In 1869, the homesteading Roy family arrived in Parry Sound’s Ryerson Township. They wanted only to start a farm, get a fresh start. In the event, they founded a community that bore their name.
George Fox Roy was born in Upper Canada (Ontario) in 1836. He later married Eliza Ann Colwell, a woman three years his junior, found employment as a wheelwright, and started a family that would soon include four children.
Enticed by the government’s offer of free land, the Roys moved north to Ryerson Township in 1869. Parry Sound District was a blank book, and George wanted a hand in writing it. Eliza was more hesitant, recognizing that the move would yank them away from their families, but George could not be dissuaded.
The Roys were at the forefront of settlement in Ryerson. Though the township was experiencing a logging boom at the time, the darkness of the forest was only intermittently broken settlers’ clearings. George and Eliza cut down trees, built a cabin, and established a farm.
George and Eliza in 1912, one year before George’s death
There weren’t enough people in the region to create any demand for a wheelwright. What there was a call for, however, was cut lumber with which to build homes, barns, and furniture. With that in mind, Roy raised a sawmill and dammed a river to ensure a steady, year-round flow of water to power the mill.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, a village began to develop, centered upon the crossroads of what became Royston Road and Doe Lake Road (now Stisted Road). The first hint of community was a one-room log schoolhouse (SS#2) raised in 1871 to see to the education of local children. Measuring a mere 16 feet by 24 feet, the school was primitive in the extreme, with children sitting on split log benches with no backrests and with boards painted dark in lieu of a blackboard. The developing hamlet became known as Royston.
Having a community named in your honour doesn’t guarantee enduring prosperity, however.
Shortly after the turn of the century, the family said goodbye to the community that bore their name and moved westward to Spence Township, where George raised a new sawmill. Youngest son James Melvin joined him. The loss of the sawmills, and the jobs and market for timber from bush lots that they represented, hurt those people remaining in Royston. The community continued a slide that would see it become a ghost town today.
By the time George died in 1913 the family’s sawmill had closed and James Melvin was working as a labourer in a mill in Sprucedale, farmed land to modest success, and had married Hazel Ethel Summerwill. Fortunes continued to slide.
Hazel and her children in 1928
One of their daughters, Bertha, shared memories of a childhood of privation her own daughter Gwen Clark. Gwen related some of these memories with me.
“My mother and her siblings grew up quite poor,” Gwen related. “It was always a struggle to get by on the farm. They had no money for shoes so went around barefoot, and their clothes were homemade by Hazel.”
But Bertha almost didn’t live to share these memories.
“When my mother was born April 17, 1919, she weighed only 2 lb. She was so small a teacup fit over her head,” Gwen told me. “She was kept alive by being placed in a shoe box lined with cotton batting and placed on the oven door. My grandmother was initially unable to feed her, so instead she was fed horse milk from an eye dropper. My grandfather was furious and said she would grow up to be an animal. There was no nurse or midwife available to help, it was neighbor women who looked after her and made the decision as to what to do to keep her alive. My mother lived to be 99 years old.”
So, perhaps the Roy family had some good fortune after all.
