Romantic History of Kettleby

The Village In Its Palmy Days: 1845-1875

The Building of the Mill and other Industries

(by J. M. Walton in the Aurora Banner, September 2, 1938)

 

From 1802, when John Bogart bought the 200 acre lot, it lay untouched many years.  The Kettleby region was a very hilly tract.  On the high lands, Indians, had many good encampments sites, where fish and game were abundant, and good crops from their poor kind of cultivation could be gathered, and there was an abundance of wild fruit of all kinds.

The first Quakers were coming in to the Yonge Street district in 1801, where a blazed trail had been chopped out from York.  Soon homesteads had to be sought farther out, and the new built cabins of the incoming families began to appear in the forest and paths and blazed trails would lead from one neighbour to another.  Immigration came fairly fast in the next twenty years.

Seven miles west, at Lloyd’s Town, and also at Brownsville, communities sprang up.  Holland Landing had its mill, stores, boat landing, and a daily mail coach service, and was the most important place north of Town of York, the new capital of Upper Canada.

The Kettleby settlement followed these a few years later.  Farm land were not of as good a choice, for there was the sandy pine-covered ridges on the south, and between that and the Holland River marsh, it was cut by ravines that carried sizeable streams, and the making of roads was hard and slow.  Lumber was soon in demand, and mills had the prospect of profit.  On these streams, affording power sites, were necessarily and naturally located the mills and villages.

The selection and felling of the best pine trees for the mill timbers proceeded during the winter 1841-1842, previous to the building.  That winter was one of the coldest in history. One man was walking to his home in Lloydtown after a day’s work and was frozen to death near the cottage now owned by Thomas Wheadon, and here in the bush, he was buried uncoffined.  This was the first life lost in the construction days.  When the timbers were hewn and the structure ready to be raised a great force of men was rallied.  It took two days to raise the frame work.  When the rafters were up, a young man by the name of Fred Webster, one of an immigrant family that had recently come from England, walked not only the perline plates but also walked up a rafter of the big high mill, a most daring and dangerous feat. He repeated his act at the raising of the Glenville mill.  The white oak axle for the giant twenty-foot overshot water wheel was procured near Duneroon, Simcoe County, where the white oak trees grew to a great size.

The village was then at the height of activity and prosperity.  The woollen mill adjoined and was attached to the flour mill and was operated from the same power.  The drying and fulling frames for the woven cloth and blankets extended to the north of the mill in a big yard and nearby were the great hog pens.  Hundreds of hogs were kept to consume the waste from the mill and distillery.  In the rainy seasons of fall and spring, these hogs milled around the place until it was mire of mud and filth.  The chief in charge of the swing herd in this case, was an Irishman by the name of Peter McGraw.  He had a troublesome job.  He used to carry hot swill from the distillery to the hog troughs with a yoke on his shoulders. The hungry hogs would jostle him and spill the hot swill down over his legs.  One day, exasperated by too many calls by cooks and other workmen on the place, he retorted to the frequent calls for his services in his high pitched voice, “Peter!, Peter! from morning to night.”

Further along was the home of the millers and small supply store and stables for the millers’ horses, the oat meal mill and the distillery.  Down stream a short distance, was the pond and saw mill of Jacob Tool, and two dwellings.  Then came the cooperage where 20 men were engaged.  Nearby was the tavern with its big sheds for the accommodation man and beast.  Further up the hill came the stores of Silas Snider then a hotel.  Across the road was a store and blacksmith shop of Jacob Walton, and a general store, paint shop, wagon-maker shop and farm implement factory of Brooks W. Walton, a blacksmith shop, 3 shoemaker shops, a tailor, a millner, a dressmaker, and a weaver, all had their establishments.  A mail coach ran daily from Lloydtown and Brownsville through Kettleby to Yonge Street.  Kettleby was the centre of the saw milling and shopping business for the Springdale Mills and the Mt. Mellick Mills.  It was a busy little place, the two taverns did a roaring trade.  In the evenings and especially on Saturday night, the streets were crowded with rigs and people.  A Temperance Society with its own hall was the social centre, and held weekly meetings for 60 years.....

When the railroad was built, it changed the routes of travel.  Then the timbering was exhausted, the potash and flour export trades had languished; the factory system put the small local mechanics out of business.  The population of the village began to shrink.  Its story is repeated in every little village and hamlet throughout the country.  Young people went from the farms and villages to seek their fortune, and the old people remained, and a general decadence set in.

Now there is a movement back from cities to the villages because living is cheaper, and with the new inventions of good roads, telephones, automobiles, radios, etc., life is tolerable in these outlying districts, and there is economy and health of the residents. Many of the old people cherish the memory of those days that are unknown to the rising generation, and so we put in print these annals in the hope that they will be preserved for the edification of the generations to follow.  In this scenic ravine perhaps someday city folk will build their summer homes and others reside continuously there for health and economy.  Old timers when they meet, talk over the past and its happenings—the years the floods went down the valley, sweeping dams and bridges, and in 1885, the woollen mill when Van Horne was caught in a fatal shaft and Dan Gregory lost his arm and a woman was whirled to death out the same fatal shaft in the mill—when Dan Donelly was drowned in the mill pond—when on different drunken occasions drunken drivers drove their teams into the water towards. The lights of the bar room across the pond and drowned their horses—when William Mason’s team plunged over the mill platform 20 feet to their death—when the Township fall fairs were held in the village, and the temperance soirees, and the 25 big annual tea parties of the Sons of Temperance- when the village was the Township centre--when Joseph Stokes was warden of the County and clerk of King township and Gersham Proctor was Township treasurer, and later J. M. Walton held the same office for twenty years-when the Rice-Routledge gang of safeblowers twice blew Walton’s safes in the store- when the school house was struck by lightning and Roasanna Daley killed-when the fine village brass band played at all the election triumphs and other occasions—when E. W. Johnson a local product, was the world’s champion in athletics—when the railroad came and the Bonus By-Law fight was the biggest scrap since the Rebellion of 1837—when McArthur dressed in his kilts raced his Scotch gray team through the village and took one of his horses upstairs to astonish his wife in her bedroom for a joke—when the morning after Hallowe’en found fireplace chimneys blocked with cabbages, and farmers’ wagons on top of their houses and barns—when sugar bushes were raided—when the naming of popular young couples for tea party waiters was the social sensation of the year and occasions when many knots were tied by the young couples’ tongues that were never untied with their teeth, in those good old horse and buggy days—when a new top buggy was more of an extravagance than a Packard car is now—when pianos supplanted organs in the farmhouse parlours, and the Methodists did not allow fast music played in their homes—when a neck tie party, held by the Sons of Temperance was denounced from the pulpit by the Rev. Peter Addison—when charivaries were war and pillage on the happy couple, and village tavern usually got the proceeds of the extortion – all of these things and hundreds of other incidents are woven into the web of the village’s history.