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Specters of the Past: Georgian Bay Ghost Towns - October 2023
Specters of the Past: Georgian Bay Ghost Towns
A look at three of Georgian Bay's most infamous ghost towns.
by Andrew Hind
Georgian Bay’s shoreline above the Severn River is characterized by deep inlets that carve into the primordial Canadian Shield. Except for a few communities — Parry Sound being the largest — and a smattering of cottages, they appear untouched.
At one point, however, some of these sheltered coves were home to sizable communities, villages and towns that have faded away over time — ghost towns. Here is a look at three of the largest and most significant.
Depot Harbour
Once one of the busiest ports anywhere on Lake Huron, Depot Harbour is today one of Canada’s largest ghost towns.
John Rudolphus (J.R.) Booth was among the greatest industrialist of 19th century Canada, a lumber baron of immense wealth and prestige. By the late 1880s, Booth was the largest lumber producer in the world, with over 7,000 square miles of white pine timber limits in the Algonquin highlands, and yet more in the districts of Nipissing and Parry Sound. In 1891, Booth incorporated the Ottawa, Arnprior and Parry Sound railway (OA&PS) to transport logs from these timber limits to his Ottawa mills.
Booth could have stopped the tracks in the Algonquin highlands, but he had additional plans in mind to further increase revenue. He reasoned (correctly, as it turned out) that if he continued his railroad on to Georgian Bay, and then extended east to link with a Vermont rail line he already owned, he could profit handsomely by offering western-grown grain the shortest route to the Atlantic.
Booth’s original intention was to end the line in Parry Sound, but, turned off by high land prices, he instead turned his eyes towards Parry Island, where he built his own port town from scratch, naming it Depot Harbour.
Extensive port and railway facilities included massive wharves and towering grain elevators, a railway roundhouse, freight sheds, a customs office and a railway station. Steamers lined up along the grain elevators daily, and trains arrived and departed every 20 minutes. To secure his trade, Booth even assembled his own fleet of steamers, the Canada Atlantic Transit Company.
Depot Harbour prospered and the townsite grew to more than 100 homes lining a dozen city blocks. There was a hotel, several boarding houses, stores and artisans, a school, a bank and three churches. Notably, however, there were no drinking establishments, as Booth insisted the town remain “dry.” Depot Harbour’s population reached 1,600 permanent residents, and there may have been as many as 3,000 inhabitants in the summers.
In 1933, an ice floe destroyed a bridge in Algonquin Park. Had Booth still owned the railway, it’s likely the bridge would have been repaired, but by this point, Booth had died and the railroad was part of the vast Canadian National (CN) network. With other lines duplicating the same role, the CN decided to simply shut down the OA&PS. That decision spelled Depot Harbour’s demise. Grain-bearing steamers went elsewhere, and Depot Harbour began to wither. Eventually, it became a complete ghost town.
Muskoka Mills
In the early 1850s, the newly formed Muskoka Milling and Lumber Co. sought a site to build a mill catering to newly secured Muskoka timber rights. Surveyors selected a location at the mouth of the Musquash River. Here, the mill would be easily accessible by vessels off Georgian Bay and still be in a sheltered cove where logs could be collected after being driven down from the interior.
The resulting steam-powered mill employed 200 men full-time and as many as 400 during peak periods. All summer long, an endless parade of ships arrived to carry lumber to ports all over the Great Lakes.
The town of Muskoka Mills soon formed and was home to as many as 500 people — perhaps double that seasonally. Millhands lived in humble company-owned homes and boarding houses that ringed the bay and shopped at a company store. Within a few years, the community boasted a hotel, a school, a church and a blacksmith. Despite its size, Muskoka Mills remained isolated from civilization. The only practical link to the outside world was by steamer, and this was severed come wintertime. As a result, the community never outgrew its frontier mentality.
The Muskoka Milling and Lumber Co. was at the center of one of the first environmental legal actions in Canada when the federal government accused the company of allowing excessive sawdust to fall into the water, thereby damaging fish spawning grounds. It was the government’s belief that mills such as this were responsible for the declining commercial fish industry on Georgian Bay. The government’s case fell apart and legal action was dropped.
By this point, it no longer really mattered. The mill and the town it supported were sinking faster than a ship floundered in a Lake Huron storm. Dwindling stocks of harvestable timber and competition from 17 mills in Gravenhurst, which could more efficiently ship lumber by rail, was its undoing. The mill was closed early in the 1890s, and Muskoka Mills disappeared virtually overnight.
More than a century later, the foundations of the mill can still be seen around the mouth of the Musquash River, but otherwise, nature has long since reclaimed the one-time mill village.
Byng Inlet
Though not deceased, the Byng Inlet of today is a pale shadow of the bustling, noisy town of a century ago.
In the 1860s, American lumbermen from Michigan, faced with the depletion of the once seemingly endless stands of white pine in their native state, began casting their gaze across the Great Lakes to Ontario for new sources of timber. Mills from two rival American companies — Clarke, White and Co. and the Dodge Lumber Co. — took shape within the natural harbor of Byng Inlet to serve their respective timber limits along the Magnetawan River watershed. Byng Inlet was born.
By 1898, all the lumber operations at Byng Inlet had been consolidated under the ownership of Holland and Emery, which replaced the old mills with a new state-of-the-art facility. The mill quickly became among the largest lumber operations in Ontario, employing hundreds of men. All summer long, an endless parade of steamers and schooners transported lumber to ports all over the Great Lakes.
Byng Inlet and its mill — now under Graves, Bigwood and Co. — prospered further when the railway arrived in 1911, providing a year-round means of transporting lumber. Every other day, 15 rail cars loaded with 20,000 board feet of lumber were shipped out of town, a rate unmatched by any mill in Ontario.
As Byng Inlet grew, it became more metropolitan. A dance hall and a silent-film movie house were built to entertain the locals, and as many as five stores opened for business. Generators at the mill provided homes with the benefit of direct-current electricity, a luxury not yet available in many larger communities. Baseball became a popular pastime, brought over by the numerous Americans employed at the mill. Games were played on a baseball field covered with sawdust. There was a sense of enthusiasm in the air. Everyone was certain Byng Inlet was on the cusp of enduring greatness.
But Graves-Bigwood was felling trees at such a rate that by the mid-1920s it began to feel the pinch as the supply of pine trees was becoming exhausted. The mills closed as Graves-Bigwood went in search of new stands of timber to exploit. Most everyone in Byng Inlet followed, abandoning homes that no longer held any value. The town disappeared virtually overnight, with but a small handful of stalwarts remaining behind to keep alive the community’s memory.
Today, ghostly concrete foundations remind us of Byng Inlet’s rich past as one of Canada’s largest sawmill towns. ★
