Ghost Towns of Ontario Volume 1
Ron Brown
Summary
A stream provides water power for a sawmill around which a town forms. The local forests are clear cut to provide fodder for the mill. The stream dries up for lack of a watershed. The town dies. Early communities depended on water transportation as early roads were virtually impassable and travel painfully slow. When new highways and later railroads by-passed towns they underwent rapid decline. The final coup de grace often was provided by flooding due to Spring runoff resulting from the lack of the moderating influence of the forests cut to feed those very mills.
Early settlers had a beat back the wilderness mentality that persists to this day but the wilderness no longer exists. The likes of Doug Ford would see the demand for housing justifying the destruction of farmland and greenspace to promote urban sprawl but who will feed that population and will those subdivisions be livable without the breathing space of remaining trees.
One of the frustrations of this and other volumes Brown has published is the terrible reproduction of the many images that lace the books.
Grist mills went under when a Wheat Blossom Midge outbreak had farmers switch to dairy production. Dairy herds lead to cheese production.
The Temperance Movement may have been the making of the Mafia in North America but it put many the hotel out of business and made continuing to hire a local constabulary unnecessary. Selling booze may have been illegal but producing it was not.
By their nature ghost towns document exercises in futility. When Mills lost their reason to operate and business moved to more advantageous locations once flourishing villages were left to rack and ruin. Little or nothing has been done to preserve settler heritage unless cottagers moved in to appropriate former structures. Weeds and farmer's fields replace former building lots and streets become rutted tracks. Lilacs, apple trees, and Forsythia typically mark former homesteads.
I've camped on the cold hard granite of the Canadian Shield. Settlers who were lured to Northern Ontario by the offer of free land found thin marshy, rocky soil that grew little including a new crop of trees after the initial tree cover was clear cut in part due to a short growing season.
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