Part 3

So '47 then, was the first year, and they asked us to go up and spend the summer there, get to know the land, and get to know all the people in Haliburton. Sort of act as public relations and see what kind of a good impression get.

Because we're tax free, Scouts are, and owning all that land was going to not sit too well on some, because they didn't have much income in those days, the merchants and the people of Haliburton. It was a small village of under 2,000 in those days. So the idea was to make friends and try and ease in, sort of, and then get to know the land and all the surroundings. So we had a wonderful summer that year. We went up and had my canoe, it's still up at Pete's lake, up at Kurt Wipper's Museum [now The Canadian Canoe Museum]. And that-was all we had for transportation.

Now, we couldn't buy the land, the land wasn't accessible without the shoreline of Kennabi, along the storage building and all of that bay. And they (Mr. Frost) didn't want Scouts there, or they didn't want to, be there in a Scout camp. This was a hunting camp they had.

So they agreed to sell to us. So we bought from the mill, the 4000 acres, or a little bit more, and then we bought what they had, and the private road that went down.

So they had a shack there that they used every November, and that was the dining room and the kitchen of the lodge. There was nothing in it really. There was an old, old wood stove in the kitchen, and there was a long table, well I guess the table, it's still there. It was a home made table, and the long bench on each side, and a bunk. That was the extent of what was in the cabin. Of course I wanted to know what's there. Well nobody knew because nobody had seen it. Nobody had got down to the lakes. So we went up without a clue as to what we were getting into. And the roads were atrocious, of course.

So the Mill was still working, they had another two years. And they decided they better clear out all around Kennabi, all around the shore. They had several piles of logs and they were working there. And they would bring them in where our docks are now, where the staff docks were.

They had one great big flat bottomed boat with a big workhorse 8 motor on it that towed the logs down the lake. It took them two days to get from the top of the islands out there down to the bay where we were. And then they have these cranes that loaded them, and the trucks backed out in the water there and they loaded them.

They had started to use the private road, other than that, they would have to wait and take them out in the winter across the lake by snow, and come out somewhere else, I think. Of course, everybody was fascinated watching them take these logs out. We spent a lot of time standing around watching the thing.

They had the awfullest old army vehicle that hauled the logs from the water up onto the truck. Was the worst contraption you ever saw. And Jim made a deal with Ken Webster, that if he could keep this old machine going, would Ken take his bulldozer and clear some spots for us? He was working for the Mill, he was the son of the manager of the Mill. So as long as Jim could keep this old army thing going, Ken would bulldoze.

That's how we got around the storage building and all that cleared, and the second road in there. He did a lot. He worked as long as they could keep this old artillery tractor going. Then after that we paid him for different jobs. He was awfully good, he would try anything.

So then, we would spend the rest of the time hiking around to see what the other lakes looked like, finding then and sort of generally mapping them out, then going farther a field and seeing Kennesis and all the surrounding lakes on up farther.

I think it was that first year they allowed two groups on a temporary basis, to come in. One was Tucker's. His father was something to do with Consumers Gas, I think. I don't know why they picked on him, but they allowed him to bring a small group of boys in, as an experiment.

I may be mistaken but I think the other one was Jack King's, the Saint Olive's [actually the 101st Toronto from Windermere United Church] group in here. But there were two groups allowed to come in that first year and just sort of try it out. Of course they had no boats or anything else at that point.

And then the Mill decided that they wouldn't bother with some of the timber that they want, they'd just pack it up and get out. There wasn't enough to make it worth while. So they left us their boat and motor and so for the first time, we had transportation.

Everybody in Toronto was so excited and they made so much fuss over finding this camp and how wild it was and what a marvellous place it was going to be and so forth. Everybody wanted to see it. So one group, I think it was an east end group, hired a Grey Coach bus, filled it with all the leaders, and they decided they would come up and see their camp.

Well, it was in May, I think it was in 1947, I think it was still that first year, well of course the bus got about as far as Curry's Mill there, and looked at the road and said no way!. So somebody walked in to say that there were 47 some people back there.

So Jim went up to them to the Mill Valley and said was there anybody that could go and get them. Well somebody said oh yes, we could do that, and they sent one of their lumber trucks out. So a large percentage of them were women on this bus, some of them in their cub uniforms and others not. You know it's a flat bed truck, but unfortunately they forgot to take off the chains. So all these logging chains were all over the floor of the truck, and these people were sitting on them, not very comfortably, particularly the women.

And they went over that road and you know how bumpy it would be. They were pretty shook up by the time they got them in and brought them down. The mosquitoes of course were out like crazy, and what did we have, we had one room. We didn't have anything; we didn't have any place to sit or anyplace to do anything. We couldn't even say come in and eat inside. We couldn't put 40 people in.

I think we tried to make tea for them because some of them were dying of thirst. Nobody would drink the water in the lake, oh they thought that was going to kill them. So we tried to do what we could. Didn't show them much, couldn't even take them down the lake, we had no way of getting them down. They could stand on the shore and look down the bay, and that was about it.

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