it, and the main centre for a largely rural hinterland.
Fred Grant’s memories of his youth reflected Barrie’s countryside location and its position on the shores of Kempenfelt Bay, off Lake Simcoe. It was here he witnessed an unusual sport characteristic of the day:
Horse racing on the ice on Barrie’s bay used to be a very popular sport, and was held during a whole week each winter. A mile track, sixty feet or more wide was cleared with a huge snow scraper, and the resulting races provided most interesting sport for the very large crowds of spectators and horsemen from all over the province, as well as the local followers of the sport.
And of course these latter included the curious small boy who always found something interesting in anything new. Sometimes after a ridge of snow three or four feet high on either side of the track had been piled up by the scraper, a thaw and frost would follow, and open-air skating would be carried on, while these races were being run, which added to the enjoyment.
The names of the horses are not so easily remembered, but the popular favourite always was a little black horse that stood straight up on its hind feet and looked as if it would topple over on the driver each time it turned before starting — I think it was named Black Diamond, and it certainly could travel too though it was only half the size of the other racers.
Sledding in Manitoba, 1886.
One might ask if a time can be pinpointed when this winter experience of outdoor frivolity and lively socialization disappeared from the everyday, generally positive experience of Canadians and became simply a nuisance to overcome and an aggravation to endure? Or, despite our grumbling, do we not secretly relish the season as one distinctly our own, particularly in the ways we respond to its challenges and revel in its possibilities?
Canadians of the nineteenth century not only watched horse races on ice, but curled on outdoor ponds, and played their first hockey games on natural surfaces subject to fluctuating temperatures. By all accounts citizens of the day accepted such experiences as normal and, in their own way, part of the charm of living in a northern climate. Work was something to which they generally did not commute, particularly if they lived in the countryside. The greatest hazard may have been removing snow from overloaded roofs, getting lost on roads covered in drifting snow, or falling afoul of the era’s restrictive social codes.
Recalling those days when young women and men occasionally tested limits to their freedom, Grant said:
Of all those winter pastimes of boyhood days in Barrie, probably the one with the greatest appeal to those now many years absent from the old town were the skating parties on the bay, especially when the arrival of a clear expanse of ice and a bright moonlit night happened at the same time.
There were many times when the surface of the entire lake was frozen over, and a skate to Big Bay Point and even to Orillia was enjoyed. On one occasion, however, I had the pleasure of being one of a crowd of half-a-dozen couples who, one moonlit night, skated from in front of Barrie station down past Big Bay Point, across a corner of Lake Simcoe to the mouth of the Holland River and up the river to the railroad bridge, half a mile or so south of the Bradford station, and returning on the midnight train, which at that time was the transcontinental one.
It would never do at this late date to mention the girls’ names, as some of them are grandmothers now, and besides, we had no chaperone on the trip.
From such a daily engagement with winter on a daily basis, conditions began to change significantly for Canadians in the last part of that century. The growth of large-scale industry and manufacturing in urban centres occurred alongside the associated termination of smaller operations in rural towns. Fixed-link transportation afforded by trains contributed to the centralization of many cultural and sporting activities once distributed over a wider geographic region, while waterfront industries powered by steam power, made big city living an economic powerhouse in which people with higher incomes could purchase consumer goods unimaginable a generation before. The daily press, the department store, theatres, and commercial sports made the city a destination for increasing numbers of rural dwellers.
By the early twentieth century, a further transition was occurring. The private automobile and alternating-current electricity made suburbanization possible as well as the gradual redistribution of industrial production from its downtown locations. All this did, however, was make the city bigger. Its rural counterparts, and their associated memories, grew weaker. There would be no going back to a supposedly “simpler” age.
Meanwhile, in the countryside by the 1880s, improvements in agricultural mechanization and competition from the wheat fields of the West resulted in an almost fifty-year period of rural depopulation, as many in eastern Canada flocked west to take advantage of the virgin farmlands of the prairies.
Fred Grant was one of those, but for him this was a new territory of winter pleasures to explore:
In December 1898, I had the pleasure of being a member of a bunch of hockey players in Golden, B.C., who journeyed to Banff, Alberta, to meet the team of that place in a game on the Bow River, and among the entertainers were four former Barrieites — Mr. and Mrs. “Bob” Campbell, the former the principal of the public school there, a player on the Banff team, now a resident of Calgary and a member of the Alberta Legislature, and a very pronounced opponent of the party led by his fellow townsman Premier Stewart; Tom Wilson, the owner of a large outfitting business for tourist and mountaineering parties, frequently a guide to Dominion Government Geological parties, and probably the best-informed man in Canada on the famous Lake Louise and Yoho Valley Districts; and Billy Alexander, then and now in the jewellery business.
Thomas Jebb, a local enthusiast in Orillia at the start of the twentieth century, enjoys the winter weather.
A whole story could be written about this wonderful national park [Banff] and its many novel attractions from its spray falls and truly wonderful “Cave and “Basin,” [Historic Site] where swimming in the open air takes place amid a forty-below-zero temperature and high piles of snow up to the very edge of the pool in which the overflow water from the ever-bubbling warm sulphur springs of “The Cave” makes things comfortable so long as you keep immersed, up to the magnificent CPR Banff Springs Hotel, which seems to be suspended up among the clouds when viewed from the “Valley of the Bow.”
Among the many entertaining features provided for the visitor was a sleigh ride through the park, past a big herd of buffalo running loose pretty much as they did in the wild state, and browsing on buds of the young trees and bushes, and many a scurrying coyote who hiked for cover upon approach of humans.
Urbanization by itself was no reason for winter to have a declining role in the daily lives of Canadians, but perhaps in retrospect it was inevitable, at least during the first formative decades of the twentieth century. City homes with central heating were, for all their primitive protection, far more comfortable than country places in which wood-burning heat might only be provided to a few rooms and turned off completely at night.
Quickly lost from memory were the ways in which winter in the country had been a respite from at least some outdoor chores for both adults and children. In the absence of the world of modern media, a young child in particular anticipated the coming winter season as a world exemplified by perfect natural ice on an open pond, or at least according to Fred Grant:
When the ice was first formed on the ponds or bay, of course it was always some venturesome small boy who was first out. It was impossible
