was a land boom.
The exhilarating promise of a fresh start in life drew many improbable settlers to this wilderness frontier. An anxious jumble of characters abandoned their problems and set out for Muskoka to start anew on their hundred acres of “free” land, hoping to cash in on a promise Ontario’s government and its immigration agents were aggressively promoting through advertisements in American and British newspapers and in the booklet Emigration to Canada: The Province of Ontario, circulated widely in 1869 to publicize Muskoka’s glowing agricultural prospects for new settlers.
Few heading to Muskoka sought a transformation more complete than a desperate thirty-five-year-old lawyer who, early one September morning in 1869, boarded the train in New York as Isaac Jelfs, but stepped off in Toronto as James Boyer. Accompanying him was a pregnant woman, their little girl, a curly-haired teenager, and another woman in her early twenties. Nobody could have mistaken this formally dressed family group for pioneer settlers heading into Muskoka’s wilds to hack a homestead out of dense forest. Yet, such was their intent.
Not only was Jelfs abandoning his name. He was forfeiting a long-craved legal career with the politically influential Broadway Avenue firm of Brown, Hall & Vanderpoel. He was relinquishing his recording secretary’s role with the Episcopalian Methodist Church in Brooklyn. He was abandoning the vice-presidency of the Brooklyn Britannia Benevolent Association, an office to which he’d been glowingly elected in May that year, being presented with a copy of Byron’s poetical works and making, as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “one of his happy speeches on the occasion.”
The real kicker was that he had closed the front door of the Jelfs’s18th Street family home in Brooklyn for the last time. Overnight Isaac vanished from the life of his wife, Eliza, and their young daughter, Elizabeth. The pregnant woman on the train, Hannah Boyer, was not his wife in law, but had become a second wife in reality after she’d captured Isaac’s heart at a Britannia Benevolent Association Saturday night dance several years before. The two-year-old girl on the train was their first love child, Annie, whose birth the couple had discreetly left unrecorded in New York’s registries. Equally absent from official documents was any record of their marriage, since neither in New York nor later in Canada would they ever have a legal wedding. James and Hannah and their affiliated family travelled by train, boat, stagecoach, and boat again to at last reach the village wharf in Bracebridge and their new life.
“Mr. and Mrs. James Boyer” had quit a bustling, overcrowded, foul city to enter a pristine wilderness, whose thick silence was punctuated only by bird songs, the hollow rushing of quiet breezes in tall pines, and the steadily comforting sound of crashing waterfalls. Muskoka’s pure air had special buoyancy, its dampness releasing the pungent earthy muskiness of fresh wood and mossy rock, a swilling mixture with heady evergreen scents made even fresher by breezes crossing the district’s rocky expanses and crystalline lakes. Bracebridge itself, a stark settlement barely a decade old, was a tiny scattering of shacks, tree stumps, and rough, muddy pathways, isolated, primitive, and much further from New York than all the miles the Boyers had journeyed to get here.
Hannah and James Boyer settled in Macaulay Township, east of Bracebridge, where he soon set about clearing land for farming. James cherished the remoteness, as did other settlers resolved on escaping their pasts. His New York years had simply been the latest chapter in a life buffeted by fate so poignantly that Edward Greenspan remarked, “The tale of his life’s journey would not be out of place in a Charles Dickens novel, except that James’s story is not fictitious.” Greenspan believes “the chapters on James’s life are essential to this book.” Yet the telling of his story and of the equally stirring, entwined saga of Hannah Boyer would require more space, to do their story justice, than can be accommodated here. So it will appear as a separate volume entitled Another Country, Another Life.
In 1868 Bracebridge was designated district capital because of its geographic centrality, and soon several provincial government offices opened to serve the entire Muskoka territory, which not only contributed to the settlement’s growth, but also helped establish the community’s character as the centre for Muskoka government and administration of justice. Muskokans, irregularly scattered across a large and rugged landscape with poor transportation and rudimentary communication, recognized the emergence of a central hub. In Bracebridge itself, these officials and courts faced plenty of work sorting out the human and economic hodgepodge emerging from Muskoka’s raw opening phase.
In the larger picture, the provincial policy of building colonization roads and offering free land had served its intended purpose. The district was being populated and settlements were growing.
Clear-cut logging created drab open space for the emerging settlement of Bracebridge, seen here in 1871, two years after the Boyers arrived from New York. The Muskoka Colonization Road enters this picture from the right, just after crossing the Muskoka River, then turns north to become the village’s main street. The Northern Advocate newspaper, which James Boyer edited, was the first publication in Ontario’s northern districts.
As the settlement grew, the usual aspects of civil society developed. Protestants in early 1870s Bracebridge had the choice of salvation through Methodist, Presbyterian, or Anglican churches. By mid-decade a Roman Catholic priest took up residence in town for the first time — the beginning of another flock. Adherents not only headed to worship services segregated into their respective denominations, but enjoyed community entertainments sponsored by their particular churches.
More broadly, social life was becoming organized: members of the Orange Lodge had a meeting hall; the children, a school; and adults, the Mechanics’ Institute library and its reading room with newspapers and periodicals from Toronto, New York, and London. This Mechanics’ Institute, which began to operate the community’s first library service in 1874, was a worthy institution for Bracebridge. A Mechanics’ Institute was the best available structure for organizing a community library in those days, since free public libraries had yet to emerge. The first Mechanics’ Institute in Ontario was formed at Kingston in 1834, and other larger centres in southern Ontario had since created community libraries this way as well.
The Muskokans of the 1860s and 1870s were different from the immigrants arriving in southern Ontario in the 1820s. The earlier settlers, recalled by historian Robert McDougall, were often “the bungs and dregs of English society,” characterized by their poverty and illiteracy. Those reaching Muskoka a half-century later were, in much greater proportion, educated and entrepreneurial. Just as McDougall recognized in the former their “sterling qualities of character” that made them “the muscle and sinew of the new civilization” emerging in the province, he saw how a smaller number of educated and literate immigrants amongst them gave the emerging community “its mind, its taste, and its voice.”
The fact that Muskoka remained closed to settlement until the 1860s meant it had been held in reserve for later waves of settlers, whose social and economic status and levels of education gave the district strong minds, decided tastes, and outspoken voices. This historical sequence contributed to differentiating Muskokans from others in earlier-settled southern Ontario. Many of those coming to settle Muskoka between the late 1860s and 1880s were more accustomed to modern ways and had higher expectations for themselves than did the earlier settlers, but their fresh start in life required more of them: not just a pioneering encounter with raw land, but also a struggle with the rude conditions on the Canadian Shield. The exchange was bound to produce a particular character.
Bracebridge itself is a river town, and the waterfalls have played a central role in its development, not only powering its early grist, lumber, and shingle mills, but forcing into existence a local economy based on transshipment of goods: moving cargoes from steamboats to horse-drawn wagons, and vice versa, because the falls were a barrier to water-borne transport further upstream into the Muskoka interior. The waterfalls and river also inspired construction of facilities to accommodate
