Powering Muskoka's Pioneer Era
Article by J. Patrick Boyer
A sudden power outage can leave us floundering in the dark, unable to ring-up sales, pump gas, cook food or be online and, in the silent calm, reflect on how dependent we have become on the energy sources enabling modern living.
For Muskoka pioneers, the absence of electricity was the normal condition. Inventors had sought to harness electricity from fabric static and flashing lightning, then experiment with generators and batteries but electricity was unavailable to early loggers, homesteaders and holidaymakers reaching Muskoka in the mid-1800s. Then, as today, most people accepted their conditions as “state of the art” and gratefully drew upon available sources.
Another similarity between both eras is the overlap of energy technologies. People used candles after coal oil lamps came in, then kept both when gas lamps were introduced. Most people still had all three burning after Thomas Edison patented his incandescent electric light bulb in 1880 and, a decade later, electricity generated at Bracebridge Falls lit them.
Overlap was not only inevitable but desirable. As blackouts prove, back-up systems are essential and redundancy can be helpful. Muskokans used broad axes to square logs, then long-blade handsaws, next rotary saws driven by waterwheel power, advancing to bandsaws powered by electric motors. Another succession of energy technologies in Muskoka was heating with wood-burning stoves, furnaces and fireplaces. Over time oil furnaces took over, followed by gas furnaces, electric baseboard heaters, heat exchangers, warming floor panels and solar power. Ontario has no coal to mine, so any Muskokans who burned coal brought it in from the U.S., Nova Scotia or Alberta.
A settler’s top ten list of power sources might have been: humans, animals, fire, lamps, wind, waterwheels, steam, dynamite, mechanical energy and early electricity.
Self-generated Power
With human bone and sinew providing a versatile framework for leverage and muscles supplying motor power, Indigenous peoples crossed Muskoka paddling and portaging canoes, following woodland trails and moving on snowshoes – as did settlers emulating their ways. Homesteaders deployed their energy digging, hoeing, harvesting and slicing, milking cows and goats, picking fruit, fetching eggs and drawing water. Printers of the first newspaper, the Northern Advocate, set type by hand and operated the printing press that way too. Elizabeth Penson rowed across roiling Lake Rosseau waters with heavy sacks of grain destined for Dee Bank’s gristmill.
People walked, often and far: from Walker’s Point to Bala and back for a council meeting; Bracebridge to Orillia and back for supplies; youthful homesteader Thomas Osborne to Huntsville from North Portage and back for mail; Muskoka home-boy Johnny Moon down to Toronto then back, or on to Montreal. Then as now, what someone believed necessary, their brain instructed their body to do. The advantages with human energy are its ready availability, ability to use it when no alternative exists and no need for fitness centres.
Working Animals
After humans emerged among Earth’s species, they trained or forced other animals into heavy lifting and carrying weighty loads for long distances. Horses, cows, mules, donkeys and burros, but also elephants, camels and dogs, became “beasts of burden” carrying heavy loads, dragging sleds and pulling wheeled vehicles. Animal power enabled all manner of work to be done, every kind of structure to be built and tasks beyond description to be accomplished. The timing of Muskoka’s development came when North America’s horse-drawn society was at its zenith, with district farmers’ cows augmenting equine-power.
Combustion
During Muskoka’s pioneer era, folks continued using fire for cooking, warmth and metal working. Anthropologists hypothesize from carbon-dated ancient ash that homo erectus cooked with fire and used it as a tool a million years ago – eons before our homo sapiens species evolved. Muskoka’s modern history, resuming when living creatures reinhabited this part of the Canadian Shield after kilometres-deep ice receded, included First Nations striking flints to spark birchbark shards or dry pine needles aflame.
Settlers brought magnifying glass to concentrate the sun’s rays to the point of ignition and chemical compound matches that blazed into flame upon striking particular surfaces. Several match factories dotted the district’s landscape. Muskokans used flame to boil sap for maple syrup, cook meat and vegetables, create incendiary firestorms that consumed the logs and slash after clearing forests for fields, turn metal white-hot to forge tools or red-hot to fashion horseshoes and burn wood in stoves or campfires for warmth and cooking.
Lighting
Anywhere at night, and during daytime in the darkness of enclosed mills, tunnels and building interiors, burning candles and lamps provided artificial lighting. Both methods dating back tens of thousands of years. Frugal pioneers did not waste matches lighting them, instead keeping tightly rolled twists of paper near the fireplace to transfer some flame.
Windows provided natural light illumination. As Muskoka villages and towns grew, extremely large plate-glass windows were features in office-blocks along main streets, public schools and, by 1900, Muskoka District Court House. The immense light-admitting windows of Bracebridge’s Carnegie Library (1905) replicated the massive windows of Ontario’s legislative building at Queen’s Park (1880s) because their architects maximized natural daylight.
Artificial lighting accelerated while Muskoka’s settler society was establishing itself. From the late 1860s, fashionable residences, stores, public buildings and resorts installed gas lights suspended from ceilings. Before long, even this advance in lighting took second spot as newly perfected kerosene fuel for lamps eliminated installation of costly gas-line piping.
All the while, electric lighting was gaining in the background on an inside lane. In 1809, working to produce luminescence by electricity, inventor Humphry Davy created an arc lamp. In the 1830s, various electric lamps were developed and experimental light bulbs tried out. By the 1840s, arc lighting – also known as “limelight” – lit up entertainment theatres in Paris. At Bracebridge in the 1860s, woollen mill owner Henry Bird experimented with limelight and delivered a paper on this topic at the Mechanics’ Institute, later trying to generate other early forms of electric light from his watercourse at the town falls. A decade after Thomas Edison produced his incandescent lightbulb, William Sutherland Shaw began generating electricity at Bracebridge Falls for his tannery in 1890.
The town acquired the plant and converted its gas street lights to electric ones. By the 1920s a number of homes had chandeliers, bracket lights and electric lamps similar to those familiar today, though many houses and retail stores instead used ceiling “drop lights” – an exposed bulb in a socket offering harsh light but, all the same, extending “daytime” well into the evening.
Wind
Although windmills in Iran began spinning to generate power for pumping water and grinding grain a thousand years ago – spreading to Europe where the Dutch especially used continuously pumping windmills to keep their country’s below sea-level land dry – wind power’s main connection with Muskoka were sailing ships delivering a variety of Europeans to North America. Many of their descendants became settlers in the district, as did others arriving directly as homesteaders just as the Age of Sail began morphing into the more reliable Age of Steam. A few North American windmills appeared in the 1880s but by then a succession of more practical sources supplied settler society’s energy needs. Vessels driven by wind were being displaced by those with steam propulsion, then diesel, next nuclear power and, most recently, solar power. Yet the thrill of sailing could not completely crowd wood and canvas from the scene, as today’s wind-powered recreation craft in Muskoka attests.
Falling Water
By the 1860s, new arrivals opening Muskoka for development brought ancient waterwheel technology with them. Soon district waterfalls and rapids were being tapped to produce mechanical power for milling operations. Water diverted into a flume or headrace leading down onto a waterwheel converted its energy. Where a good drop could be obtained, Muskoka mills used “overshot” waterwheels. The water, feeding in at the top, filled buckets on the wheel’s perimeter and this weight caused the wheel to turn. Less efficient was the “undershot” wheel, occasionally used where only slower water was available – turning, like a boat’s paddlewheel, as flowing water pushed against its blades. From the rotating waterwheel, power was transmitted by driveshafts, belts and gears to activate machinery. Water-powered mills benefited from clean fuel along Muskoka’s watersheds – no need to burn wood or imported coal, as happened powering steam engines.
Mills sprouted around Muskoka’s waterfalls driving the local economy by rotating sawblades slicing logs into lumber and turning grindstones that converted field crops into flour and oatmeal. While lumbermen delivered logs and farmers grain to sawmills and gristmills, other water-powered mills produced shingles from wood and cloth from sheep’s wool.
Steam
When boiling water to create steam under pressure that powered all types of engines for a wide variety of roles, the phenomenon so transformed economic life and society it became known as the Steam Age. The era, too, coincided directly with Muskoka’s pioneer development years. By the 1870s steam’s revolutionary impacts on the district rolled up with steam trains and castoff with steam-powered watercraft. Land and water were suddenly much easier to travel. Muskoka’s treasures became readily accessible. The ascendancy of steam also enabled district manufacturing to expand into new realms, including the generation of electricity. While communities around waterfalls like Bala and Bracebridge could generate electric power by turbines, locations elsewhere lacking waterfalls such as Gravenhurst, Huntsville and Port Carling now also joined the parade of progress with this new way to spin turbines.
Where often there were no roadways or even much possibility of building them, steam engines propelled watercraft throughout Muskoka’s extensive and interconnected waterways moving building materials, transporting all manner of supplies and carrying passengers. Where road construction was taking place, steam-powered machinery began replacing horses. In nearby fields, where teams once pulled plows, steam tractors took over much of that work too.
From the mid-1870s, steam trains gave Muskoka-produced lumber, woollen fabrics, famous Muskoka lamb, maple syrup, maple sugar, blocks of refrigeration ice and tons of boot leather access to world markets.
Steam turbines delivered new efficiency to district forestry operations because logs no longer had to be driven distances to waterfall sawmills when they could be sawn into easier to move lumber close to where they fell, if a nearby stream or pond had water available to boil.
Dynamite
If any place had need of explosive force to deepen and widen navigation channels and space for roads, it was Muskoka. Initially settlers built roads around giant boulders because it was easier but when solid rock faces impeded their route, they stopped – as was the case north of Dorset with the early Bobcaygeon colonization road intended to run to North Bay. In most cases, the only solution was dynamite. Railway construction crews laying tracks across the Canadian Shield’s surface had no choice but to make noise and scatter rock.
Once again dovetailing with Muskoka’s pioneering era, far more powerful explosives were invented in the mid-1800s by treating various organic substances with nitric acid. Among the new explosives was dynamite, a stabilized form of nitroglycerin which Alfred Nobel produced in 1867, the year of Canadian Confederation. Blowing things up with this potent new energy source quickly caught on everywhere, including Muskoka where it was a blessing for pioneers struggling to extract a homeland from primordial rock.
Dynamite, the great novelty that year, even provided entertainment when Bracebridge blacksmith Duncan Cameron provided spectacular frontier fireworks by blowing his anvil sky high on July 1 to celebrate the inauguration of a four-province country.
Mechanical Energy
Leverage systems using pulleys made it possible to raise and move boulders when building roads, lift logs onto sleighs, heft cargoes at loading docks, construct buildings and do most anything else by multiplying the strength of humans or horses. Today this principle of mechanical energy and multiplication of lift or pull force is still seen with motorized cranes on construction projects, cargoes lifted onto and from waterborne vessels, Muskoka bridge construction and at logging yards.
Electricity
While Muskokans developed a pioneer community using various combinations of those nine energy sources, electricity kept nudging further to the forefront. The 1752 efforts by Benjamin Franklin to capture electricity from lightning using a metal key on a kite had advanced by the 1830s to scientists and engineers working to generate alternating current power, with Nicola Tesla by 1888 getting a patent for his AC motor. During the district’s settler era, battles raged over alternating or direct current electricity, about constructing power lines, building power dams that back-flooded Muskoka communities like Matthiasville and Wahta, safety issues and death by accidental electrocution, dangers of electrical fires and the politics of private or public ownership of such a vital utility. In 1894 Bracebridge, with voter referendum endorsement, became the first municipality to own and operate a water-power station generating electricity. In 1906 the provincial government created the publicly owned Hydro Electric Power Commission of Ontario.
Today’s power generated by nuclear reactors (some 58% of Ontario’s total), mobile generators, motor vehicles running on liquid fuels or batteries, solar energy concentrated to heat homes and power solid fuel launching rockets through gravity’s forcefield into space, were all still science fiction in Muskoka’s pioneer era.
Each form of energy has played a role in Muskoka’s settlement and continues to factor into the character of the region today. For those who appreciate how the present is the past in disguise, Muskoka Pioneer Power Association showcases power source transitions and the types of machinery supplanting horses at Bracebridge’s JD Lang Activity Park, adding special annual displays in August and at September’s fall fair.