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HomeMy WebLinkAbout553"Illustration - This is a sketch of Frenchman's Bay as it was in 1778. Article taken from Sailor Magazine, Jan/Feb 2001. The Making Of Frenchman's Bay by Robert B. Townsend, Author of When Canvas Was King. Two pioneers in 1843 cut a channel from Lake Ontario to Frenchman's Bay, creating a safe port — and a legacy as a private harbour — in which lake schooners could call to escape raging Great Lakes storms over the years. Their foresight and hard work along the waterfront also spawned business in the bay, which now features a yacht club, various marinas, a yacht broker, restaurant, chandlery and more. It was 1843 when William Edwards and William Henderson of the village of Dunbarton, in the then township of Edinborough, (now Pickering) cut a channel through from the lake which turned Frenchman's Bay, five miles east of Port Union, into the port of Pickering Harbour. At the time, they used what was described as ""sort of elevator worked by Horsepower"" for the dredging. Schooners were then able to come up to a point where the present culvert under the railway tracks, which was then a stone bridge at the head of the bay, where a wharf and warehouse was built. Neither the bay, which is located just east of Toronto, nor the name appear on early Ontario maps, even one dated 1813 which was based on Governor Simcoe's Surveys. The sandbar from Duffin's Creek, which now encloses the Bay, may not have been in existence when the survey was made. When the sandbar stretched across the high shore near Petticoat Creek, to the west of the present harbour, Frenchman's Bay became a landlocked pond. The water from the other creek at Dunbarton to the north trickled through the sandbar, but apparently there was no navigable entrance from the lake until those pioneers, with their crude elevator worked by horsepower, scooped away the channel, and cribbed it to keep it from filling up again. For this reason, Frenchman's Bay is one of the very few private harbours in the country. A harbour that was an afterthought of nature, developed by pioneer enterprise, and has ever since been treated as an orphan by politicians. ""Even the coal oil for the green harbour light had to be paid for by harbour dues,"" which the harbourmaster had great difficulty in collecting. The original warehouse at Dunbarton was removed about 1853, ten years after it was built, and the wharfage rapidly fell into decay. This wharf was replaced by one near the east side of the entrance, serviced by a plank road along the beach to the lower end of the side road just east of the village of Dunbarton. This wharf was replaced by another wharf on the east side of the bay. Because of the shifting sands in the harbour, ships entering from the lake had to steer straight north, past the piers, then break off sharply to avoid the sand-spit, then head eastward to a timber crib in the middle of the bay, and so over to the big red elevator, coal sheds and ice houses on the east side of the bay which provided the wharfage of the port from the 1870's onward. As business in the harbour deteriorated, the red elevators and the ice house were torn down, and a new warehouse was built to serve as a storehouse for the stone, sand and gravel business which dominated the area in the early 1900's. There used to be 10-feet of water at the harbour entrance, and vessels drawing more than that were hove out of the harbour by kedge and windlass and capstan to the three-fathom line, just outside the piers. There were many regular schooners in and out of the Harbour, including the Highland Chief and the Lillian, the Island Queen, and even the large commercial schooner C.T. Van Stanbenzee. Excursion steamers including the Argyle, the Garden City, and the Chippewa were frequent callers, taking passengers to the Niagara region. The Schooner Belle of Dunbarton was built at the mouth of Duffins's Creek, (not in Frenchman's Bay). Some of the old schooners were no doubt built within the harbour. In the olden times, when there was 10 feet of water in the channel, some larger sailing yachts of the day entered the harbour. The Churchill brothers Medora, and RCYC commodore Gooderham's Vivial, a deep 40-foot cutter, are recorded as entering the harbour, however when W.G. Gooderham's Aileen which drew over 10 feet tried to enter in a storm she bumped hard on the bottom in the heaving seas of the entrance, and had to lighten ballast before they could exit the harbour and sail her home See FRENCHMAN Page 34 " "FRENCHMAN From Page 21 again when the storm died down. Perhaps the last ""big vessel"" to enter Frenchman's bay was Capt. Dan Rooney's three-master called Charlie Marshall, which rode out a gale in the piers in 1913, the time the steamer Alexandria was lost. But Frenchman's Bay was an ideal playground for small yachts of the centreboard type. The revitalization of the harbour was done by some Toronto sailors, who knew the possibilities of the Bay from camping and cottaging there in the summer. They got together in the winter of 1937-38 in an old coach house on lower Jarvis Street in Toronto, and built 18 sailboats with their own hands, for their own use. One of the boats was raffled off to provide capital for a new club. They then formed the Frenchman's Bay Yacht Club, finding the bay an excellent place to sail and race their ""skimming dishes"". Soon there was a large fleet of Moths, Sunrays, Nationals, Catboats, (and kittens). The Moth was an 11-foot little pancake of a boat with an 18-foot mast lifting a Marconi mainsail. Moths, were the foundation of the Frenchman's Bay Yacht Club. In the beginning the club started with 18 of them, and soon added another 10 before expanding into Sunrays, Snipes and National One Designs, the latter being pretty sloops, 17.'6 foot long with a Marconi type mainsail. In the beginning Eric Blenkarn was commodore of Frenchman's Bay Yacht Club, Tom Tomblin was vice-commodore; Bill Green served as the rear commodore. The first secretary was Herb Cunningham, and the first treasurer was Alf. Piggins. Others associated with the enterprise were Al. McCord, Jim Johnson, Tom Mullaney, Tom Archibald, Jack Defoe, Norman Laidlaw, W.W. Yeaters, Harry Hughes, Clarence Skitch, and Norman Williamson. Frenchman's Bay is still privately owned by the Pickering Harbour Company, operated by it's subsidiary East Shore Marina Ltd. It continues to be a vibrant playground for pleasure craft of all types. It is home to over 350 vessels and hosts hundreds of visitors. Over the past few years, a large fleet of live-aboards has been established. The friendly, member-owned Frenchman's Bay Yacht Club has club and vessel facilities at it's original site on the west shore. On the east shore of the bay, in the vicinity of the old harbour facilities, are chandleries, Bernie and Jean Luttmer's Swan's Marina, Morgan's Wharf Street Marina, and the Eastshore Marina. East Shore Marina is home to the Pickering Yacht Club (PYC). Insert on page 1. History Frenchman's Bay spent two centuries as a war post for the Inidans, a rafting place, a barley and lumber centre, a haunt of stonehookers and finally, as an abondoned port. It became an active port again in the 1930's because of the push and entreprise of the Frencman's Bay Yacht Club. The present bay was formed by sand washed fron the adjacent cliffs or banks forming a bar cutting off a triangular area of the Lake Ontario shoreline, with Frenchman's Bau becoming a landlocked pond. A channel to Lake Ontario wa dug in the mid 1800's. An American chart of Lake Ontario in 1836 shows the area along the shore at what is now Frenchman's Bay as ""Poor Man's Creek"" extending to ""Billy Go To The Road's Gap"" at what is now Bulffers Oark. Ot os possible that Frenchman's Bay derives its name fron the D'urfe Suplican cissionarie, who wintered somewhere in the vicintiy of Duffin's Creek in 1669-70. Dennonville, the governor at the time, was entertained in the same area seventeen years later at a great pow wow. Attending was converted Senecas, Hurons and Algonquins who provided two hundred fat deer for the realement of the governor and his motley army of French soldiers. It is probable that Frenchman's Bay may have been formed and named long after those first Frenchmen came. About 150 years later French Canadians bisited the area from Quebec each spring to form rafts of logs or squared timbers, cut the previous winter by farmers clearing their land and hauling them to the bay area by sleigh while the snow made good roads. The Belle of Dunbarton (William Dunbar was a blacksmith with a shop at the head of the bay) was built at the mouth of Duffin's Creek (not in Frenchman's Bay). In 1864, with the American war drawing to a close, William Bellchambers built a little schoonein Frenchman's Bay called Anna Bellchambers. Captain Alex Cuthbert, designer, builder and sailor, started his career at Frenchman's Bay. "