LITMIR.BIZ

      As the farthest place that steamboats could come up the Muskoka River before encountering waterfalls, Bracebridge and its wharf provided a major transshipment facility for central Muskoka. Wagons and coaches ran the steep slopes of Dominion Street, seen beyond the steamers, connecting passengers and cargoes with boat transport around Lake Muskoka and Gravenhurst.

      Alex Cockburn would be called “the father of Muskoka tourism” because his steamboats, operating out of Gravenhurst, made vacationing at summer places on three of the district’s major lakes, whose shorelines often could not be reached by road, possible. Yet the men who created those lakeside lodges could also claim paternity, as could the settlers who opened the roads and built up the settlements with their stores and services, because tourists could not have visited the district unless settlers had already colonized it, even if just for a few short years. The two phases were not far apart in time. Muskoka’s first adventure visitors arrived in July 1860 and summer vacationing began soon after, incrementally becoming a more and more important part of the district’s development.

      The vacation economy was not created from a single blueprint, but constructed piece by piece by the district’s permanent residents and their visitor guests. Homesteaders with disappointing crops found that if their rocky fields backed onto a major lake, they could make an alternative livelihood by opening their log homes to parties of fishermen. The transition of these homes from rustic homestead to summer resort was a product of a mutual exchange between the cabin dwellers and the wealthy sportsmen who came to stay in their accommodation. Families would vacate their beds, put fresh straw ticks on them for the guests, and move into a shed to sleep. The small parties of sportsmen were content with a couple of square meals a day at the family table. Each adjusted to the other, and learned from each other, as their standards and expectations evolved. If the initial experience was a happy one, the following year an entrepreneurial homesteader might advertise space available for sportsmen, and when the anglers or hunters arrived, typically from the United States, they would discover an addition had been made to the cabin since last season, which now offered more space.

      The names of these evolving early lodges epitomized their essential domestic character: “Cleveland’s House,” “Windermere House,” Francis and Ann Judd’s cabin, “Juddhaven,” and John Montieth’s place, “Montieth House,” all proclaim their true status in their names.

      Over several decades a continuously upgraded range of accommodations emerged. Modest cabins became rustic lodges. Then purpose-built structures replaced cabins. Stuffed deer heads on lobby walls were replaced by oil paintings of Muskoka steamboats. Those at the vanguard created palatial lakeside homes and summer resorts with sloping lawns to the waters’ edge.

      Such summer places were being replicated around all Muskoka’s main lakes, as farmers throughout the district learned to use their homes as resorts and their unpromising lakeside fields for tennis courts, lawn bowling greens, and golf courses. John Aitkin, who built up elegant Windermere House with his wife Lizzy Boyer — one of Hannah’s sisters who’d come from Brooklyn and lived four years in the Boyers’ Manitoba Street house before snaring the widower Aitkin — created Muskoka’s very first golf course.

      Arrival of the Grand Trunk Railway in Bracebridge would boost and transform the local economy. Here the road gang blasts through rock in 1884 to create a level approach to the river, before bridging over the falls’ chasm.

      Roads remained a challenge but the waterways offered convenient alternative transportation routes. The various types of watercraft that plied the lakes of the region offered a variety of benefits to guests, from elegant transportation to the pleasures of waterborne adventure. Once railways reached Muskoka, making connections to the growing fleets of steamboats, the district’s robust vacation economy became part of the Muskoka way of life. In vacation accommodation, just as in land settlement, the democratic district was open to anyone who came, offering humble cabins, easy accommodation for families wanting leisure, and elegant spaces of luxury for plutocrats.

      As Muskoka grew and evolved, James Boyer continued as steady pilot of municipal affairs in Bracebridge. Depending on the mayor and council, some years were better than others. Bracebridge’s local government was generally progressive, providing electrical services and clean water, subsidies to attract new industries, and pushing for new and better public buildings.

      By the late 1880s, the village had grown enough to qualify as a town. In 1889, when his private-member’s bill to incorporate Bracebridge as a town was passed by Ontario’s legislature, Muskoka MPP George Marter sent a telegram to the town office. Clerk Boyer relayed word of the new

      In 1894 Bracebridge became the first municipality to own and operate its own electricity system, buying out a private power plant and propelling the town’s economic surge with clean, cheap hydro-electricity for the motors of industry and better lights for homes, shops, and factories. By the end of the 1890s, demand for electricity in town led to construction of Bracebridge No. 2 generating station at the foot of the falls, completed in 1902.

      municipal milestone being reached to town constable Robert Armstrong, who rang the town bell for a full hour as the community celebrated their new municipal status and their law officer’s stamina.

      Major leather tanning facilities in Bracebridge and Huntsville helped Muskoka emerge as part of the largest tannery facility in the British Empire, with cow hides imported from as far as Argentina. In addition to creating many (often dangerous) jobs, the tanneries also provided Muskoka farmers with a new lease on life, buying hemlock bark from them to brew the tannic acid they needed to cure the leather. The money was a boon to the farmers, but the tanneries’ effluvia resulted in the two towns’ rivers becoming outrageously polluted.

      Another major milestone in the development of Bracebridge was the creation of an electricity system for the town. Bracebridge became the first municipality in Ontario to own and operate its own electricity generating station. In conducting these developments, council took a leading role. Clerk Boyer, among other related duties, conducted the plebiscite by which ratepayers voted to raise funds for the municipal hydro-electric system. The electric works greatly benefited townsfolk and existing business operations: the installation of thirteen streetlights transformed the main streets downtown, allowing shops to extend their shopping hours into the evening, and increasing safety in the streets at night. Stores and workplaces acquired electric lights, then electric motors. A competitive advantage had been gained with the town’s ownership of the electricity supply. Bracebridge offered electric power at low cost to sweeten the deal for new industries it was competing with other Ontario municipalities to attract.

      On October 12, 1890, James wrote Hannah, who was visiting her sisters in New Jersey, “There is talk of another very large Tannery in Bracebridge. I have written to the parties to meet the council tomorrow night.”

      The town’s ensuing success in landing yet another leather tanning operation illustrates how the tight interaction of government and industry in Bracebridge helped municipal development. First, town council, when negotiating with David W. Alexander of Toronto to establish the tannery, offered a two-thousand dollar bonus as further enticement beyond the advantage of low-cost electricity.

      Second, James, as clerk, drafted a bylaw for voters to approve the incentive payment, which they did in the plebiscite that he conducted. Third, it was decided that the new tannery should be on the south side of the river. But the piece of land, although increasingly a part of the town socially and economically, with the J.D. Shier lumber mills and Singleton Brown’s shingle mill in that same section, as well as a growing number of homes, was still legally part of Macaulay Township. So the town council and its residents immediately set to work to ensure that the necessary changes were made to bring that land within the

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