Belmont Club performed this feat, with three men (combined ages well over 21 years) at the helm.

They anchored her, still afloat and not leaking VERY much after her two-year dryout, off the senior RCYC moorings on the Island shore of the Bay. The club used her as a turning buoy, for their little regattas, and she looked swell.

But they had not taken into consideration the problem of winter storage. They left her where she was until in an October gale she dragged on to a shoal west of the channel that still leads into the island lagoon, and there she got frozen in. The bay froze solid, three feet deep, fifty years ago.

Iceboaters used the frozen hulk as a turning buoy, too. Some of the late Lou Marsh's friends wrecked Lou's iceboat, turning too short around the stranded vessel. The long hickory jibboom which had extended the original long bowsprit of the little hooker stood the strain much better than the iceboat did. Lou was a patient man with his friends, but this tried his patience sorely. We weren't in on this scrape, but well remember carrying down two stout oak two-by-fours and a dozen long threaded bolts with nuts, from Peterkin's mill on Bay street, to effect repairs.

The little old hooker did not survive the winter of such shocks. The ice and skaters' bonfires and just plain thieves did to her what seventy years of hard and honorable service had failed to do. She broke up. Her bottom must be under the sand somewhere yet near the RCYC.

But what became of the Belmont Yacht Club?

In mid-January, 1903, the Ann Brown lay forlorn in the ice of Toronto Bay, a drift of snow curled against her bows in frozen mockery of the bright spray they had dashed aside in seventy years sailing between the old harbor of York and the Straits of Mackinaw.