Smiths Falls, Schooner Port!: Schooner Days MCCXXX (1230)

by C. H. J. Snider

PIONEERS planted honey locusts in Upper Canada to they had left behind - the laburnums dripping golden cascades in England, the acacias which had adorned estates from which the Loyalists were driven in the American revolution.

Sight and scent of the mauve-and-green tassels beloved of the bees, among the graceful fern-like pinnated leaves of Ontario locust trees, ever recall old mansions of mellowed red brick. They are so often found bowered among these crooked rough-barked giants waving pale green fronds higher than the wide-mouthed chimney tops. Lovely trees they are, murmurous of mellow prosperity, distilled from the hopes and fears and lives and loves of three, four, five generations.

There must have been honey locusts in Smiths Falls, Ont., when the schooner Acacia was built there in 1873. Many of us, wrong botanically but right in popular usage, confound the honey locusts with the Acacia. Alfred Ayearst of Kingston, this vessel's first owner, may be forgiven if if he made a botanical error choosing her name. If not a honey locust, and built not of locust wood but of good Ontario white oak, she was certainly a honey of a schooner for forty years. Whoever christened her may have chosen "Acacia" because he shared the common belief that there there was nothing luckier than three A's in the name on a vessel box and stern.

BUILT BACK IN THE BUSH

Smiths Falls, in Lanark county, between the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers, and 60 miles from the nearest corner of Lake Ontario, is not the place where one would look for a Great Lakes schooner's launching ways. But fellow Canadians should not forget the 125 miles of Rideau Canal navigation completed in 1832 by the sweat of Imperial soldiers and the taxpayers of Great Britain for the defense of Canada West. The idea was that if the St. Lawrence were impassable above Montreal, by reason of its rapids and enemy menace, a backdoor route up the Ottawa river and through the Rideau and the Cataraqui to Lake Ontario at Kingston could give Upper Canada the support of the British army and the British navy, which had saved the province in the War of 1812.

This precaution which cost the motherland millions of sterling proved unnecessary, but it provided Canada with a commercial highway of great value in opening up the province twenty years before the first railways chipped the shell. It put Smiths Falls on the maritime map, and it made the capital of Canada out of Bytown on the Ottawa.

LOTS OF TRAFFIC

Even up to the present century passenger steamers and tows of tugs and barges, and little wood schooners and sloops, navigated the Rideau route between Ottawa and Kingston. The Blue Barge line made two trips a week from Ottawa to Oswego, where it connected with Erie Canal traffic to New York.

Smiths Falls was not so far back in the bush as sailors might think. Several steamers were built there, or near there, and more than one tall-sparred sailing vessel. There was plenty of good white oak for timbers, frames, and planking, and good white pine for decks, quickwork, and masts.

One schooner was the Dundonald, 262 tons register, built in the canal in 1859, re-rigged and changed in name two years later to the brigantine City of Toronto—one of several vessels owned by J. G. Laidlaw of this port. The brigantine George Laidlaw, built in 1856, made a voyage to the West Indies.

This Dundonald, her name was changed, made two round trips between Port Whitby and Oswego in April, 1861, delivering 21,654 bushels of Canadian wheat in eleven days.