Reminiscences of north Sydenham : a retrospective sketch of the villages of Leith and Annan, Grey County, Ontario / by A.H.R.

Front matter

from

the estate of

J. Stuart Fleming

Index

Page

Foreword - - 1

I — What it Looked Like - 5

II — What Was Going On 22

III — Building and Clearing .. 29

IV — The First Settlement 43

V — No. 8 Company, 31st Regiment 72

VI — Development and Decay 86

VII — The Churches 110

VIII— The Schools ' 186

IX — The Public Libraries - : 155

X — Societies and Social Amusements „ 165

XI — A Meritorious Record 189

XII — A Few of the First . 194

XIII — Conclusion 1 237

ILLUSTRATIONS

Plate I. — 1. Rev. Robert Dewar. 2. Rev. Alexander Hunter.

3. Robert Grierson. 4. William P. Telford. 5. Thomas Lunn. 6. Thomas Rutherford.

Plate II. — 1. James S. Ross. 2. Dr. William Lang. 3. William Brown. 4. Robert Elliot. 5. David Armstrong. 6. Gideon Harkness.

Plate III. — 1. Andrew Sibbald. 2. Walter Aitken. 3.

William Johnstone. 4. James Gibson. 5. Hugh Reid. 6. John Couper.

v

Foreword

History is a fable agreed upon, said Napoleon. There could be no more cynical comment upon the reliability of history, yet the truth of it is largely borne out by what historians have had to say about the man himself who made it. Hardly two of them have agreed in their estimate of his character. History is bunk, says America's wealthiest automobile manufacturer and we might be surprised if we knew the number of wise men who agree with him, to a certain extent at least, when they look around and see the evil ways of men and how they so wantonly have disregarded its plain teachings.

The task of the historian, as one of the greatest of them has pointed out, is traditionally a thankless one. Not for him are the sweets of popular applause, the emoluments of office, the decorations awarded the soldier or the diplomat. Unseen and alone he assumes his voluntary labors. Then commence long toilsome years of the most arduous and exacting research and when this is completed there still remains the tedious routine of arrangement and compilation. At length the result of his labors is given to the world and then he samples the first bitter taste of ingratitude. His facts as he has found them are assailed as distorted and misleading, if not openly mendacious. When he ventures upon the field of deduction from these facts however, where he is a lawful subject for criticism, he finds that there are not two, but twenty sides to every question, and he finds a critic for every side of it ready and anxious to fall upon him and tear to shreds the issue of years of painful effort.

This little volume, however, does not rise to the dignity of history. The author fortunately knows his limitations ; aside from this he has neither the time, the patience or the money to treat the subject as it deserves. It is an attempt to portray the first settlement of the Leith and Annan district in the township of Sydenham, the general appearance of the country when the first settlers arrived, the institutions they founded, secular and religious, the privations inevitable in the lot of pioneers they endured, their social amusements anfd the work they undertook and acomplished. It is, in short, a retrospective sketch of the first twenty-five years in the life of the community, which, as in the life of an individual, are often the most important. There will also be brief biographical sketches of a number of the most representative men who took an active and leading part in the general affairs of the district and guided its destinies at that time. The importance of the beginnings of things in the lives of men and communities is seldom over estimated.

Men with the true instinct of the artist, with an eye to see and a heart to feel the joys and the tragedies of life have gone into just such country places and, with the materials found there, have woven stories that have stirred the hearts of their fellows to their innermost depths.

Yet even a sketch as limited in scope as the present one will be open to criticism. Anachronisms will be discovered. Errors in time and place will be pointed out. It will suffice to say that the facts as stated therein are as nearly authentic as it has been humanly possible to ascertain them.

It will also be subject to another form of criticism. “What, in the name of common sense/’ some will say “is the use of raking up and reviving these memories of seventy and eighty years ago ! We are living in the present, not the past. Let us act in the living present then, and leave the dead past to bury its dead. Surely it is vanity and vexation of spirit to indulge something which at the best is only sickly sentimentality, in which there is neither use or profit.”

The best answer to this is that, aside from the interest many good people feel in the lives of their forebears, the

FOREWORD generation that has no respect for the memory of its predecessors and feels no pride in their achievements will hardly be accorded any respect by those that follow it. Posterity has always had its rights, even if they have not arrived upon the scene and in turn it will have its duties to perform, altho it may be remarked here that helping to pay the debt incurred in the greatest of all wars does not seem to us as being among those duties. When President Roosevelt first enunciated his far reaching policy for the conservation of national resources as a duty the American people owed to their posterity, he was frequently met with the brutal enquiry from many so-called captains of industry who were exploiting, or rather wasting, the nation’s natural wealth, “What has posterity ever done for us” ? It is a bad thing for both men and nations when they begin to live in and for the present moment only. Their finish is not far distant for in the chain of responsibility that links up the past with the future we owe a duty to both and we will disregard that debt at our peril.

It was once said of a great Englishman by one of his countrymen, that it was not so much what he did as what he was that made him great. The pioneers of Sydenham performed a great work, but after all it was not so much what they did as what they were that constitutes their claim to the gratitude of those of us who have come after them. It will always be so as long as example is more powerful than precept.

Leith,

' o.nvfr, :

*

Chapter I

Had an inhabitant of the planet Mars, supposing Mars to be inhabited, visited that section of Grey County now known as Sydenham township in the year 1880, and after a careful survey have formed an ineffaceable impression of its general appearance and, after returning to Mars had visited us again eighty years later, there are several striking changes he would have noticed at once. Time has wrought these changes so gradually that it is almost impossible for the younger generation to visualize a correct mental picture of the country as it appeared at that time.

First he would have noticed the disappearance of the forest in large part and the evidences of civilization in the shape of bams, houses, outbuildings, fences, roads and all other public and private improvements that follow the work of man’s hands. Then, in all probability he would have noticed the lowering of the lake level, for this has been so pronounced it could hardly have escaped his attention. Then he would have noticed the complete disappearance of many of the smaller streams and the dried up aspect of the larger ones. Then, if he had stayed long enough in the first place and had been of an acutely observant nature he would have noticed that the climate was slightly warmer. The average temperature on this North American continent always rises about five degrees after the forest has been cleared, for obvious reasons.

These are the greatest physical changes that have followed the advent of civilization here as in all parts of the country lying adjacent to the Great Lakes. They have not added to the beauty of the region but they were inevitable.

We cannot have the wild beauty of the wilderness and the comforts of civilization at the same time. One of the oldest settlers on the Lake Shore Line who came to it in childhood has said it was the newness and wildness of the country that made the first few years he spent there the most enjoyable of his life. It was Nature at its best, because unadorned.

The streams were always full. There were no springfloods, because the snow melted slowly in the forest shades, the frost left the ground just as slowly and even in midsummer the heat of the sun’s rays was lost in the thick foliage that shaded the ground everywhere. The smaller streams were arched overhead by spreading branches of the trees on their banks and their courses were often choked with a mass of tree trunks in all the stages of decay. As they became completely rotted, they were torn away by the current. There is a passage in a poem by Bryant, in which the noble red men eloquently describes the rivers of the wilderness, before they had shrunken at the destruction wrought by the inroads of the white man’s civilization.

Before these fields were shorn and tilled,

Full to the brim our rivers flowed ;

The melody of waters filled The fresh and boundless wood ;

And torrents dashed and rivulets played,

And fountains spouted in the shade.

All these have passed, and with them have passed the numerous saw and grist mills, erected by the early settlers. They served well in the day of small things, but they have given way to the gigantic electric plants which have dammed our greatest rivers in the quest of power.

The steadily lowering water level on the Great Lakes is so alarming that it is engaging the attention of our most eminent engineers, as well as the United States and Canadian Governments. Just how much the level of Georgian Bay has fallen since the general settlement on its shores nobody seems to know exactly. But it has been consider* able. Along the western shore of the lower peninsula of Michigan where authentic records have been kept, the level of Lake Michigan has fallen eight feet since 1837. There are reasons for believing it has fallen as much or more in Owen Sound. The oldest settlers pointed out high water marks of the fifties and sixties of last century that seem almost incredible. About the only people who have benefitted by the change are the dredging contractors. It has ruined the appearance of the foreshore along the waterfront of Sydenham, where the lake shallows so gradually in approaching the shore, and from present indications its old beauty will never be restored. It has destroyed many small harbors, Lunn’s Landing, Coffin and Johnston Harbors among them, where the largest fishing boats could once find good anchorage. First they became marshes, then as the water steadily receded they took on the appearance of pasture patches. In the olden days it was impossible for the foot traveler to make his way along the beach without resorting to wading at many points, or making a detour into the adjoining swamp. But “the lonely shore” of that time had a beauty all its own that compensated for all such inconveniences, a beauty we have lost forever in the steady march of modern progress.

From all accounts that have been handed down to us, it appears the country lying between Owen Sound and Cape Rich was practically a vast unbroken bush. There is mention in some early documents of patches of prairie, but they must have been exceeding rare. Bush fires must have been also of the rarest occurance for many years before the first settlers came, or, if there were such bush fires, they were insignificant and destroyed little of the standing timber. They were numerous enough after the pioneers came.

Many of them did positive good, others a great deal of damage. The swamps were in many places simply impassable, rendered so by a tangled mass of fallen tree trunks lying in every direction, evergreens broken off many feet from the ground, and a general confusion that defies description. Fire was the settler's most valuable ally in clearing out such places ; otherwise the labor involved in clearing them would have been unprofitable. But even in the higher land where the hardwood was found, the underbrush was thick almost everywhere. There were no open arches of the forest over which poets have raved. An old record shows that two homesteaders spent the whole summer of 1845, in underbrushing, just south of Annan, and this in the midst of heavy hardwood timber. So practically every foot of the land had to be cleared and the first task that confronted the pioneer after he had built his little shanty “in the heart of the forest primeval” seemed an appalling one. Yet under the terms of the land settlement acts of those days, one third of the homestead that had been allotted him must be cleared and under crop before he could be granted a patent for his land by the Crown.

There was a wide variety of hardwood timber, the maple prevailing in most places. Beech, birch and ash were found in various states of profusion according to the locality. The rock elm grew to a considerable height and as it carried that height so well, and dressed so easily it was in great demand for barn timber. In the swamps could be found almost every variety of evergreen that flourishes in these latitudes, spruce, cedar, tamarac, balsam, to mention a number of them, with a few pine. The hemlock was found on both high and low lying land. This timber was all rather an unusual size, in fact the Annan district was noted as having some of the finest in the County of Waterloo, as it was then known. But the soft elm easily overtopped them all. It grew to a remarkable size in places and they were quite numerous also, as many as four or five beingfound in a single acre, and of the largest kind. In the winter of 1847-48 one was cut down about two miles south of Annan, which measured seven feet in diameter on the stump, and fully eight feet at the ground. Its height was estimated at about ninety feet. Four expert choppers commenced wrork on it one morning just after a winter's breakfast, and shortly after high noon it came to earth. Three of the choppers had been at work on it for half an hour the previous evening. The butt was gnarled and fifteen feet were cut off, then four rail cuts each twelve feet long, the first one of which made one hundred and five rails, were saved, the top being left to rot. Another large elm, about the same size in diameter, but shorter, was in later years cut down on a farm about three miles northwest of Leith. With four choppers at work, it took five hours to fell. Another tall elm which stood “like a city on an hill which cannot be hid” about the same distance from Annan as the first one, could be seen from a point fifty miles distant on Georgian Bay, the late Captain John MacNab being the authority for the statement. These were the largest trees ever found in Sydenham.

How old were these monarchs of the forest ? Nobody knows, or at least there is no record of anyone attempting to number their years. The age of trees is a subject on which there will always be more or less conjecture. Some oaks in England are said to have been standing at the time of the Norman Conquest. The author read recently an account of a tree chopped down in central New York State in 1854. About half way from the circumference to the centre the choppers came upon a gash made by an axe and counted one hundred and seventeen rings outside of it. The axe had been driven into the tree in or about 1737, and the tree had, it was estimated, been growing one hundred years earlier than that. There are good grounds for believing these elms on the Lake Shore line were fully as old. It takes a lot of yearly growths to make a diameter of seven feet, even if the elm is a fast growing tree. It may be accepted that these trees had passed the sapling stage in the days of Cromwell and of England’s great Civil War. They hald looked down upon two centuries of solitude, yet they were destroyed in the course of a few hours.

It may be well to step aside a moment and compare these trees with the largest found in the world. Such a comparison makes them look like a lot of pygmies. Just how great the disparity was, may be worth a considerable digression here.

In the year 1850, a party of hunters were pushing their way through the then unexplored wilderness of what afterwards became Calaveras County, in California. One of them who had gotten considerably in advance of his companions, suddenly broke into a valley, about one hundred and sixty acres in extent, rather it might be styled an ampitheatre. He was the first man to see what became famous as the “Big Trees of Calaveras County.” At least if white men had ever gazed on them before, the record has not survived. The group were solitary specimens of their race. By actual count there were about ninety-two of them, and they grew in a small valley of little more than one hundred and fifty acres, as noted, and within two hundred and forty miles of San Francisco. Their discovery was a little more than a year later than the chopping down of the famous elm in Sydenham ; some of them, alas ! soon shared a like fate.

Their colossal proportions and the impressive silence of the surrounding woods created a feeling of awe among the hunters ; they walked around the huge trunks and gazed reverently at their magnificant proportions, then returned to the nearest settlements with stories of what they had just seen. These stories, however, were laughed at as incredible until they were confirmed by actual measurement.

PLATE I.

1. Rev. Robert Dewar. 2. Rev. Alexander Hunter. 3. Robert Grierson. 4. William P. Telford. 5. Thomas Lunn. 6. Thomas Rutherford.

The trees were immediately named Washingtonians, though some of the savants of San Francisco endeavered to change this to Wellingtonians, because some patriotic British botanist availing himself of the discovery hastened to appropriate the name for the conqueror at Waterloo. The basin or valley in which they stood was damp, with here and there pools of water, into which some of the largest trees extended their roots. These gigantic conifers were of the species known by naturalists as the sequoia. A town called Murphy was in those days the end of the stage coach lines and from here to the “Mammoth Tree Hotel”, erected to accomodate the visitors to the newly discovered world’s wonders, was a distance of only fifteen miles.

Adjoining the hotel stood the stump of the “Big Tree”, which was cut down in 1853. It measured ninety-six feet in circumference, showing a smooth surface and seventy-five feet solid circumference of timber on the stump, on which there was ample space for thirty-two dancers, for it was often used for that purpose. Theatrical performances were also given upon it, the Chapman Family and Robinson Family, well known entertainers of the time, giving them there in 1855. This monster was cut down by boring with long and powerful augurs and sawing the spaces between — an act of vandalism as ingenious as the Chinese refinement in cruelty in pulling the nails of criminals with pincers. It required the labor of five men twenty-five days to effect its fall, the tree standing so nearly perpendicular that the aid of wedges was invoked to complete the destruction. But even then the immense mass resisted all efforts to overthrow it, until in the blackness of a tempestuous night it began to groan and sway in the storm like an expiring giant. It succumbed at last to the elements which alone could complete from above what the human ants had commenced below, and great was the fall thereof. Its fall was heard at Murphy, fifteen miles distant and was like an earthquake's shock. When the great trunk went down it buried itself twelve feet in the mire of a creek hard by, with its two thousand cords of wood. Not far from where it stood were two giant members of this family known as “The Guardsmen;" the mud splashed nearly a hundred feet high on their trunks. As it lay on the ground it measured three hundred and two feet clear of the stump and broken top. Large trees had been snapped like pipe stems in its fall, and the woods around were filled with splinters and debris. On its levelled surface were afterwards built the barroom and bowling alley of the hotel.

One of the most interesting of the group was called the “Mother of the Forest". It was the loftiest of the grove, rising to the height of three hundred and twenty -seven feet, straight and beautifully proportioned, and in 1860 supposed to be the largest tree in the wTorld. It was ninety feet in circumference and into its trunk could be cut an apartment as large as a common sized parlor and as high as the architect chose to make it, withqut endangering the tree or damaging its outward appearance. A scaffolding was built around this tree, for the purpose of stripping its bark for exhibition abroad. With damnable industry this was at last accomplished for a distance of over one hundred feet from the ground, and it was effected with as much neatness as a troop of jackals display in cleaning the bones of a dead lion. Such was its vitality however that it continued annually for about five years to put forth green leaves, when the blanched and withered limbs showed that nature had done its best but was exhausted.

The largest of the whole group paled, however, before a prostrate giant known as the “Monarch of the Forest." This monster had long before bowed his head in the dust, but what magnificence in ruin was his ! He measured one hundred and twelve feet in circumference at the base and forty-two feet in circumference at a distance of three hundred feet from the roots, where it was broken off short in its fall. The upper portion was greatly decayed, beyond this break, but judging from the average height of the others, this tree must have towered toward the heavens to at least four hundred and fifty feet. A chamber, or burned cavity, extended through the trunk two hundred feet, broad and high enough for a person to ride through on horseback ; a pond deep enough to float a river steamboat stood in this great excavation during the rainy season. The mind can scarcely conceive its astonishing dimensions ; language fails to give an adequate idea of it. It was, when standing, a pillar of timber that overtopped all other trees on the globe. “To simply read of a tree, four hundred and fifty feet high” observes a contemporary, “we are struck with large figures, but we hardly appreciate the height without some comparison. Such a one as this would stretch across a field twentyseven rods wide. If standing in the Niagara chasm at Suspension Bridge, it would tower two hundred feet above the top of the bridge, and would be ninety feet above the cross of St. Paul's, and two hundred and thirty feet above the Monument. If cut up for fuel, it would yield three thousand cords, or as much as would be yielded by sixty acres of good wood-land. If sawed into two-inch boards, it would yield about two million feet, and furnish enough three inch plank for thirty miles of plank road. This will do for the product of one little seed, less in size than a grain of wheat.”

Many of our readers will doubtless smile at the above, and mentally note it down as a piece of the grossest American exaggeration. They are mistaken. Out of many descriptions the author has read of these mammoth trees, all of them which coincide remarkably as to their size, he has quoted from one which appeared in Cassell’s Family Magazine for 1860, and a British magazine of such standing as Cassell's could be relied upon to give its readers nothing but the cold facts. It was estimated by scientists who were authorities on the subject that the prostrate giant known as the “Monarch of the Forest” had been standing four thousand years ago. Perhaps it had. It is dangerous to deny such things for there are stranger things in this world than are dreamed of in our philosophy. As far as actual bulk wTas concerned these trees wTere in all probability the largest ever seen in the world. But were they the highest ? Cheer up, gentle reader, for the worst is yet to come.

Late in 1884, James Anthony Froude, the eminent English historian and litterateur, left London on a trip round the world, going by way of the Cape to Australia and New Zealand. He has left us a splendid narrative of the journey, which was made in a leisurely manner and with ample time for observation, in a volume called “Oceana”. Like many another valuable volume, it must have had a small sale, as copies of it are rather rare. While in Australia he visited all the large cities ; Melbourne was then the largest. While there he heard tales from enthusiastic Melbournians of a wnndrous sight to be seen not far from the city, and, as the city’s guest of honor, he was pressed to go and see it. He consented. Conveyances were secured after the journey by rail had ended by the party that had accompanied him, and after a journey of about ten miles during which the scenery had grown wilder and wilder, and the trees steadily taller, at a point near the sources of the River Yarra and about ninety miles from Melbourne, the distinguished Englishman was shown trees standing in a valley which he says averaged from three hundred and fifty to four hundred feet high.

These trees could not be counted in the course of a few minutes like those in California. They were there in regiments and brigades, towering up in the shelter of a mountain like “the tall masts of some great Amiral.” In fact Froude attributed their great height to their sheltered

WIIAT IT LOOKED LIKE position and the rich nature of the soil. The hand of the destroyer had been busy and several of the largest levelled, but the government of Victoria had intervened, not altogether effectually however. These trees were of the gumwood species, or the far-famed Australian eucalyptus. Considering their height, their girth was not remarkable ; the visitor spanned the circumference of one with his arms, but the result by a lapse of memory is forgotten. It is certain however, they were not nearly so bulky as the Calaveras County trees. But there were a few among them that ran up to four hundred and twenty and thirty feet, and Froude was assured that one had been felled that measured four hundred and sixty feet. There was no supposition about the height of this one, as in the case of the long-fallen tree in California ; it had actually been measured, and, as far as is known, it had been the highest tree in the world. It was but natural that a man of Froude’s mentality should have been profoundly impressed by such a sight. There are some poor unfortunates among us who, like the author, have never seen the Woolworth building, but as between seeing it and one of these mighty gum-trees, our choice would at once fall to the latter. How long had their towering tops waved in the gales of the passing centuries and “held their dark communion with the cloud ?” Froude does not even venture to guess, but as geologists assure us that Australia’s surface is probably the oldest land on the face of the globe, forming as it did part of a long-lost Antartic continent, their birth may have reached back into the remotest ages of antiquity. Ancient empires had risen, flourished and decayed, civilizations had waxed and waned while they were adding cubits to their statue. At last, after Tasman, came the adventurous Captain Cook, and after him came the white man with his genius for destruction. It was nothing short of a crime against man’s better nature that even one of such trees should have been destroyed. They must have whispered to the beholder, like Addison's stars of the firmament,

“The Hand that made us is divine.”

So if we were to take one of these huge elms in Sydenham, and piled on top of it in their natural position three others of like size, the height of the topmost one would still have fallen below the crests of some of the sequoias of California or the gum-trees of Australia. Had they been standing alongside them, they would have looked like saplings. Sir Walter Scott once saw a vessel unloading squared timber from America, at Leith ; he gazed long and earnestly at the sight and remarked to a companion that it must be a great privilege to live in a country where timber grew to such dimensions. What he would have said had he seen the Californian trees standing on their native heath we can only surmise, but his incomparable genius in poetic description would doubtless have risen to the event.