Idyll of a Lost Port
Schooner Days MXV (1015)
by C. H. J. Snider
MIDSUMMER in mid-Ontario in mid-century. A gravel road moistened and shaded sufficiently to keep the dust down, not a wheel on it but ours. This side and that and back again it runs by a 20-foot ditch or trench screened by continuous walls of trees and shrubbery, lush and green from the good brown soil. Orioles aloft, hanging their procreant cradles in the tall elms. Perfect, perfect.
Where the trench split in two and the road also forked, gleamed a red gasoline pump. Its background was a large white store with nothing in its 40-paned front windows, and a black spaniel asleep on the doorstep. Had it not been for the pump we might easily have missed the quiet tree-hidden hamlet which lined the bough-arched crossroad, and so never seen Stromness, Ont.
Stromness in the Orkneys is but a wee seaport o' twa thousan’ honest men and bonny lasses, but there the whalers used to fit out for the Greenland fishery, and there the Hudson’s Bay Company had its clincher-fastened boats built, and there John Gowe the pirate, hero of Scott’s prose and Byron’s verse was born; and there he gave his wild dance parties with compelled partners for his pirate crew, before they all danced on air at Newgate, in 1725.
Stromness in Ontario, pop. 200, no post office, was where we were, Stromness-on-the-Feeder, a dried out lake port which had built its barquentines and barges, schooners and scows and steamers, and sent them all over the Great Lakes, and that within living memory.
Lachlan McCallum named it, and made it hum with the help of the Feeder Canal and Grand River navigation. Railways, rubber and concrete roads made it what it what is is.
Lachlan was born in the Isle of Tiree in the Hebrides, not the Orkneys, March 14, 1823. But he had Orcadian Stromness in his mind when he came out to Canada West, in 1842 to find his fortune. He found it where Broad Creek met the Feeder Canal, and the canal forked one branch going west to Port Maitland on Lake Erie, two miles away, the other northerly four miles to the Dunnville dam. There a lock lifted navigation to the upper reaches of the Grand River. The lower reach finds Lake Erie at Port Maitland.
This Feeder Canal was the lily padded trench we had just followed under its trees. It was not always such. Fifty feet wide and seven feet deep, it fed not only the Welland Canal, but, indirectly, the Erie Canal to New York. Before railways and before highways it was an essential part of Grand River navigation, with regular steamboat and barge service for passengers and freight between Brantford and Buffalo, nearly all in sheltered water. In the Reciprocity decade farm stuff, fish, flour and forest products flowed through it towards New York State in a night and day stream which only ceased when winter bound water iron hard.
Broad Creek was a hamlet which fed on the Feeder. Pioneer steamers panting from woodpile to woodpile drew a deep breath and fueled at these forks. The country round good farm land, had still to be cleared of its overgrowth of hard and soft wood, and the steamers and locomotives all burned slabs, sawdust and cordwood
Like other Scots, Lachlan knew opportunity when he saw it at the crossroad. He began by cutting firewood here. He ended on the red plush of the Senate Chamber in Canada’s capital; the Honorable Lachlan McCallum, Senator, after bearing MP, MLA and MPP around his name — simultaneously, when the law allowed it — ever since Confederation. He was also merchant, contractor, ship builder, ship owner and farmer. His big old mansion of white brick, with tall chimneys fluted with flues of moulded brick, yet stands half mile west of his shipyard, with yellow briar roses under its windows.
In his shipyard now hardly descernible were built for him the tug R. L. Howard of 119 tons by D. McSwain in 1856; the Jessie, and the Mary Ann, larger, both named for his daughters; and the W. T. Robb, largest of all, 236 tons register, insurable for $18,000. George Hardison was her builder, in 1864.
The insurance was needed, for Lachlan was captain of the Dunnville Naval Company, and he put himself, his company, and his new tug wholeheartedly into fighting the Fenian Raid of 1866. The Robb acted as a gunboat, having two guns mounted and carrying troops and supplies from Dunnville up the Welland Canal, which the Fenians were trying to capture and destroy.
In the fighting near Fort Erie Captain McCallum almost lost his life. But the Fenian Raid calls for another column. Next week perhaps.
Caption
An Old Mansion on the Canal - Senator McCallum’s
