Little Lost Ports: Port Granby: Schooner Days CCLIII (253)

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Bowered in green and drowsing in the sun, Port Granby feels the sap of new life stir in its veins when summer reopens the half dozen homes which have been closed all winter and thereby increases the population by one hundred and fifty percent.

Port Granby?

You may find it on the road map and in the postal guide still, but for the sailorman it is now as nebulous as that harbor in Ararat, where Noah moored the ark.

You could sail up to it and past it a dozen times, and never see it. The Canadian Hydrographic Survey chart of Lake Ontario dated 1923 shows no sign of it. yet it is well enough landmarked. It is so pretty, so unspoiled by service stations, hot-dog stands and tourist cabins, that you must excuse me from publishing directions to it by road. It is farther than Lovekin and nearer than Newtonville; fifty miles from Toronto and ten from Port Hope. It is not on the highway nor on the railway - so leave it in its peace.

Granby was the first name; still used sometimes to the great annoyance of postal people, who are sure addressers should know that Port Granby is in Ontario and that Granby is in Quebec. Both get their tangled names from John Manners, Marquis of Granby, target of Junius, Colonel of the Blues in the Horse Guards, master-general of the ordinance, and finally commander-in-chief, through some luck and some talent displayed in Germany in the Seven Years War. "A road near the Village of Granby" is mentioned in the Upper Canada legislative papers in 1841 and in 1846 William Rowe and others were petitioning for an act to incorporate the "Granby Harbor Company." The act, passed in 1848, fixed the name as "Port Granby."

Seventy years ago Port Granby shipped out 95,000 bushels of Durham County barley in one season, besides a quantity of wheat and rye, a little lumber, more shingles, thousands of cords of hardwood, and hundreds of long masts from the pine ridges of Clarke and Hope townships to the north.

It was all wood and grain going out and money coming in, in those days; the export trade was over $200,000 a year. Port Granby imported little - sometimes a schooner broad in a load of apple trees or nursery stock, or settlers' effects, but the country was self-sustaining.

So was the port. There were three grain elevators, a gristmill, a sawmill, a distillery, a malthouse, a schoolhouse, a Methodist church, two taverns, and thirty or forty happy families in the village. A census taken in 1862-63 found a population of 250. Whiskey at 25 cents for the four-quart pailful was carried to the cradlers, rakers and binders reaping barley by hand in blazing August weather; when the price went up to 50 cents a gallon there were loud protests and threats to join the blue-ribbon brigade. For seventy-five cents a fiddler would saw the strings from nine o'clock at night till four in the morning, for the polkas, mazurkas, schottisches, waltzes, round and square dances, which whiled away the winter evenings. The long ballroom above the driving shed and stable of March's Port Granby Hotel was the grand rendezvous.

David March was hotelkeeper, carpenter, builder, postmaster, grain dealer, elevator operator and general merchant, which means in country parlance that among his multifarious duties he "kept store." Beneath the dancers' feet, in the draught driving shed below, buffalo-robed cutters and sleights would rank runner to runner and their steeds snorting to the music as they munched their oats. There were good times in Port Granby, winter and summer.

The Elliotts were the big shots of the place, George senior built the grist mill and still house, George junior one of the elevators. David March and James Robinson were the other elevator owners. David Carson also dealt in grain. Mrs. Carson kept the general store fifty years ago. Thomas Lyon ran the mill in 1871. Wm. Goodenough and Joseph Snow made boots and shoes. Wm. Bradley was the blacksmith and Thomas H. Kinsman made edged tools. Hendersons, Robertsons, Rowes, Wades and Welshes were farmers with homes in the village. The old Montreal Telegraph Company, preceding the Great Northwestern., had an office in Port Granby and William Colough was the telegraph operator. John Gifford was constable.

Port Granby lay between two fine headlands - Bouchette Point and Crysler Point on the chart - past the Peach Stone and towards the end of the Highlands of Newcastle. It was beside a creek - Decker's Creek -big enough to run a sailboat, though too small to berth a schooner. The best lakemark for it was, and is, the L-shaped grove of poplars on the high land to the eastward. "Lay" you may notice, not "lies." Port Granby as a port, has been dead an buried all this century and longer. As a village it still lives and has a post office. Four families inhabit it all year round, and ten in summer, for it is a lovely spot.

Of this port, which once had launching ways, elevators, a storehouse, and a dock, nothing remains but a 700-lb. anchor, bedded in the lake. This was used for mooring vessels waiting to load at the pier, or for heaving them off when they were ready to sail. It was buoyed, and they would run their lines to it and haul out, to the tune of captain pauls and windlass brakes. Of the pier nought is left but a few big stones which once filled its cribs, and were too heavy for the stonehookers to steal. There are also some of the ninety square timbers of beech and maple which, bolted together in a solid mass, thirty-six feet each way, formed the pier head.

Stones, timbers and anchor are all under the waves, visible only to the airman or the gull. Even as they have disappeared so too have the elevators, storehouse, distillery and mills vanished under green ripples of grass and billows of shrubbery. The only indication of them are a few posts and some field stoned that once formed a foundation wall. The sites of the buildings are traceable from the green lines of the wagon ramps, once thronged with tossing teams of farm horses. One long log-walled tavern has vanished completely from its knoll. The other- March's Port Granby Hotel - has lost its characteristic stoop and ballroom and driving shed, and survives as a small neat building embowered in late-blooming lilacs and bridal wreath. The wagon road which once formed the main street to the pier is now a grassy lane, gate-crossed and almost overgrown with old garden shrubs. Projected, it lines up with the left-over cribstones, submerged pierhead, and long-bedded anchor.

Every anchor has its story, and next week we shall hear some of those shackled to this Port Granby ground tackle by the links of memory.

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Barquentines and Topsail Schooners

Sir, - I was pleased to read "Compiler of Schooner Days" reply to my letter in your issue re "the Rig of the Alembic" as he evidently is acquainted with the subject and I can therefore talk to him. My seven years' experience in deep water sailing vessels has not been in vain either.

He says "A barquentine's foremast is usually in three sections." Is this an admission that it may sometimes be in two sections as on the "Alembic," and the vessel still be a barquentine? The fact that the mast of the Alembic is in two parts only is because it is all that is necessary to carry the topsail and topgallant yards on a small vessel. The upper section of the mast on he Alembic has only the weight of the upper topsail and topgallant yards to support as the lower topsail yard is supported from the cap of the lowermast, but on a larger vessel the third section would be necessary to support the topgallant and royal yards. His argument that because the Alembic's mast is in two parts it makes her a topsail schooner is of no value, she did not need a third mast.

But he goes on to say that "a barquentine has no gaff and boom sail between her foremast and mainmast except in rare instances when they do carry a fore trysail," admission again that in these "rare instances" the vessel is still a barquentine. But he says "The foretrysail on a barquentine in these instances is a low sail for storm use," well the heel of the gaff would hoist three-quarters of the way up the lowermast, anyway, and could be reefed when necessary the same as a spanker. A fore trysail is a fore trysail whether high or low and is made according to requirements, so in these rare instances when she does not automatically become a topsail schooner, as my friend has admitted.

But, when a vessel carries a square foresail in addition to topsails and topgallant sail, she certainly becomes a barquentine, her rig on the fore is exactly the same as on a barque, with foresail, topsails, topgallant sail and no doubt a royal, and her having or not having a gaff and boom fore trysail would make no difference, she would in no sense become a topsail schooner on that account.

The topsail schooners I have seen were vessels schooner rigged but also carried on her foremast a fore yard and two topsail yards and the square sails carried were upper and lower topsails only - no foresail on the fore yard. I forget now whether a topgallant sail was carried on some. Of course, on a barquentine, a main topmast staysail is preferable to a foe trysail and the reason is evident, but whichever she carried she could not be called a topsail schooner.

My goodness, if she had a gaff and boom trysail abaft her foremast, how on earth would they get it over the cook's funnel when the order was given to "Bout Ship"? This is a joke. Excuse me. I have read this letter to my wife, she says it is all Greek to her.

A.K. LONG

Mr. Long considers the late Alembic a barquentine because she had a square foresail. Schooner Days calls her a schooner because she had a schooner's foremast and schooner's foresail. Lloyd's latest survey described her as "an auxiliary twin -screw three-masted schooner." Here the case closes, with sympathetic regard for Mrs. Long's expressed opinion. COMPILER OF SCHOONER DAYS.

PORT GRANBY TO-DAY—All that is left of the old "port" is the sturdy figure of Edward Thomas Brown, now in his 86th year, one of the mariners of sixty years ago, and postmaster of the little village. The pretty modern cottage on the hill is the summer home of Mr. anad Mrs. J. Arthur Lane, of General Motors, Oshawa. Mrs. Lane is a daughter of Postmaster Brown. Between the present cottage and the dwindling waters of Decker's Creek once flourished three grain elevators, a shipyard, warehouse and mill—all long since vanished, with the pier which projected into the lake for a hundred yards.