KAWARTHA LAKES-Mossom Boyd’s sawmill was originally located just north of the locks on Juniper Island, but as the volume of traffic through the lock and the quantity of lumber sawn increased, it was difficult to accommodate everything in the vicinity of the locks. The mill waste and piling of lumber on the public wharf sparked outrage, and in 1872 he received permission to build a new mill at the mouth of the Little Bob Channel on Pigeon Lake.
“They had about 60 men working down there, and it was a big operation. The virgin pine was cut, and floated down the river to here, then brought to the sawmills and cut into boards. This picture was taken around 1893. The boy in the foreground with the horse and wagon would draw away the sawdust to the burner.”
The Boyd’s last drive took place in the spring of 1903, after the Bark Lake Shanty had found “No good pine left here, cleaning out everything that will float.” The following year the mill operated intermittently cutting custom logs, the mill’s boom timber, rough pine logs, hemlock, various hardwoods, and made a small cut in the spring of 1905 under James Powers. The last order was a custom job for W.C. Moore. On April 26, the men cut up sunken logs they scrounged out of Little Bob, and for the next two days they took the belts off the mill, never to reopen. In 1908 all the machinery was taken out and the building was torn down over the winter. Boyd lumbering operations moved to Cowichan on Vancouver Island.
Even after the Boyd mill closed “Bobcaygeon was a town of sawmills. The Read brothers had a sawmill that started out at Nogies Creek, just on this side of the bridge—that whole corner there is still sawdust. They had a little steam engine in there. Later they moved, across the road from where DJ’s is on Highway 36. Russell Thurston started a mill where Jermyn’s are now. It was about the same size of a mill and steam driven. When I came down here in 1950, the Jermyn’s were still sawing with steam. And then later on it went electrical and then it was out of order for a while, and then Mark rebuilt it a few years ago. There was another sawmill up the Nogies Creek Road near the fish sanctuary there.
The Arnberg mill was on Snake Point Road. There were several more of them outside of town, of course in those days there was lots of lumber around and lots of trees around and a lot of use for wood.”
This story is part of our partnership with Maryboro Lodge, The Fenelon Falls Museum and was written by Glenn Walker.
If you want to make a donation to the museum, you can e-transfer to: curator@maryboro.ca or mail a cheque to :
Maryboro Lodge Museum
Box 179
50 Oak Street
Fenelon Falls, ON
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