By Isobel Harry
GORE BAY—If you’re in Gore Bay this weekend taking in the Canada Day celebrations (organized in partnership with the township of Gordon/Barrie Island), you’ll be treated to a full-day’s slate of fun for kids and adults, including pancake breakfast, parade, dog show, hoop-dance presentation by Sheshegwaning First Nation artist Celina Cada, rib dinner, free ice cream social, beer gardens with a roster of bands and DJ Deanna Smith until 1 am and clown shows by the Manitoulin Conservancy for Creation and Performance.
That’s a lot to take in, but the visitor would be wise to reserve some time to look around this little town (pop. 900) that’s been “serving western Manitoulin since its founding in 1890.” While the first recorded ‘resident’ was the educated and eccentric Ned Saunders who, some time before 1870, lived for a while in a “hog’s head” or large shipping barrel half-buried in a gravel bank, the first settler, Willard Hall, arrived at the “dense swamp” that was then the town site, in 1869. Other settlers of Scottish ancestry began arriving in earnest from southern Ontario in 1870. In 1872, the township of Gordon, in which Gore Bay was situated, was surveyed.
Wander down to the waterfront and the marina where, in those early years, it was all happening: the first store was built in 1870 on Thorburn Street; a hotel, the Atlantic, went up (near the present-day Queens Hotel). Then came a blacksmith, liveries, sawmills, shoemakers, a wagon shop, and three more hotels (the Queens, still operating as period-style accommodations, was built in 1891). Gore Bay’s oldest historical homes can be seen in this area, on Thorburn, Borron and Meredith streets, built after the town’s centre gravitated southward to where the business core is today.
Development proceeded quickly, with the limestone courthouse, registry office and jailer’s home (with jail cells in back, now the Gore Bay Museum) built right after Gore Bay was voted the judicial seat of the Island in 1888. The Town of Gore Bay, by then a boomtown, was incorporated in 1890; the flourishing commerce in shipping and lumber and fishing exports before and during that period saw churches, public halls, a water system, a public school and an agricultural building built to support the growing community. The first Island newspaper, ‘The Manitoulin Enterprise,’ had been published in Gore Bay in 1877.
Today, over 125 years later, the once-thriving business core on the waterfront is a bustling hub of a different kind. “The town developed around the harbour, uniquely protected between the East and West Bluffs, as water was the only way to get things in and out, including vital supplies and the mail,” says Gore Bay mayor Ron Lane. “The commercial driver today is tourism.”
“The harbour has been improved to attract more boaters,” adds the mayor. “Now Canadian Yacht Charters’ slips are fully booked, and the boat yard (where boats overwinter in storage) is at capacity. We have a seasonal community of boaters who return year after year to spend the summer here on their boats.” Nearby are the perfectly preserved Janet Head lighthouse, built in 1879, the expanded patio of Split Rail Brewery, the wide verandahs of the studios, shops and galleries of the Harbour Centre and the breezy deck of Buoys’ Eatery for residents and visitors keen to enjoy the bay’s waterside below the East Bluff, including swimming off the dock at the beach and walking along the new breakwall and the boardwalk.
“We have to balance everything we do between residents and visitors,” adds Mayor Lane. “We must continue to support the residents of western Manitoulin as we have for over a hundred years, with facilities for seniors, a medical centre, school, courthouse, shops and eateries, a government service centre, and with solid infrastructure such as the replacement of sidewalks, a new water line and storm sewers. Residents and visitors all benefit from these improvements, including new swim docks and the newly completed trail from the boardwalk downtown leading to the Harold Noble Lookout on the East Bluff.” The old boardwalk itself will be completely replaced this year, at a cost of $300,000.
photos by Isobel Harry
While the mayor acknowledges that people sometimes have to shop off-Island, “you can find anything you want every day” on Meredith Street, the business centre. “We don’t want to be like everywhere else with factories and big-box stores. People visit here not for what they can see every day, they come to see something they haven’t seen. We want to be unique and continue to offer that while at the same time maintaining the requirements of the population.”
One Haweater, longtime resident, historian and former teacher, Bernadette Walker, who still lives in the Gordon Township house built by her grandparents in 1920 just a few metres from Gore Bay’s town line, remembers farmers’ special relationship to the town back in the ‘30s and ‘40s. “Shopping in Gore Bay on Saturday nights was a big deal. Farmers worked every day and Saturday evenings they’d come into town to shop. We’d have to clean the eggs at home on Friday evenings so they’d be ready for Saturday when we’d take the eggs, cream and butter into town to exchange for groceries.”
Floyd Walker, Bernadette’s husband who passed away seven years ago, raised Charolais calves to winter over at the farm then sold them the next fall, while Bernadette continuously taught school at No. 4 School in Gordon then at Barrie Island until the rural schools finally closed, finishing her teaching career in 1985 at Gore Bay public school. “We bought clothing and shoes at Smith Brothers store (now Woods Brothers). We only went to town once a week,” says the nonagenarian, “but it was so exciting. We’d go to one of two ice cream parlours, sit on little wire chairs and have sundaes. We had no hydro on the farm, only a cool cellar, although Uncle Frank had an ice house where on summer Sundays we’d make and then eat so much ice cream our foreheads hurt!”
Much of Gore Bay’s old-fashioned charm remains today, to be enjoyed especially during Gore Bay’s Canada Day festivities this weekend and during the annual Harbour Days later this month (Friday, July 21 to Sunday, July 23), each a welcome respite from worldly cares. This is where the past meets the present for an unforgettable Island experience.
For more information: www.gorebay.ca and Facebook. The Gore Bay Municipal Office can be reached at 705-282-2420.
For an in-depth history of Gore Bay, pick up ‘The Early Years of Gore Bay’ by John McQuarrie at Gore Bay’s two pharmacies and at the Expositor Bookstore.
