Up the Great North Road: The Story of an Ontario Colonization Road - Softcover

Macfie, John

9781550464214: Up the Great North Road: The Story of an Ontario Colonization Road

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1550464213 ISBN 13: 9781550464214

Publisher: Boston Mills Press, 2004

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A lively and entertaining look at early Ontario history.

This is the illustrated history of the Great North Road. In 1870 the author's great-great uncle James Macfie, a middle-aged bachelor of Scottish birth, crossed Georgian Bay from Collingwood, Ontario, to the fledgling village of Parry Sound, where he found work with a crew clearing a wagon road into the hinterland. Ten years later, the author's grandfather Frank Macfie followed his Uncle James up that road, forging the second link in a chain of events that led eventually to this book.

The path these pioneers followed was known as the Great North Road (also called the Great Northern Colonization Road), one of a score or more colonization routes that, beginning in the 1850s, the Ontario government pushed into the rock-ribbed southern flank of the Precambrian Shield to admit agricultural settlers. It was Man against Nature in its most primary form -- bareknuckled roadbuilders and homesteaders attempting to transform a rugged landscape containing the most ancient rock on the continent.

Most of the land proved unsuitable for crops, but a great many families settled along the road nonetheless, and they and their descendants created some of the province's most proud and picturesque communities along Georgian Bay. This fascinating book is filled with stories and photographs the reveal a little-known aspect of Ontario's history.

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From the Author:

I began taking an interest in the history of my community (I was born, in 1925, on a farm near Dunchurch, about 25 miles outside Parry Sound, Ontario) while still quite young. What got me started was listening, enthralled, to old-timers yarning about their adventures in the lumber camps and on the river drives of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Out of this came my first book, Parry Sound Logging Days, an oral history of the industry as viewed by those who did the actual work.

My interest in local history soon overreached the bounds of the lumbering days, and after retiring, I launched an historical column in the local weekly newspaper. I had begun capturing district people and scenes on photographic film early in life, and also borrowed and copied old photographs while I was interviewing old-timers, so I had a ready source of pictures to illustrate those columns with. Twenty-three years later, I'm still writing a column for the Parry Sound North Star.

While my field of interest as a gatherer of history includes all of the Parry Sound and Muskoka Districts of Ontario, it is only natural that my thickest files are those dealing with central Parry Sound District. The lifeline of that region is Provincial Highway #124 whose beginnings date from 1867, when it was launched from Parry Sound into the interior as the Great North Colonization Road. Settlers and their families streamed up the road over the next 20 years, and although the attempt to turn the inhospitable soil of the Precambrian Shield into lush farmland was a failure, the colonization scheme laid the framework for the outdoor recreation and summer cottage industry that is the region's mainstay today.

Up the Great North Road documents this story in words and pictures. The book will particularly appeal to descendants of the pioneers, the recreation property owners and tourists who frequent the area today, and students of Ontario history in general.

About the Author:

John Macfie was born on a farm in Ontario's Central Parry Sound District in 1925 and received his formal education in a one-room schoolhouse. He worked in the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources until his retirement in 1981. His previous books include Parry Sound Logging Days and two volumes of Now and Then: Footnotes to Parry Sound History. He lives in Parry Sound, Ontario.

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