Bowmanville. William Humber

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      Chapter One

      The Land is a Narrative

      “. . . landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.”

      – Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory

       “The land is a narrative”

      – William Least-Heat Moon, Prairyerth

       “We understand the width of the world, but its age is beyond our grasp.”

      – Phil Jenkins, An Acre of Time

      May is the most tranquil and loveliest of months in Ontario as new life and soft greens crowd the landscape. In 1842 settlement and the destruction of the original forest left a scarred and often dispirited scene. The old wilderness was in sad retreat, but it had yet to be replaced wholly by the patchwork quilt pattern of fields, small woodlots, hedgerows, wooden fences and brick homes which would characterize our image and fond memory of southern Ontario.

      In that spring Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine from whom he would one day cruelly separate, took a break from the novelist’s exhausting literary tour of America to visit Toronto and then travel on to Montreal. Of the Ontario countryside Dickens would later write, “There was the swamp, the bush, the perpetual chorus of frogs, the rank unseemly growth, the unwholesome steaming earth.”¹ The idea was informed by the total experience of Ontario and we will never know if on that trip to Montreal he slept on the portion of the journey past Bowmanville or was able to view it with any degree of fascination.

      The desultory appearance of the fledgling British colony marked the final stages of the destruction of what had been there only fifty years previously. John Squair described its features as consisting of “. . . the rich and varied forest growth . . . on the best clay loam soils it was essentially a beech and maple forest . . . on the lighter, sandy soils also there was often a fine growth of hardwood . . . in the wet lands, such as in the bottoms of valleys eroded by the streams, there were splendid areas of white cedar, with a large percentage of birch, elm, ash, basswood, pine and hemlock, and, sometimes, in the wettest places, the tamarack.”²

      This was the world that had been populated by aboriginal inhabitants and was virtually undisturbed except for necessary pathways such as that from the site of present day Bowmanville north to Lake Scugog. This Indian trail passing through the future locations of Hampton and Enniskillen would one day become what is now known as the “Old Scugog Road.”

      But there was a time before even the immense darkness of the forest and its native population, when the region was covered by the last Ice Age. A glacial sheet covered all of this territory so that it resembled the gravest portions of the Arctic and Antarctic. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia this Ice Age conformed to the Pleistocene epoch of geologic time, “. . . during which periodic, extensive glacial activity occurred in many parts of the world. This period began two to three million years ago and lasted until 10,000 years before the present.”³ It is the conceit of humankind that the life of several million years can be reduced to so little space in the history of an area.

      As the Ice Age slowly closed the glacial sheet stopped at a point which, in the area of Bowmanville, conformed to what would be the northern concessions of Darlington and Clarke Townships. A great ridge of deposits was left here to become the Pine Ridge and below which the springs arose which flow south as the two main creeks, Bowmanville and Soper, which define Bowmanville’s old western and eastern boundaries.

      The ice continued its retreat, and as it did and temperatures rose, a great lake known as Iroquois filled a basin to the south which conforms to present Lake Ontario. It was in fact larger and covered the southern parts of the later township of Darlington to a point roughly equivalent to the fourth concession. All of Bowmanville as we know it was underwater.