Raw Life. J. Patrick Boyer

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      Pioneer William Spreadborough’s wife stands behind the fence while he and their four boys are out in front. The family’s hard work and pursuit of quality are displayed in their cabin: logs squared and interlocked at the corners, a sloping and shingled roof, framed windows with curtained glass panes, and the fence built of split rail.

      General economic development created a demand for labourers, millwrights, woodsmen, factory-hands, and teamsters. Several more tradesmen were arriving in Bracebridge each year. All the while, the forestry economy in Muskoka was keeping several thousand hard at work logging, droving, and milling. In the process, Muskoka was achieving a diverse mixture of peoples with a wide range of skills and aptitudes, many with strong backs, a large number with intelligent minds, all propelled by stubborn determination.

      Although people enjoyed robust life in a natural setting, fitting their activities rhythmically with the district’s alternating seasons, the ever-present hardships and toil made Muskoka an inhospitable and unnatural home for malingerers. People did not come to the frontier to claim land or work in a mill expecting a frivolous escapade. A few were able to get by doing little work; these were rich rascals, the “remittance men” sent to Muskoka by socially prominent British families to remove their embarrassing presence from respectable society, but at least the money sent out, or remitted, to them in the distant colony helped Muskoka’s cash-short economy. Another plus was how a number of these dandy misfits added lustre to the community’s arts and letters clubs and early drama societies.

      England also contributed to Muskoka’s population mix from its poorest classes. Here again the British adopted an out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach, “solving” their social problems by merely shipping them overseas: prisoners to the penal colony of distant Australia, orphans and street urchins to the farms of Canada. Thousands of “orphans, waifs, and strays” were shipped to rough and rural pioneering Canada where struggle awaited them. Muskoka had the highest concentration of these “home children” child labourers — so named because they came from homes for orphans — thanks to the district’s settlement and development between 1870 and 1930 coinciding exactly with the duration of a deportation program emptying out the orphanages, poor houses, and slums of the “Mother Country” into Britain’s colonies. Many fetched up as indentured child labourers on the farms of Muskoka’s townships, most badly exploited, unschooled and unsupervised, overworked and underfed, melding into the economic underclass that was forming in rural Muskoka on farms that barely sustained those living and working on them.

      Decades later, William E. Taylor, himself the son of an eleven-year-old orphan who laboured as an indentured home boy on a Canadian farm, explained that these youngsters were sent “in a mixture of intense confusion, terror, child courage and, occasionally, optimism. They absorbed the shock of early Canada, cultural and geographic; lived a grinding pioneer life we can now barely comprehend; fought, died, or somehow survived the holocaust of trench warfare; struggled through the Depression and in turn, watched their own children enter another war.” Taylor noted how greatly “their lives and thinking contrasts with the current Canadian mood of self-pity and dependence.” These world-wise and stoic children, who grew into adulthood and in most cases formed Muskoka families of their own, constituted another component of the human wave that reached the district during its settlement years and melded into the hard-love sentiment typifying Muskokans.

      Wherever or however they lived, Muskokans needed goods and services, and enterprising settlers were establishing a supply to meet demand. By the early 1870s, services available to people in Bracebridge and its surrounding townships included those of a doctor, notary public, conveyancer, druggist, music teacher, and several land surveyors. Among the community’s tradesmen could be found a house builder, carpenter, window glazier, butcher, and baker. There was the post office, a newspaper, a blacksmith, the stage coach service, and hoteliers, each in their way helping people communicate and travel.

      This rutted mud roadway had pole fences to keep cows out of gardens and people walking in the darkness of night on the path. The log barn at right would have been damp and dark, with its flat un-drained roof, tiny window, and dirt floor. The cabin, with chimney, sloped roof, and boards covering the dormers, was a typical dwelling of Muskoka homesteaders.

      A number of retailers had also opened their doors to offer specialty lines of furniture, musical instruments, boots and shoes, leather supplies, groceries, dry goods, and clothing. In the heavier end of things, still others offered threshing and separating machinery, shingle making, lime and lathe sales, grist milling, and the services of a sawmill. For those who suddenly packed it in, coffins were available in Bracebridge, “made of the latest style and on short notice.”

      Such enterprises and services were also emerging in Huntsville, Gravenhurst, and other comparable Ontario towns of the day. Something rarer in Bracebridge was its woollen mill, established at the falls by Henry Bird in 1872. It rapidly became an important part of the town, helping to guarantee the progress of Bracebridge and the success of the many hard-pressed Muskoka farmers who’d discovered with chagrin that their patch on the Canadian Shield was too rocky and swampy, with soils too thin, to serve for traditional farming.

      Some other towns had woollen mills too, but two things that gave Bird’s Woollen Mill a unique place in Muskoka’s development were its added impacts on agriculture and resort vacations. The booming mill needed huge supplies of wool. Rocky Muskoka farms, unsuitable for crops, were ideal for grazing sheep.

      Bracebridge industry soared when Henry Bird built this woollen mill by the falls in the early 1870s, giving a lift to Muskoka farming in the process. Sheep on the district’s rugged lands produced wool for his mill and famous “Muskoka Lamb” for the dining rooms of summer resorts and big city hotels.

      Henry Bird made generous arrangements with financially strapped Muskoka farmers to raise sheep, provided they sold their wool only to his Bracebridge mill. At the same time, Muskoka was experiencing the emergence of hotels and lodges for visitors. Distinctive and handy, “Muskoka Spring Lamb” became a menu specialty in their dining rooms. Muskoka’s new sheep farmers made lucrative arrangements with the district’s enterprising hoteliers to supply both fresh lamb and mutton. As soon as train service connected the district to the country’s larger centres, these born-again farmers began meeting the demand for СКАЧАТЬ