Part 2

They wanted a camp in the west end, one in the east end, and one wilderness camp up north: About that time, they sold Crooked Creek, and they had a hundred acres up on the top that nobody ever used, it was part of a farm. They got a nice healthy sum for that, where they built the hospital. The Conservation area took over the lower valley and gave them some little bit, I don't think it was much they gave. But [Executive Commissioner] Burt Greenaway who was head of Scouting at that time, had a dream of owning a building of their own and starting a real wilderness camp.

Now, they have no camps in Toronto, Crooked Creek is gone, but at the same time, Metropolitan Toronto [Region] starts to form, and all the Municipalities come into Toronto and they don't want the responsibility of their own little camps, having to support them, and having Toronto using it. So most of them offered them to the City, and that's how we acquired Goodyear Memorial Scout Camp up in Hockley Valley. Toronto Region had bought that from the Lakeshore Group. In Cookstown – Oba-sa-teeka, was from another district out this end, and they were sort of taken in. So that sort of looked after the small camps in the west end. Then, we started looking farther a field.

We were at Gull Lake at Miner's Bay on holidays where we spent sometime every of our holidays year with the same group of people. It was a gorgeous day like today in September, hot and beautiful. Jim decided he would go in to Minden and see the Real Estate people and see what they had to offer. So he came back and said yes, they had some property, would I like to go see it so I said “sure”. So we took off.

It was a fairly large 2 or 3 hundred acres at the end of Deep Bay. But it was flat farmland. It was on the water on Gull Lake but it didn't have any wilderness aspect to it at all. It was just flat farmland, Quite a few buildings. And we decided or he decided he didn't think much of that.

So we went back and said no, that wasn't satisfactory and he said have you anything else? No, they didn't have anything else, the only thing they might have was a lumber tract, but that wouldn't do for a camp. That was much to big and too wild and would never be. So he said is there any way I can see it, I'm up this way and I wouldn't mind going up and having a look.

So he went out and he could only get as far as the mill yard. From the mill yard down belonged to The Hon. Leslie M. Frost who became Premier of Ontario, and Ernie Fee of Lindsay, Fee Motors. They had bought several hundred feet all along that shoreline of Kennabi and put in a private road and had the gate locked, and no body could go down. So as far as we could was the mill.

Well, you don't see too much coming in the road, and oh what a road it was. There were three places they had bull dozed out where the lumber trucks passed. They had them timed so one went in to the little area and the others coming in this way passed then they went on and they had it all figured out and timed because no two could ever meet on the road.

There was a cook there. and Jim said well isn't there anyone around- anywhere? Well, the men are all out, they won't be back until dinner time tonight, they're all out working. Being very brave he said well can I not go out and talk to somebody? Well the boss is out with them, Nells Webster is out working with them, and you go here and you follow this trail and you go there, and so Jim started out.

It wasn't very long before he didn't know where he was or where he was going. He was in the middle of nowhere. I doubt whether he had a compass or not but he's usually fairly good in the bush. Anyway he kept on the direction where he was going through the bush, and suddenly he heard a chain saw and he thought oh my gosh, I'm saved. So he started following the noise of the chain saws. And he's down in the valley and all of a sudden, no chain saws. Dead silence. Everything stopped, not a sound.

So there he was, he didn't know which way to go, where to go, lost all contact with any humans. Eventually, he decided, well, he might as well just follow his nose and go in the direction he had been hearing the noise. He crossed a couple more ridges, and there were all the men seated. It was lunch time and they'd all sat down to have lunch and everything was quiet.

So he talked to Nells Webster, he was Manager acting for Bill Harris who was a lawyer in Oshawa. And he had bought it when he was representing someone and the man lost it, and he picked it up.

Mill Valley was always run as a temporary, get in, take the choice, the best, and then move on to someplace else. They'd do reasonably large wood lots for farmers, go in and cut up all the timber, pay them for what they took and move on. Everything was very portable. They had two more years on their contract with this land to cut, it was a very large tract, but they said after that, they were through with it and they were leaving, getting out.

So there wasn't too much to see around except the general outlay of the land. You couldn't see any lakes or anything of that type because it was just bush. But Jim was very impressed with the wildness of it and they told him there was a lake over here, and another one here, and the big lake was down here, which was Kennabi, but no way of getting to it. Kennaway road was impassable and it was private property all down there.

So he came back to the cottage and thought about it and decided it was pretty nice. So the next day he decided to go and take another look. This time I think he got down to Holland and Minnie and down in there and saw those lakes. And it began to look better all the time. So he went back into Minden and he put a down payment on it [$25.00].

So for a very short, maybe three weeks, we owned all of Haliburton Camp. Then he came back and got the Camp Committee together and they all arranged to go up.

Well it took them maybe two, three weeks before they could get everybody together. They went up at dawn on Saturday morning. By this time, it was colder than cold, a miserable day. So there again, they got as far as the Mill.

The Mill people were expecting them. They served them lunch, which was a bit of a surprise to most of them, because no one's allowed to talk in a lumber camp at meal times. You come in, you eat and you get up and get out and give the cooks time to get on with the meal. Nobody says boo. And they couldn't figure out why all this quiet. Everything was dead quiet, except, can I have that or pass me this, just sort of a mumble. So they thought maybe it was them, that they weren't very popular.

But when they got outside, things changed. Everybody was talking. They all went outside then, sat around and smoked till it was time to go back to work.

So the men started out in all directions to try and see what they could see but they sort of went off through the bush, trying to get a look at Kennabi, which they said was the biggest lake. And a couple of them got sort of lost, and they took a while to find them and get them out. I don't think many of them got down as far as the lake. But anyway, they were all impressed with the property, and went back and talked to everybody else and it was decided then to buy it. So that was the fall of 1946.

Up • Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3 • Part 4 • Part 5 • Part 6