It might be interesting to describe what the terrain was like where our city now stands. There are no records so I will have to use my imagination. However, I can visualize what it was like years ago. The sand beach would be much as it is at present only it would not be polluted then. The water level fluctuated greatly even before the dams were built at Chaudiere Falls because of the narrow gorge there. At time the beach would extend away out father than it does now. The dam was built in 1912-13, and the spillway in the early Fifties, I believe. There was a sand dune a few yards back of the beach sparsely covered with low shrubbery. Back of it a ridge or rock extended along what is now Main Street, from Trinity United Church to Cassells Street, and another ridge where the CNR is now.
In the Second Ave. area, between Ferguson and Fisher there was a little beaver pond and around where the A & P store is now was a wet swamp. Chippewa Creek is about the same as it was one hundred years ago, but some will remember when it flowed around Monk St., and entered the lake north of the sewage plant. Out around where Northgate Shopping Center and Thomson Park is now was another muskeg swamp and likely flooded by beavers.
The area where the Algonquin Collegiate is now was also a swamp and a little stream ran from it along Harvey St. out to the lake. There was a wet spot between Bourke St. and Bloem St. and the drainage ran down Durrell St. into the Jane St. swamp. Between McKeown Ave. and Thibeault Hill was a wet swampy flat, often flooded in the spring; even 50 years ago it was a regular jungle. From Algonquin Ave. over to the CNR and most of Pinewood would be mixed hardwood bush and up on the escarpment a maple bush much as it is now.
On the other side of Algonquin, over in the Scollard Hall area it would be a pine forest. This is where they got the timber for their first log houses. The hardwood, maple and birch was all cut for firewood during the first few decades. Eloy’s Hill, up around the Canadore College was denuded of hardwood too by the woodcutters. The forest you see there now is second growth that has frown since the 1890’s. Most of the terrain along Duchesnay Creek, around where the Ontario Hospital is now, was a virgin pine forest. J.R. Booth and various lumber companies cut the pine in the area and drove the logs down Duchesnay Creek to the lake soon after the CPR railway was built. They built a log slide from the top of Duchesnay Falls right down to near where Highway 17 crosses the creek.
When I came to North Bay in 1920 it was still there in quite good shape. A few years later, that is in the late 1890’s Cook had a mill on that pond east of the highway, and that area was called Cooks Mills for years. Farther out, right on Duchesnay Creek, west of the highway, there was a fairly big mill and I believe it was the first mill to have electric lighting, which was generated in the mill by a steam engine.
Roads are always of historic interest. The original road out to Trout Lake followed the present Ski Club Road and went along the side of the hill, above the ONR track. Later it was extended put past the hydro station up over the hill to the east and down to the summer cottages along Silver Lady Lane. The road out to Cooks Mills, north, went up the Chippewa Creek valley and on out as far as Duchesnay Creek. That was as far north as you could go up until 1927, when the Ferguson Highway was built, now Highway 11. There was a sort of tote road to Cobalt that went our Chadbourn Road and up past Tomiko and Osborne, but it was only a trail through the bush.
Probably the first real road was the Callander Road, which was built, or cut out, about 1883, and served as a connecting link between and port of Callander and the construction camp of North Bay. There was a steamboat on Lake Nipissing, which ran from Nipissing Village, its homeport, to various places on the lake. As there was no dock and the water was too shallow at North Bay, it went to Callander.
Some of the CPR construction workers were men from Nipissing and Commanda, and they came up the Muskoka Road to Nipissing Village, and from there by boat to Callander and hence to Thorncliff and North Bay. Thorncliff was east of North Bay, not far from Corbeil, and had a post office and a store, etc., before North Bay.
Some of the first residents in North Bay, like the Dreanys, Conroys, Hummels, moved from Thorncliff to North Bay when it became the divisional point of the CPR. However, most of the original residents came from the Ottawa Valley, Pembroke, Cobden, Campbells Bay, Arnprior, etc.
They were mostly Scots and Irish, the French didn’t come until J.R. Booth started lumbering around Lake Nipissing and built the railway from the Wasi over to Lake Nosbonsing. The villages of Bonfield, Astorville, Corbeil were settled originally by employees of J.R. Booth, who brought their families along and built homes where they worked.
Widdifield Township was settled during the early 1890s by farmers and lumbermen, the Carmichaels, McNabbs, Hunters, Lees, Overholts, Normans, Ellis’s, Chadbourns, etc. The Chadbourn Brothers built a sawmill on Four Mile Lake where the Air Force Pumping station is now, and later moved it over to where the trailer camp site is now. It provided work for settlers in that area. The first sawmill in North Bay, I believe, was Bourke’s mill, about where the Canadian Longyear is now, and another near where the Rahn Metals is now. There were other mills, but the history of sawmills is another story.
