History of Logan Lake

The following is based on a title search, some research in available literature, and the Lakeland minutes and memoranda. It also includes some oral recollections from one of the long-term former members of Longford and from a number of the poachers and local residents.

Before the Crown Grant

Longford Township lies along the line which anthropologists indicate divided the hunting territories of the Algonquin Tribes from those of the Huron nations. Longford was probably occupied by the Ojibway tribe of the Algonquins. Indian village sites, probably of Huron origin, have been found to the south in Digby Township near Head Lake. One Indian village has been located on the Head River two miles below Head Lake on Lot 25, Concession 3. In the 1640's, the Iroquois attacked from the south and took over this area.

The Black River attracted a considerable amount of interest from the earliest days that English speaking people were on Lake Simcoe. A map of 1793 bears the note "The source of this river is reported to be near the head of the Rideau. Canoes go up it a great distance.". An 1813 map in Osgoode Hall refers to the area as "Chippewa Hunting Country" and the Black River is shown as a wavy line leading into the wilderness. The cartographer's comment is "Black River, runs a great way into the country". In the 1820's the Duke of Wellington sent out a number of exploratory surveys to try to find a feasible water communication between Lake Simcoe and the Ottawa River that would be less vulnerable to American attack than the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario. One of these surveys in 1826 by Lieutenant W. B. Marlow of the Royal Engineers and Lieutenant Smith of the Royal Artillery started on Lake Couchiching, went up the Severn River to the first falls, up the Black River to its junction with Anson Creek, and then followed the latter up the Dead Hole through Logan Lake, Duck Creek, Duck Lake and Trout Lake. They were probably the first white men in Longford Township. The first settler in the area, Augustine Angiers, arrived in the 1860's. Another early settler in Ryde Township was a man named Housey, who arrived in 1874. An interesting account of the founding of Cooper's Falls and settlement in that area is contained in the book titled "Muskoka" by Geraldine Coomb. Logan Lake was not named after Logan MacLean, but after Sir William E. Logan, founder of the Geological Survey of Canada, who also gave his name to Mount Logan. Prospectors explored the area but were unsuccessful although Longford Township lies on the southerly margin of the Laurentian peneplan, the location of important mineral discoveries elsewhere. · A gold strike was recorded along the Black River six miles below Ragged Rapids, and there are traces of molybdenum throughout the area. A survey conducted by the Department of Mines shows no important commercial deposits in the area. Early Ownership Longford Township was one of nine townships in the District of Haliburton granted by the Crown to the Canada Land and Immigration Company Limited in May of 1865. The Company paid $0.50 an acre and agreed to have the land settled within ten y·ears. Extensive information about the grant, the negotiations leading up to it and the subsequent renegotiation of terms is contained in a book titled''rhe History of Muskoka and Haliburton" written by Florence B. Murray and published under the auspices of The Champlain Society. Amongst the documentation on the subsequent negotiations is the report of a survey by a provincial land surveyor showing that Longfo.rd Township contains 5,621 acres of first class lands, 8 ,-977 acres of second clas& lands, 17,015 acres of third class lands (rocky and broken), 6,272 acres of fourth class lands (marketable timber, unfit for settlement) and 988 acres of fifth class lands (unfit for settlement). In the following year, 1866, the Company gave John Thomson the right to remove the timber. Two years later, in 1868, a Melville Millar acquired part 'interest in the timber on the property. This may be the origin of the name of Millar's Falls down the Dead Hole just above where the Anson Creek flows into the Black River. Another story that we were told was that a lumberman by the name of Millar (possibly a relative) was drowned there in the timber run one spring. In 1872 Longford Township was sold to John Thomson and Anson G.P. Dodge. While Thomson owned the Township, the logs from it were taken down the Black River to Lake St. John, then over a small railway to Lake Couchiching and hauled by steamer to Orillia. Thomson's mill there was one of the foundations on which Orillia was built .. It is interesting to note that there is a family named Thomson who still operate a saw mill near Vankoughnet on the north boun~ dary of Longford Township. In 1876 the Township was conveyed to Longford Lumber Company, and there was a succession of owners until 1926 when Longford Reserve Limited acquired it for $32,500. Lakeland got its lease from that company in July of 1958. The original Crown grant reserved rights of way around the shorelines of navigable waters. In 1895 the then owner, Longford Lumber Company, conveyed three road allowances to the Townships of Laxton, Digby and Longford - one was north of Trout Lake, another around Crotch Lake and the third was the Victori~ Road, which is a colonist road from the south to Victoria Bridge. It used to go further north. In 1931 that municipal corporation regranted the first two roads to Longford Reserve Limited. In 1952 Longford Reserve Limited granted the transmission line right-of-way to the Hydro. Lumbering Most of the pine was cut from Longford Township around 1890 and 1909. In 1901 the Muskoka Leather Company acquired a one-half interest in all the live hemlock bark in Longford Township, presumably to use in tanning leather. That company was owned by the Tudhope family who had tanning and other interests in Gravenhurst and Orillia and were influential members of some of Toronto's financial institutions in their formative years, including A. E. Ames & Co. and Canada Permanent Trust Company. Logging continued for the next few years. The lumbermen of the day were very ingenious at damming rivers to provide flows in the direction needed to take lumber to their mills. The dams in the Washago area were established to take lumber to the mill at Longford Mills and.still set the intriguing flow pattern of the Black, Severn and Head Rivers. One of the old timers' stories of that mill relates to the purchase of new saw equipment manufactured in Sweden to speed up the rate of sawing the logs. One of its features was a very fast rn.oving "cqrriage" that ~arried the logs back and forth past the saw as they were being ripped into t t E I E c t Il j r 1 , Il c c I I 1 C 1 ( j j t Il boards. The operator rode on that carriage and had to be strapped in because it went so quickly and stopped so abruptly at each end. The man who had previously ridden the carriage in the former saw equipment regarded the straps a& an insult to his ability and was confident that he could hold his •seat on any carriage made anywhere, so he refused to be strapped- in. Shortly after the new equipment was installed he was jarred out of the seat and into the saw, which cut him in half. There were some lumbermen's shanties on our property between 1809 and 1905-. One was just above Millar's Falls and another on the point immediately north and east of the landing where we park our cars. That landing was called French's Landing, since a , man by the name of French operated a "farm" there growing fresh vegetableq for the lumber camps. At that time the road to Logan Lake followed the Victoria Road south from Victoria Bridge about half a mile and then turned east paralleling our road a.bout half a mile south. The remains of a chute for the log drive can still be seen on Duck. Creek. There was a winter bush road starting near Bill Lindsay's cottage and going east up the valley to Fisher Lake. There are still two of the old sleighs rotting along that road. Another winter bush road crossed Anson Creek above Millar's Falls and can still be followed a long way north and west. Around the turn of the century, there was a thriving lumber community called Lewisham just west of South Longford Lake on the road running north from Steen's farm to Barkway. I.t had a number of farmhouses, a store and a school. By the 1960's it was central Ontario's closest thing to a ghost town, with only the ruins of a hotel, pool hall,. some houses and other buildings. The last resident moved out long before. Before 1900 the Township was covered with enormous trees, the stumps of which are still visible. The rock that is so apparent now was rarely visible then because there was two or three feet more earth than there is now. By 1903 there were slashings everywhere and a huge fire started which raged over the entire area for two or three weeks. Finally the wind changed direction and rain put out the fire. Harold Abel Sr. had pictures taken in 1907 and 1910 in which there was not a tree visible more than six to ten feet high, except in a few swampy areas. A few feet of soil was either burned by the intensity of the fire or subsequently eroded. Other than the few trees in the swamps, everything was gone. From the top of the hills one could see extremely far and nothing but bald hills and old burnt trees. This was the last fire around Logan Lake and Anson Creek, but there were more recent fires along our road, I believe in the 1940's. Settlement The Canada Land Company had the whole township surveyed by a provincial land surveyor in 1862 and divided up into farm lots with road allowances shown to the farm lots and around a number of the lakes. The map also shows Victoria Road going north ·through the length of the township and being joined by a road from Browns Lake. The Canada Immigration and Land Company never got anyone to farm in Longford Township, but there were a number of fanp.s to the west. Some of the oldtimers we met poaching in the late fifties and early sixties had worked as loggers around Logan Lake. One of them by the name of Stevens, who had a hunt cabin a mile north of Victoria Bridge on the Black River, told us many stories about the families that farmed on the Black River Road west of Steen's farm. There must have been a lot of such farms because one oldtimer told us that there were, at one point, six one-room school houses in use between Steen's farm and Washago. One is still kept in good shape by the Laytons a mile or two east of the Sadowa Bridge. In the 1960 1s another one was still standing just west of the Sadowa Bridge. These were,the days when Clifford Sifton and other Immigration Ministers were enticing many settlers from the United Kingdom with free land and overly optimistic assessments of agricultural possibilities. A story is told of one such family that settled one road north of ours towards Vankoughnet and brought retainers and an enormous amount of equipment with them, intending to transfer the, manorial system to Canada. Needless to say, the soil did not support it and soon those retainers and family members with any gmnption or initiative had left the land to make their way elsewhere. However in the 1960's when Lakeland started there were still some descendants of that family living in a log shack in pretty abject circmnstances but eating off crested plate with sterling silver that their ancestors had brought over with them in high hopes. Longford Reserve Limited In 1925 or 1926 a Cleveland visitor was persuaded to leave Muskoka for a day and to fishing in Longford Township. He became interested in the area as a place to raise beaver commercially, and gathered a group of friends in Cleveland to invest about $1,200 each. Forty-eight shares were sold to raise about $60,000. Longford Township was bought from the Tudhope interests for $32,500 and the group spent another $100,000 putting up enclosures for the beaver. A man named Bowen was employed to manage the operation. A story we were told by Harold Abel Sr. was that when the Cleveland shareholders came up to inspect their investment Bowen would point out various pens where "there were 2,000 beavers" and recommend deferring trapping for another year or two in order to produce 5,000 or 7,000 beavers. After three years the Cleveland men told Bowen to purchase $13,000 worth of trapping equipment and then they came to the township and spent several days trapping - and got a total of 15 beavers. Apparently Bowen had been allowing local people to trap the beaver in return for half the profits. The Cleveland group were unable to prove this but refused to reimburse Bowen his $13,000. Ultimately Bowen sued the Company and obtained a first mortgage. He would have been able to foreclose on the whole property but Thor Schnaufer bought the mortgage from Bowen. I believe there were also some misadventures in trying a cranberry farm, but I am not sure of the details. In the early 1930's the Orillia Lake and Power Company built the present dams on Big Trout and Rainy Lakes, although they apparently had no permission to do so, and there was considerable confusion in the late 40's whether that company or the province had the power to regulate water flow. In the late 1930's Messrs. Abel, Gleason and McCreary built cottages on Browns Lake that were quite modern for that time, containing bathrooms and having their own electrical·plants, at a cost of about $10,000 each. Their large parties and speed boats upset the remaining Longford members who spent their time in a small lodge, at one end of Browns Lake and wanted only to fish. After four or five years the groups were reconciled, more members were brought in for hunting and fishing at about $200 a year, and Longford Reserve was finally ab-le to pay off its debts. In the late 1950's when we first started discussions with Longford Reserve, it had a small active group that wished to retain the property in its natural state and that controlled about-half the shares. The other shares either were owned by people Le that did not use the property and wished to realize on their investment, or had been lost track of in estates of original members etc. The active group did a lot of work over the next 20 years in finding and buying out the shares of the others. Lakeland Lakeland is the successor to an unincorporated association known as "Summer Cottage Property Search Group" formed on May 28, 1956 by Glenn Curtis, Wilf Curtis, Lang Farrand, Bill Greer, Chris Miller and Norman Patterson at the initiative of the four first listed. Throughout the next two years the membership in the association fluctuated a great deal with a large number of members or prospective members att~nding some meetings and then either losing interest or not being sufficiently keen to participate in the many trips to assess possible lakes. The initial members who remained were Glenn Curtis, Lang Farrand, Bill Greer and Chris Miller. Of the new members, Dick Butterfield and Warren Hurst stayed with the group. The finding of Logan Lake resulted from our investigations of Big East Lake to the north of Longford Township. In flying over that lake in July of 1956 Wilf Curtis noticed the lakes in Longford Township, and Bill Greer undertook enquiries of the Provincial Government. A little later Glenn Curtis, Lang Farrand and Bill Greer made an abortive attempt to portage into Big East Lake and then drove into the Longford Reserve and fortunately happened to meet Thor Schnaufer. After a lengthy discussion and ascertaining the objectives of our group, he suggested that we write to Longford Reserve because it had previously considered letting a group such as ours have one of the lakes in Longford Township. 11 ! ' ,._ l : :i ~t ~: On September 9, 1956 Chris Miller went into Logan Lake via Coopers Falls and walked from the present gate. I reported that the road from Victoria Falls" ••. was over fairly open and barren country ..••• The road in its present condition would be passable to a jeep or Landrover, but not to an ordinary stock car. There is one part of the road which goes over an inclined rock and then down into a rather marshy stream bed that might be difficult to repair and maintain, but otherwise the·road could be made fit for cottage traffic at little expense. The country through which the road passes is fairly flat, contains few large trees and is a little unprepossessing ••.• It was concluded from this trip that the means of access to the lake are much better than could have been anticipated, and much better than are likely to be found for other unoccupied lakes, but the portion of the lake seen was rather disappointing." On September 16, 1956 Lang Farrand and Chris Miller paddled into Logan Lake via Longford Reserve and Browns Lake. Their report included the following: "4. Logan Lake is approximately two miles long and on it there are eight or ten good sites for cottages. There were a few more acceptable sites but from the examination made it was felt that fifteen would be a maximum number for the main lake. There are four or five sandy beaches which looked quite nice. There are also three or so swampy areas, but most are bordered by rocks so that they do not reduce the attractiveness of the lake. The trees are varied including some pines, birch and oak, but generally speaking they are light and young. Practically the whole of the southeast shore of the lake is an almost bare twenty foot rock cliff which affords hardly any protection from the sun, and very few prospective cottage sites. The country behind the shoreline of the lake appeared comparatively flat and there were no hills overlooking the lake. 5. The water in the lake is very dark and we understand it is not very deep. The water leaves the lake via Anson Creek at a point where there is a natural rock dam which could be improved so as to control the level of the lake with little difficulty. The electric transmission lines are visible only from the southwest corner of , the lake and so are not offensive. The map of the Longford Reserve caretaker showed a hunting cabin on the lake but no habitation was seen. 6. It was concluded from the trip that this lake would be acceptable as a minimum compliance with the main objects of the Association, but that it is a little deficient in mature trees and interesting surrounding areas for hikes and trips and in shoreline configuration." The next trip was in October, 1956 when Chris Miller 'went via Minden into Millward Lake and thence to Big Trout Lake, meeting both Wendover and the owner of the cottages near Wendover's on Big Trout, and getting the story of the friction between them and their poaching in Longford. Early in November there was a·meeting of Glenn Curtis and Chris Miller with Mr. Schnaufer discussing the possibility of the Lakelanders becoming members of Longford. A flight over Logan Lake was arranged on November 25. The basic lease arrangements were l I I t l made at a meeting on February 9, 1957 between Messrs. Chaplin and Schnaufer for Longford, and Messrs. Curtis, Farrand and Miller for Lakeland. The Longford representatives answered a series of questions we had posed earlier about their longterm intentions with respect to the Township and then made us an offer which is the basis of the present lease. The first group visit was planned for Saturday, May 25, 1957 with weekend accoromd.dation being provided at Kashe Lake, courtesy of the Curtises. However most of the group never did get as far as the lake, due to problems with the road, black flies, etc . .In the summer and fall of 1957 there were many trips into the l2ke assessing its potential and the work necessary to make the road passable. There were further discussions with Longford and outstanding points were settled on January 16, 1958 at a meeting between Messrs. Chaplin and Schnaufer for Longford and Messrs. Curtis and Miller for Lakeland. I drafted the lease and sent it to Longford's negotiators and lawyer. It was settled with virtually no change in March, except for the renewal clause. There were many discussions of the renewal clause and its operation in various possible circumstances over the next few months. Then it was settled with only minor changes in July 1958. Lakeland Conservation Association Limited was incorporated on April 12, 1958, with Messrs. Butterfield, Curtis, Farrand, Greer, Hurst and Miller as charter members. The publishers of this Lakeland Almanac asked for a list