Author and historian Andrew Hind returns with his latest book, Founded on Stone 3: Even More Tales of Early Parry Sound District
The rural landscape of Parry Sound District offers countless captivating stories deeply rooted in history. Hind compiles two dozen stories, many of them lost gems from the region’s past, in the third volume of this series that began in 2021.
Topics range from ghost towns and historic buildings, ways of life now forgotten, enterprising settlers, uplifting tales of community and the deed of notorious n’er-do-wells.
Within the book’s pages we climb up creaking, weathered steps and enter The Rosseau General Store, which has been serving patrons for 150 years, making it perhaps the oldest continuously operating general store in Ontario. We enjoy carefree summers at Stanley House, a beloved resort operated by two generations of the Bissonnette family, but which now exists only in their collective memory and faded photographs. We uncover the mystery of how a church bell from Byng Inlet ended up in Bala. And we venture along the Nipissing Road. Known as a ‘ghost road today’, its length dotted with faded farming hamlets, we learn how the Nipissing Road was once a highway of settlement and commerce.
At one time Depot Harbour was one of the largest ports on the Great Lakes. Today it is a ghost town. The community’s rise and fall is detailed in Founded on Stone 3: Even More Tales of Early Parry Sound District.
Here’s an excerpt, detailing its founding and earliest years.
Extensive port and railway facilities were built, including towering grain elevators with a capacity of a million bushels, a railway roundhouse, freight sheds, a customs office, and a railway station. Five thousand feet of docks with capacity to handle four lake steamers at a time were constructed, along with two massive warehouses, one measuring 700 feet by 80 feet, the other 600 feet by 60 feet. These facilities were completed by the beginning of the 1898 navigation season on the Great Lakes. Booth added to his empire by also operating his own fleet of steamers and grain elevators at American ports on the western Great Lakes.
Depot Harbour immediately proved its worth. Travel time for a cargo of wheat from Duluth, Michigan, to Britain was timed at just 15 days, representing a new speed record for shipping grain from the interior of North America to European markets. As much as five days were shaved off the standard shipping time. In 1898, one hundred and twenty-five vessels unloaded 10,000,000 bushels of grain at Depot Harbour, and the numbers only rose in the years that followed. By providing western grain growers with the shortest and thereby most economical route to the Atlantic, Depot Harbour eclipsed other Lake Huron ports, including Collingwood, Midland, and Owen Sound.
As the port facilities boomed, so too did the town of Depot Harbour. 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, bank, pool hall, outdoor skating rink, and three churches. Notably, there were no drinking establishments as Booth was a tee-totaller and insisted the town remain ‘dry’. Thirsty residents had to hop a boat across to the bay to patronize one of the hotels or taverns that sprung up on the outskirts of Parry Sound, which itself was a dry town, in a district disapprovingly referred to as ‘Parry Hoot’.
Andrew Hind is a freelance writer who specializes in history, travel, and lifestyle. Over the course of his 20-year writing career he has written 36 books and contributed to numerous publications, including Parry Sound Life and 705blackfly.com.
Founded on Stone 3: Even More Tales of Early Parry Sound District can be purchased direct from the author (maelstrom@sympatico.ca) or on Amazon. The book will be arriving in a range of Parry Sound District stores by the end of October, including Magnetawan Bait and Tackle, Duck Rock, Parry Sound Books, Bearly Used Books, and Rosseau General Store.
