and boasts a main street of new boutiques. Glen Elgin, later renamed Balls Falls, fell silent and is now a ghost town within the Balls Falls Conservation Area. But a ghostly sight of a different kind greets motorists racing along the QEW. It is the gaunt remains of a listing and rusting “tall ship.”
The strange tale begins on the St. Lawrence in 1914, when Le Progress was launched as a ferry. In 1991 it was rebuilt to resemble La Grande Hermine, the sailing ship used in 1553 by explorer Jacques Cartier to make his way across the Atlantic and up the St. Lawrence River. To avoid allegedly unpaid dockage fees on the St. Lawrence, the ship was towed to Jordan Harbour in 1997 and, six years later, became a victim of arson. Its owner now deceased, it remains a mystery at this writing as to just how long this landmark will remain in its current location.20
Forty Mile Creek: Grimsby Beach
While the world-renowned and historic Chautauqua Movement is associated with the lake of the same name in upper New York State, its roots lie firmly in Canadian soil with a Methodist camp on the shores of Lake Ontario.
In 1846, John Bowslaugh, a devout Methodist, dedicated a lakeside parcel from his extensive property east of Grimsby as a Temperance meeting ground. For the next thirteen years, the annual meetings occurred in different sites, but by 1859 Bowslaugh’s land had become a permanent Methodist camp. For several years, followers sat and listened to lectures held in tents, and swam in the inviting waters of the nearby beach. Finally, in 1874, the Ontario Methodist Campground Company was formed, and the site became known as Grimsby Park. The company divided the land into fifty lots, and a community of decorative cottages grew up on them. These otherwise simple buildings became known for their elaborate fretwork façades.
In 1876 a dock was built and the Great Western Railway added a stop at the park entrance. Two hotels, The Lake View House and The Park House, provided accommodation for those coming on short visits. Camp rules prohibited alcohol and foul language, and lights were to be out by 10:30. Any scofflaws might be detained by the camp constable and incarcerated in a lockup below The Park House Hotel.
In 1888 an elaborate temple replaced the outdoor speaker’s stand in Grimsby Park, a building thirty-seven metres in diameter with a dome that soared thirty metres high above. Unfortunately, the resonance within such a shape made the speakers’ words nearly unintelligible. By the 1890s the rules were relaxed, and campers were entertained by fireworks, concerts, recitals, and a new device known as the stereopticon.
By 1912, the Grimsby Company was bankrupt and had been purchased by Henry Wylie. He had a decidedly non-Methodist vision for the property and effectively turned it into an amusement park. Eliminating most of the constraining rules of the Methodist days, he installed two carousels, a miniature railway, and a shooting gallery, as well as a “Figure 8” roller coaster. Following Wylie’s death in 1916, the park was bought by Canada Steamship Lines, which also operated other parks such as Wabasso in Burlington and Lakeside in Port Dalhousie.
But as the buildings aged, fires began to take their toll. In 1914, thirty-four of the tiny wooden cottages were destroyed, along with the roller coaster and The Park House. Just four years later, the Lake View House Hotel was also consumed. In 1922 the rotting temple hall was demolished, and in 1927 another thirty cottages went up in flames. But despite the dwindling attendance and the disappearance of most of the park’s attractions, the band played on, and the dance hall stayed open through the Depression.
The last grand addition to the park was in 1939 when a new stone-and-wood entrance to the grounds was erected in honour of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Ontario. Ironically, that was the same year that the monarch opened the QEW, a route that took over much of the park property. Soon after, the lots were sold off to the cottage occupants, and the community became a year-round suburb of Grimsby.
Despite the overwhelmingly suburban nature of today’s Grimsby Park, a visit to the site is like a visit to another era. The tiny streets are lined with many of the elaborately fretted little cottages, the stone section of the entrance still stands, a cairn sits in “Auditorium Circle,” and the bell that once called worshippers rests in a parkette on Fair Avenue. By the water’s edge, Grimsby Park offers a shady respite from summer’s heat, as it did many years before, while down on the lake, traces of the pier remain, buried now under more recent fill.
The bell from the Grimsby Beach meeting ground is preserved in a park surrounded by camp cottages.
The village of Grimsby was once quite separate from the Methodist Camp at Grimsby Beach. It began to grow as a mill town on the banks of Forty Mile Creek. The first settler on the Forty was said to be a Captain Hendrick Nelles, whose son Robert built the area’s first mills on the creek. The sites lay along the St. Catharines Road, inland from the lake. In 1846, William H. Smith would describe Grimsby as “beautifully situated on the St. Catharines Road … in the midst of some very fine scenery…. During the summer it is a favourite destination of pleasure seekers from Hamilton.”21
A harbour was developed where the creek flowed into the lake and where schooners called at the wharves to carry off such products as lumber and wheat. When the Great Western Railway built its line closer to the main road, business at the harbour decreased. Grimsby still boasts a powerhouse from this era, located on the lake along with the remains of the wharf. A busy marina now occupies most of the one-time harbour. Although the picturesque station built by the Grand Trunk in the 1890s burned a decade ago, the original Great Western station still stands close to the track, now a private business operation.
But it was the Nelles family who dominated much of Grimsby’s early history, and much remains of their legacy. At 126 Main Street West the grand home built by Robert Nelles between 1788 and 1798 still survives. Other Nelles family homes are also still standing — the one at 139 Lake Road, known as the “Hermitage” was built by Robert’s brother William in 1800, while William’s son Adolphus built “Lake Lawn” in 1846, found today at 376 Nelles Road North.
Geographically, the head of Lake Ontario is somewhat complex. Two sections of the mighty Niagara Escarpment form a wide steep-sided valley where the walls converge to the west, creating the spectacular Dundas Valley. Here the waters of Lake Ontario reach their western extremity. But before they do, they encounter two hurdles.
One is a sand strip or beach bar separating the main body of the lake to the east from a bay known variously as Lake Geneva or Burlington Bay to the west. At the western end of Burlington Bay lies yet another, higher barrier, Burlington Heights — the remains of an ancient beach deposited by the waters of Lake Iroquois. Beyond this ridge lies the lake’s westernmost body of water, Cootes Paradise, which breaches the Burlington Heights through a small stream known as Morden Creek. Burlington Bay flows into the lake through an occasional breach in the sandbar at the north end of the strip. At least that was how the first Europeans encountered it.
When John Graves Simcoe was obliged to relocate the province’s capital from Newark, he chose a site a safe distance away, in fact so distant that he was told to abandon it. That site was to have been at the forks of the distant Thames River, the location of today’s busy metropolitan centre of London. To access that location, he ordered that a road be laid out from the head of Cootes Paradise to the Thames. Simcoe named that starting point King’s Landing, a landing which, along with the community of Dundas Mills, developed into the town of Dundas.
But Lord Dorchester refused to consider the manning of two garrisons, and ordered
