Revised April 6

Lecture One
An Introduction to the History of Collingwood

When I was first approached to deliver a series of lectures to your institute, my thought was that I could recount some of the things I have learned about Toronto, the city I have worked in, studied and written about for three decades. On reflection, that seemed to me to be a lot like reworking old ground, and I contemplated talking about how the big city had impacted a place like Collingwood.

That led me to considering more closely the nature of the Town of Collingwood. I looked for a concise history of the place, but found nothing. I delved more deeply, and found a loose collection of disparate information which did not give me what was needed to help me understand how Collingwood worked, or provide enough history of anything of significant interest to an attentive and informed audience that I am aware you are.

And so I was led down the proverbial garden path to a new world that I never expected to discover. I began to read everything on Collingwood that was in the University of Toronto Robarts Library. It was thin pickings. I rushed through material in the local history room in the Collingwood Public Library. I reviewed the recent publications of The Blue Mountain Foundation of the Arts and other locally published works. I perused the Ontario Archives, and reviewed the archives for the Town’s Planning Department. I received the assistance of some of the colleagues of my mother-in-law Carol Rykert in looking more closely into several nooks and crannies.

In the process, I became intrigued to learn how Collingwood had developed and changed, and I wanted to see if I could put together a relatively comprehensive picture, one that would seem to make sense while at the same time encourage others to look further, amend, and arrive at an even more satisfying history. As we know, understanding how communities work is not easy, and there are great differences of opinion among community leaders about what is important and what is not. Providing a reliable history of the past at least makes a start to understanding the present. My hope is that these lectures will provide that basis.

I turned to several friends in the academic community to seek out models or paradigms of how small communities function. How do they grow economically? How do they work socially? How do they relate to other communities? I have been disappointed at how little attention this subject has received in academia. Small communities might be found throughout the country, but they have not received the kind of study that allows one to make predictions or plot strategies. I have found that disappointing.

All of which is to say, in concluding this introduction, that these lectures are a work in progress. I recount the history of Collingwood as best I can understand it, in the hope that others will fill in the blanks and/or correct my misunderstandings. I try to make sense of what I know, but since there is a paucity of information, and at times the recountings are at odds, I often have made leaps of faith.

And there is a larger issue here, too. I believe that a history of Collingwood reflects upon the history of other small communities in Ontario. Generalizations that come out of this history can be used very productively in looking at other places. Collingwood’s history is similar to that of other communities in many ways, but of course it has its own quirks and differences, making it a distinct place with its own culture within the Ontario framework. My hope is that the generalities I draw elucidate the similarities and the differences of each.

My approach to these lectures will be as follows. The first lecture will deal with the general history of Collingwood to provide some sense of the town’s shape and change over the last 150 years, and to shed light on some of the large issues impinging on the place. The second lecture will deal with the town’s economy over the years, and in the process try to outline some general theories as to how small places like Collingwood actually function, and what kinds of public decisions might be helpful, if the past is any indication. The third lecture will deal with the physical development of the town, trying to trace how it grew in spatial terms and the opportunities that were both opened and closed over the last 150 years. The fourth lecture will deal with the social development of the town and how people in a small community organize their lives together, for pleasure, companionship, social and spiritual needs. The last lecture will deal with the current challenges that Collingwood faces and what the past might indicate about both how current leaders will respond to the challenges and ho other approaches may in some cases may be more appropriate.

My attempt is to try and draw out an interest in this community so that its various aspects become more intriguing and more care will be given to not only the town’s past, but also its present and future. If I can help to encourage and strengthen Collingwood’s civil society then I will count these lectures as a success.

In brief, the history of Collingwood runs like this. The area was settled sparsely by aboriginals for three millennia, but the Petuns were massacred in the mid 17th century, and the land remained unoccupied for 150 years, until Europeans arrived in the early 19th century. It was formed as a distinct community only in the late 1850s. Its population grew to 1,000 in the first decade, then to 2,000, and by the end of the 19th century was almost 7,000. About the time of the First World War it stagnated and its population hovered below 7,000 for the next 50 years. Then slowly the growth began again, mostly fuelled by people escaping from the big city to the south.

In the late 19th century there were many dreams that Collingwood would become a large metropolis with the Board of Trade then predicting a population of 100,000. Those dreams were shared by other communities as well, but invariably they ran aground on the shoals of reality. The population of Ontario jumped from about two million at the end of the 19th century to slightly over 11 million by the end of the 20th century, but very few of those new souls resided in towns. Small settlements were generally bypassed by growth. Growth favoured large communities which quickly grew even larger. The reasons for this will be explored.

In 1793 John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, visited Georgian Bay. He declared that for military reasons a port would be located at Penetanguishene, although it would be another decade before a road was opened between the Town of York and Penetanguishene. (Simcoe named the road Yonge Street after his good military friend Sir George Yonge, the English Secretary of War. Yonge secured an enormous legacy for someone who never even visited Canada.) It was not until 1818 that Penetanguishene became an actual naval and military station.

There was no reason for anyone to pay attention to the place we now know as Collingwood since there was little to commend it. The land was low, swampy and covered with mixed forest, fronting on a bay spotted with small islands. The melange of water and land was laughingly referred to as the Hens and Chickens. Immediately following the end of the War of 1812, the British government reached agreement with native population to cede the land, preparing it for settlement. In 1819 the area was surveyed by Gabriel Lount – his son, Samuel Lount, who was later to become a hero of the Rebellion in 1837 for which he was declared a traitor and was hung, helped make this survey with his brother George. That survey, like all others in the province, arbitrarily divided land into concessions by means of the straight line. It took no account of the way streams and rivers meandered, nor of the way land forms such as the Niagara Escarpment impacted on the environment. It was on the basis of the lines in this survey that roads were laid out, farms were established, and municipal boundaries assigned. In short, this survey had an enormous impact on the ways decisions would be made, and the kinds of decisions that were possible, in the coming decades.

The survey may have been a harbinger of development, but little change occurred in the next few decades. Towns were formed where water power was available – hence Nottawa became established along the Pretty River. These settlements were joined by a road following the surveyor’s straight line, a road that was pushed north to the Bay in the 1840s and is now known as Hurontario Street.

The survey permitted land parcels to be defined and roads to be laid out, and the government could make grants of land to those it wished to reward, and to settlers. It did both with results that were contentious, and some suggest these grants as one cause of the 1837 Rebellion. By the 1830s Scots received grants in the Collingwood area, hence Duntroon, as well as some Irish. But settlement was very limited in this area.

The survey also permitted the establishment of a broad structure of local government based on the English system of counties, towns, and townships. The Simcoe District Council was organized in 1843 as a first tentative local government. It covered the large area from Lake Simcoe to Georgian Bay.

What changed the situation was the rush to build railways. By the 1840s railways were thought to be the technology of the future and the Parliament of Canada, East and West, passed a bill in the hope a railway would be built into the northern parts of Canada West. Some kind of connection was needed to Georgian Bay to assist in shipping goods through the Great Lakes. The Welland Canal had been built by mid-century but its locks were too small to accommodate the larger boats then in use. A railway, it was thought, would provide the needed connection between Toronto and Georgian Bay in order to ship goods to and from the American mid-west. The campaign for a northern line was led by the Barrie Magnet, a newspaper that began publishing in 1847, and many public meetings were held in support of the venture. In 1849 a proposal was advanced by railway entrepreneurs Casimir Gzowski and his partner Frederick Capreol, for the Ontario, Simcoe & Lake Huron Railway, which was incorporated by Parliament.

The advocacy was successful, and in 1850 Simcoe County Council decided to invest the extraordinary sum of 50,000 pounds into the new railway company. It was not a unanimous decision of Council. The representatives of five townships, slightly to the west of the Hens and Chickens, feared the impact of taking on this large debt and they successfully petitioned Parliament to secede from Simcoe County and join Grey County. This secession occurred in January 1851 and these townships – Osprey, Collingwood, Euphenia, Artemesia, and St. Vincent – continue to be part of Grey County, although Collingwood Township has been renamed the Town of Blue Mountains. That division, now exceedingly important and strategic, occurred 150 years ago over the issue of public investment in the railway.

Over the next few years a railway was constructed from Toronto to the Allendale Junction, just south of Barrie. The question was where the railway would next proceed.

Where should the northern terminus for this railway be? Directors of the Ontario, Simcoe and Lake Huron Railway reviewed the alternatives, which came down to a choice between the Hens and Chickens, the mouth of the Nottawasaga River (now Wasaga Beach), Penetanguishene, Thornbury or Meaford. None was an entirely satisfactory port but the grade of the railway routed into Collingwood was considered easier than into Penetanguishene. As well, it was considered that building a spit nto the Hens and Chickens Harbour would make it reasonably operative, and it was selected in 1853.

Having made the choice of location they came upon the difficult question of finding a name more dignified than Hens and Chickens Harbour. For reasons that are still unclear they settled on the name of Cuthbert Collingwood, the successor to Horatio Nelson, the great British admiral, and the person who actually achieved victory in the Battle of Trafalgar after Nelson had been killed. The name may have been generated by local residents, some of whom were veterans of the Battle of Trafalgar, and who named streets in Owen Sound, for instance after others involved in that battle. Prior to the construction of the railway it was said that the town had a population of three or four families.

Construction of the track from the Allendale Junction was completed by the end of 1854, and the first train arrived at Collingwood on January 1, 1855. The town quickly grew, although someone who arrived in 1857 complained that Hurontario Street was still dotted with stumps.

As the railway terminal grew in importance local residents to create a town separate and independent from the Township of Nottawas,pressuredaga parliament and the Town of Collingwood came into legal existence on January 1, 1858. The first election for the local cd mayor occurred on January 18 and W.B. Hamilton was elected Mayor. Mr. Hamiouncil anlton owned a bank in the new community.

The existence of the railway led immediately to a vibrant shipping industry. Steamers brought flour, pork, butter, lard, sheet lead, corn and other materials both natural and manufactured from places like Milwaukee and Chicago. Lumbering was a significant activity on the shores of Georgian Bay, constituting the largest group of materials shipped out of Collingwood in the form of shingles, cord wood, cedar posts and cut timber. By the latter part of the 1850s boats were sailing from Collingwood to the far reaches of Lake Superior and beyond, carrying goods for the Red River Expedition in the area we now know as Winnipeg.

With all this shipping activity the town boomed. A sawmill was built by the Hotchkiss & Peckhams firm at the foot of Pine Street, the first industry of any significance. In 1860 the Prince of Wales visited the town to find a population of about 1,400 people. A grain elevator was erected at the edge of the harbour, and a decade later a larger stately elevator - the largest on the Great Lakes - replaced it,

perhaps to the designs of Frederick Cumberland, the architect of a number of extraordinary buildings in Toronto, including University College. Cumberland was also the manager of the Northern Railway, as the Ontario, Simcoe and Lake Huron Railway had since been renamed. Also working for the Northern Railway, from 1858 on, was Sanford Fleming, later knighted for the institution of Standard Time.

Shipping also included passengers, of whom 4,000 were registered in and out of Collingwood in 1858. As will be noted later, some of the passenger traffic consisted of escaped slaves slipping through another branch of the underground railway from Southern United States through Chicago, thereby enriching Collingswood’s social milieu.

As with other towns of a comparable size in Ontario, the economy was extraordinarily mixed. As land was cleared of timber, agricultural uses were established. Apples and other tender fruit products such as cherries and plums were grown, as well as mixed farming. The manufacturing activities were very diverse, and it could be said that Collingwood like many other communities was generally self-sufficient in terms of the goods that it needed and manufactured. The manufacturing activity in the 1890s included pork packing, biscuit making, flour mills, blacksmithing, two foundries, a tannery for leather making, mechanic shops, a hosiery mill, a broom factory, meat processing, tailors, and of course - to deal with the shipping industry - woodworking shops and boat factories. One of the first manufactured products exported from Collingwood was a small bell made by a man called Underwood, who also manufactured horseshoes.

By 1878 the municipal council was faced with the important question of whether it would support the shipyards by helping to fund a dry dock. The decision also involved an element of competition, since Owen Sound, the lake terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway already had a dry dock. Just as the original railway into Collingwood had been spurred on by the financial support of Simcoe County, the municipal council decided public investment was important, and invested $25,000 in the dry dock venture. Five years later, in 1883, another $25,000 was sunk into the venture. The investment helped to assuage the loss of business that Collingwood shipping experienced once the Canadian Pacific Railway had been built across the country in 1880, providing an alternative route to the west. It also provided the basis for a long-term municipal fuel with Owen Sound – the two towns fought each other, rather than working together.

By the 1880s, Collingswood’s population had burgeoned to almost 5,000 and passenger travel through the port reached almost 30,000 a year. “There are indications that this is but the beginning of the flood tide of prosperity,” remarked an 1881 publication. Four million bushels of corn and wheat passed through the port each year and many boosters of the town referred to Collingwood as “Chicago of the North.” To facilitate this interchange of commerce and passengers with the United States, an American consulate was established in Collingwood. It seemed as though the opportunities for growth and expansion were unlimited. Even the fire which caused extensive damage in the downtown in 1881 did not dampen the enthusiasm - the wooden buildings destroyed in the conflagration were replaced with new brick structures. The town had its own water works system, and electric lights by 1889. Boat building grew apace, moving from the small wooden Collingwood skiff produced by W.Watts and Sons to much larger craft, including yachts and steamships, and finally in 1901 the steel-hulled “Huronia,” a 321 foot steamer for passengers and freight.

As the twentieth century dawned, a major change came to the Canadian economy, one that Collingwood and other towns were unable to escape. It had to do with the nature of manufacturing. For most of the 19th century, manufacturing activity in Upper Canada was carried on by relatively small companies, employing three or four men working more as artisans and craftsmen than as manufacturing employees. This kind of process meant that every town could have its own small tannery, ironworks, and sawmill. Capital costs were not significant and while the levels of skills were considerable they were the result of well rounded craftsmen rather than specialized experts. As geographer Jacob Spelt notes, manufacturing was “a village handicraft in small workshops.” He found that breweries had an average of four employees, sawmills ten, tanneries five; foundries 15; and woollen factories 10.

One reason for the small scale of enterprise was the difficulty involved in transporting goods and materials any great distance. Spelt states “the inadequate transportation network made it difficult to ship goods and raw materials, particularly flour and lumber over long distances. Consequently, on account of [the small size of local] markets, the workshops did not grow into large factories.”

Obviously the railways changed this considerably - by 1880 there was a significant railway network which converged on Toronto. William Lyon.Mackenzie had complained about the poor condition of roads from the time he came to Canada in 1820 and 70 years later they had not seen significant improvement. There was no simple way of moving on these roads in any case, since the automobile had yet to be invented. Beginning after the middle of the 19th century, the lessons learned in Europe about manufacturing came to Canada. By 1880 large factories had begun to appear in Toronto. These factories were aided by the National Policy which in 1878 imposed high tariffs on manufactured goods coming into Canada, and the large factories in Toronto proliferated. But the large factories also were a result of more reliable electrical and steam power, and the large markets available through improved transportation. These new factories had large work forces, and the degree of specialization meant that the quality of products improved considerably while the price went down. The example of factories producing tractors and other machines for farms in Western Canada shows the change: whereas firms that manufactured agricultural implements had an average of 12 employees in 1871, by 1911 the average had zoomed up to 165. Obviously, smaller factories found themselves at a disadvantage. They were unable to make constant improvements to products, and they could not match the price of the larger enterprises. Investment went to the large new plants, not the small ones in the small towns. As Spelt notes, “Labour supply, access to raw materials and markets, contact with related industries, were factors which were essential in the location of the new larger plants.” By 1911, Toronto had no less than 70 per cent of all the manufacturing employees in south central Ontario.

The impact of this economic change on communities like Collingwood was astounding. In 1891 Collingwood had 78 manufacturing enterprises but a decade later that number had been cut to 36, and by 1911 it was down to 28. All communities of a comparable size suffered the same fate. Orillia, for example, went from 73 manufacturing firms in 1891 to 40 twenty years later; Penetanguishene from 39 to 19; Peterborough from 216 to 65; and Midland from 35 to17 firms. Smaller communities fared even worse. Bowmanville went from 86 in 1891 to 10 in 1901; Aurora from 64 to 8; and Orangeville from 103 to 6. The change in the structure of manufacturing was enormous.

What saved Collingwood was that it had invested in ship-building. Given that it had the infrastructure – a dry dock, and skills in ship building – it was able to forge for itself a new and continuing life. Collingwood embarked on a very vigorous programme of building large steel ships and this programme was enhanced by an expansion of the Collingwood Ship Building Company of the dry dock to a length of 550 feet. Ship-building became the main stay of the employment base in Collingwood along with shipping. In 1929 Town Council showed its support for a larger grain elevator by issuing a debenture in the sum of $800,000 to support the new private company, Collingwood Terminal. This was an enormous sum for the Town, since its long-term debt at that point was less than half that sum. During the Depression in the 1930s industries had almost no orders and shipyard manufacturing was varied to include farm implements and cement mixers. The Second World War brought new orders, and a kind of prosperity returned to the town. Some saw the shipyard’s success as something of a curse and a 1953 Land Use Plan said that “the present industrial composition of Collingwood is characterized by an excessive concentration in the ship yards which consequently exerts a disproportionate influence on the general welfare of the town. It is most desirable that a better diversification of industry be achieved.” Apple growing and storage remained more minor economic activities. Skiing activity began in the 1930s, expanding somewhat with the arrival of Jozo Weider in the 1940s, but it did not add much to the town’s economic base until the 1960s. The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1963 was another blow to the town’s port economy.

The fifty year period between 1915 and 1965 might be described as stagnant. Collingwood’s population had reached its high point in 1911 and then declined until after the Second World War when it slowly began to increase by 50 or 100 persons per year – increases that would not have been noticed if they had occurred in communities closer to burgeoning Toronto. Collingwood was seen as something of a depressed area, and in the late 1960s was designated as a place where the government would provide subsidies for industries to locate to. This program was successful. By the late 1960s Collingwood could count almost 1,900 industrial jobs, 800 of which were not in the Collingwood shipyards, but were found in such industries as Kaufman Furniture, Goodyear Tire and Rubber, or Harding Carpets. One might even say that in the late 1960s Collingwood had managed to achieve a diversified industrial base, again as a result of government intervention, as with the railway, the shipyards, the grain elevator.

The decades of the 1970s, 80s and 90s saw Collingwood’s growth pattern re-established. The population in 1971 was 10,000 but a decade later it had expanded to 12,000, and then 14,000 so that by the end of the 20th century it approached 17,000 people. The settled area of the town doubled in size between 1970 and 1990, exhibiting a suburban trend seen throughout Ontario, where the amount of land consumed by each person considerably expanded. This growth provoked its own problems of which the cryptosporidium water scare in 1996 was simply one harbinger. As we have seen recently in Ontario, the issue of degraded water supply has been at the forefront as one of the costs of urban growth.

In 1981 the teetering ship-building business was purchased by Paul Martin’s Canadian Steamship Lines and shortly thereafter collapsed. The last ship - the 231st steel hulled ship to be built by the Collingwood Shipyard since 1901 - was launched on April 18, 1985. Fortunately, the loss of this industry was not the end of Collingwood. Other industries continued to provide wealth to the town and the tourism industry, although providing lower paying service jobs than was experienced with other industries, managed to grow quite quickly. Many skiers were introduced to the Collingwood area and that experience led them to seek out Collingwood as a retirement residence. In recent years the wealth of these new comers can be gauged by the increase in the number of financial services offered in the Collingwood area.

Now new growth seems to be upon the town, fuelled by the disposable income available from former Toronto residents looking for both recreational experiences and retirement possibilities.

This then is the brief history of Collingwood. Like many other towns it was not the beneficiary of this province’s growth during the last century. The serious grown has been in the Greater Toronto Area, where the total population of Collingwood is added to the big city every two or three months. Collingwood has found ways to survive and, indeed, prosper but it would not be fair to say that Collingwood is in the main stream. That is one of its great charms - it is outside the hurly-burly and drivenness of the big city. But as its history has shown, it has not been able to survive simply on the basis of market forces, nor has it avoided many urban ills. It has required intelligent public interventions for its continuation and it will require intelligent intervention in the future. Our question will be trying to determine what they will be. If the wrong decisions are made, one might find Collingwood too fragile to survive any mistakes. As well, the actions that might prove successful in Collingwood may well be those which enrich the life of other small communities. They may prove to be a cost effective alternative to the centralization playing out in the Greater Toronto Area. These may be actions from which other small communities may benefit from example, as they too may learn from Collingwood.