Part 6

Throughout the property, especially by Pike's Peak and the gorge you see the remains of the lumber chutes. These were from 1860. They came from Ottawa, those logs. That's where those capstans and all of those things were used.

Somewhere up in there they say there is a camboose camp that was used at that time. They tried to bring the logs overland and down through that system, and sell them in the market here.

That was a way back in the 1860's, about the time they were starting to colonize, when the old Kennaway Road was a stage coach road, the one that went behind the mill and down.

Colonization was started in England. They went over there, got people who were dissatisfied, sold them so much land and told them it would be beautiful. We did have the route of where they came across Lake Simcoe or Lake Couchiching by boat, then picked up another stage. Then they just dropped them.

The Farms
There were three farms on that old Kennaway, back behind the mill: Spears was one of the names. Where the old lilac bushes were, that was a farm. We got the names of all the people that lived there.

They tried to farm, and they had to clear someplace to live first, so they cut down the trees and they built their log cabins. Then they wanted to plant so they cut down some more trees. They had nothing to do with the trees so they piled them in piles and burned them to get rid of them. Got the stumps out, tried to grow, and found that the rocks were down this far, and there was no topsoil. The 'only thing valuable on the land were the trees and they were already gone.

Even in our time, there were farms down on the main road that looked as if they could be used. They were cleared. The Johnson were one, they were next to Paradise Lodge. Their total cash income for a year, was $35.00. That was when they first went up there and that was from cutting railway ties. They grew enough wheat to feed the horses to plough the land to plant the potatoes to feed them in the winter, and that was about the cycle.

And I think Stan Parish's brother had a sawmill down on his part. I guess the year we built the Staff Cabin was the year, because we cut our own pine, took them into him and the boys went in and helped the sawing. We got enough lumber to build the Staff Cabin.

Camp Kennaway and Camp Kennabi
At that time, Composite was going to operate down there, entirely separate from us up here at our end. We looked after all the campers on the lake, and they looked after all the Composite Troops.

Then somebody said that's no way for Scouts to live, they should be out cooking their own meals. They shouldn't be coming into a dining room and eating. So they changed the whole thing around and they made them cook as if they would if they were with their own Troop.

That's when staff started eating in the dining room. At that time, we were running two dining rooms, one up at our end and one down at the other end.

They had the friendly competitiveness between Kennaway and Kennabi when they used to steal some crazy thing. There was something we used to anchor in the water that they kept trying to steal. They used to leave the light on it all night and they'd leave people sitting up all night to guard it. There was a great big aluminium thing we made for the parade one year when we first had the astronauts starting to build rockets. We had a big rocket made. That was out there for a long time, but there was something they used to try and steal back and forth, something stupid.

The Telephones
That was started by the Rovers. They used to come up every spring, and we had someone at Northern Electric that used to get the wire for us. They used to come up every spring and they had these big round spools with the wire on it, and they put them on the back of a truck, put something through the middle, and they'd string off the wire and fasten them to the trees.

In the first year, they had staple things to fasten it to the trees. They discovered that when the trees bent in the winter, the line broke. So the next year, they put a loop around the tree and then slung the wire through and give it some leeway. Then somebody higher up got interested and they supplied the underwater cable. That was put down to the camps.

Then in '67, Murray Crimless (68-73,81-95) built the switchboard as a Centennial project. He was working at Northern Electric too.

We didn't buy any of those phones. The old ones that you're' familiar with came from towns where the Bell was putting in their own system, and they had no use for the battery operated ones, and they gave them to us. So there must have been somebody high up in Bell or Northern Electric that got these bigger things for us.

We used to have these stupid rings, when one phone rang, they all rang. There were different codes. It was one for our cabin, two for the Hub and three for the hospital. They were only supposed to be used in an. emergency.

The Training Schools
We used to always turn over one campsite to the Cobourg Training School. They would switch on a Wednesday and they'd bring their, "good" behaviours up. They'd stay for a week, and every Wednesday night, after they got settled into camp, because the camp was sort of permanent, there wasn't much setting up, you'd hear them all coming down the lake.

The first thing they learned was how to scale a wall, which was that one on the far side just outside of our cabin, the rocks that they cleaned off. They'd bring them all there and teach them how to scale. I thought, what a thing to teach at the Training School the first day out.

One year we brought some boys up to work. They had been in training school and were going to graduate. We had six of them on Staff. That was quite an experience. Mostly they'd been in for stealing a car, or something of that type. Nothing, I don't think, terribly serious, mostly from broken homes. We thoroughly enjoyed them. They were great.

We let them go one weekend but they weren't supposed to leave camp. We got pretty scared Monday morning. One came in very late Sunday night and we thought the other one wasn't going to make it. I forget how many miles he walked to get in. But he made it back, as he promised.

They were sent up with their big boots and the sort of a khaki coloured pants; better clothes than any of the rest of the Staff, had in pre-camp when they were painting boats and all that, and nice shirts and flannelette pyjamas. But the day they finished there and were going back to their school or wherever they had come from, all of a sudden we saw smoke and we went over and they were burning every single thing, all these good clothes. Apparently they just absolutely hated them, I suppose because they had to wear them day in and day out. By that time I think they were allowed to bring some clothes of their own. And they were allowed to have their watches; that was the biggest treat. They took all that stuff away from them. You'd think that someone had given them a million dollars.

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