and not everyone had located on good land. Some with marginal lands but an entrepreneurial nature successfully shifted to sheep rearing and wool production, others harvested lucrative tanbark and maple syrup from their trees, while still others shifted their land use to the cash crop of Muskoka’s vacation economy. Just as Muskoka as a whole had a mixed economy, most of its homesteaders operated mixed farms.
For many would-be farmers, though, the dream that first brought them into the district, when Muskoka was being promoted to immigrants for farming, had been shattered by their inability to fulfill even the minimum conditions of the free-grant system for acquiring title to their land. In 1886, although 133 persons were newly located on lots in the district’s townships that year, there were also 99 cancellations of grants for non-fulfillment of settlement duties.
Although many poor farms were abandoned, some families stayed on in unfavourable locations and sank to subsistence-level living. In this way, the agricultural experience in Muskoka over the decades of free-grant settlement was gradually producing, in addition to its success stories, an economic underclass. These people were living on poor farms but were too poor to go anywhere else. Quite a few homesteaders had
Trains running south through Bracebridge from Ontario’s northern hinterland or the Canadian West were so long and heavy they required two locomotives. At right, Bird’s Woollen Mill increases production for Canada-wide and British Empire markets.
burned their bridges behind them, in the manner of James and Hannah, so could not “return home,” but they could not afford to relocate to anything better, either. Looking beyond the front verandahs of the Muskoka lakeside resorts and tennis courts where genteel city ladies in long dresses laughed while tapping balls, Canada’s 1891 census takers found two-thirds of Muskoka’s people dwelling in rural areas, many of them destitute.
By the close of the 1800s, Muskoka, and its towns, villages, small settlements, and random, scattered farms at the southern edge of the Canadian Shield, had each assumed distinctive characteristics, attributes which contributed, as social historian G.P. de T. Glazebrook expressed it, to “the great variety that was Ontario.” Bracebridge in the 1890s was, like most of the province’s villages and small towns, intact with its own commercial and social life.
This view of Bracebridge, taken about 1902, shows the centre of town as it was by the end of the 1890s. The short-lived Hess Furniture factory, five-storeys high, on the left, is adjacent to a sawmill and lumber yard; the river is spanned by a wooden bridge to Hunts Hill; the train station (centre right) is busy with freight traffic; across the street from it is the Albion Hotel, which stood until 2011.
Manufacturing and commerce sparked life in Bracebridge as the dawn of the twentieth century approached. Here, Henry Bird’s Woollen Mill dominates the foreground, and the central business section of town stretches up Manitoba Street beyond.
Workmen and workhorses in early 1890s Bracebridge pause at a busy mill and lumberyard in the centre of town, above the falls. Log booms in the river await their fast-moving saw blades.
During the decade, the town’s population more than doubled, from 1,020 residents counted in the 1891 census to 2,480 recorded in 1901. By the end of the decade, tax assessment of town properties topped more than half a million dollars, at $504,633. The town had also incurred a debt of $44,000, with plebiscite support from Bracebridge taxpayers, to create Ontario’s first municipally-owned electricity generating and distribution system, and to lay pipes beneath the town’s streets for clean drinking water to reduce water-borne illness in the municipality. The yearly receipts of the town from taxes and fees added up to about $36,000.
Within three decades of the town’s pioneer John Beal arriving by canoe, Bracebridge had grown to become an economic centre despite the number of marginal farms in its surrounding townships. In 1890 the building of another vast leather tannery and the creation of a major park within the town exemplified the town’s twin pillars of economic development and vital cultural life. Both reinforced the robust sense townsfolk had of Bracebridge as a go-ahead community.
The possibilities continued to dazzle. By the 1890s James Boyer was secretary and a director of the Bracebridge & Trading Lake Railway Company, which aimed to build a railroad from Bracebridge east to Baysville and Lake of Bays, and west to Beaumaris and Lake Muskoka. Railways, including the transcontinental that passed through Muskoka, had become an exciting physical link with the wider world.
Canada counted for the biggest expanse of British red on the world map, and thanks to common political institutions and language, shared laws and legal principles, and even derivative English judicial offices such as the justice of the peace, Canada’s “British subjects” experienced what historian Carl Berger called “a sense of Empire.” Despite this conscious connection to grandeur on a global scale, the country as a whole consisted of fewer than five million people sprinkled over a seemingly endless territory. Ontario styled itself Canada’s “Empire Province,” and, at the start of the 1890s, boasted a population of 2,100,000. The population of Muskoka, which in 1891 was 15,666 and rose some 5,000 more by the turn of the century, was still a far cry from the millions of people promoters like Thomas McMurray had boasted would by now be prospering on their free-grant farms.
Despite this fact, life in Bracebridge, reflected week by week on the rival pages of the Grit Gazette and the Tory Herald, unfolded within a confident sense people had of being part of something larger than themselves. News and advertisements from the United States, reports of global developments, and accounts of national political events, all meshed seamlessly with local births and deaths, weddings and hockey matches, updates on crop prices, and advertisements seeking able-bodied harvesters to go west by train and bring Prairie wheat in from the field.
Queen Victoria, who had ascended the throne in 1837, the same year David Thompson first mapped Muskoka, was well into the longest reign of any British monarch, having herself become as much an institution as the Crown itself. Bracebridge had its Victoria Hotel, Victoria Street, and like most every municipality in Ontario, its Queen Street. In 1897 the agricultural society’s show grounds were renamed “Jubilee Park” to commemorate Victoria’s diamond jubilee.
The long political reign of the Liberal-Conservative Party in Canada under its wise and wily leader Sir John A. Macdonald, who helped form the country in 1867 with the creation of a new federal constitution, and then oversee its development with bold new national policies and the addition of Prince Edward Island, Manitoba, and British Columbia as provinces, was spluttering to its end. After Sir John A.’s death in 1891, which shocked the country not because he was an old man but because it seemed a Canadian institution had vanished, a succession of Tory prime ministers — John Abbott, John Thompson, Mackenzie Bowell, and Charles Tupper — held office before the Liberal leader, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, was elected in 1896. Laurier’s leadership in re-fashioning the Liberal Party of Canada and forming a “cabinet of all the talents” by bringing to Ottawa such illustrious provincial leaders as Ontario’s Premier Oliver Mowat began an historic shift in the country’s political alignments. All these events were fully reported in the local newspapers and discussed avidly in Bracebridge, a highly political town.
The 1890s stood as a high water mark for the British Empire. By the turn of the new century, Queen Victoria would be gone, another human institution vanished. Britain’s seemingly invincible military was bogged down in a war in South Africa that would extract a high price, as a relatively small number of resolute fighters in a faraway land stalled
