Chapter One
The Land is a Narrative
“. . . landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.”
– Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory
“The land is a narrative”
– William Least-Heat Moon, Prairyerth
“We understand the width of the world, but its age is beyond our grasp.”
– Phil Jenkins, An Acre of Time
May is the most tranquil and loveliest of months in Ontario as new life and soft greens crowd the landscape. In 1842 settlement and the destruction of the original forest left a scarred and often dispirited scene. The old wilderness was in sad retreat, but it had yet to be replaced wholly by the patchwork quilt pattern of fields, small woodlots, hedgerows, wooden fences and brick homes which would characterize our image and fond memory of southern Ontario.
In that spring Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine from whom he would one day cruelly separate, took a break from the novelist’s exhausting literary tour of America to visit Toronto and then travel on to Montreal. Of the Ontario countryside Dickens would later write, “There was the swamp, the bush, the perpetual chorus of frogs, the rank unseemly growth, the unwholesome steaming earth.”1 The idea was informed by the total experience of Ontario and we will never know if on that trip to Montreal he slept on the portion of the journey past Bowmanville or was able to view it with any degree of fascination.
The desultory appearance of the fledgling British colony marked the final stages of the destruction of what had been there only fifty years previously. John Squair described its features as consisting of “. . . the rich and varied forest growth . . . on the best clay loam soils it was essentially a beech and maple forest . . . on the lighter, sandy soils also there was often a fine growth of hardwood . . . in the wet lands, such as in the bottoms of valleys eroded by the streams, there were splendid areas of white cedar, with a large percentage of birch, elm, ash, basswood, pine and hemlock, and, sometimes, in the wettest places, the tamarack.”2
This was the world that had been populated by aboriginal inhabitants and was virtually undisturbed except for necessary pathways such as that from the site of present day Bowmanville north to Lake Scugog. This Indian trail passing through the future locations of Hampton and Enniskillen would one day become what is now known as the “Old Scugog Road.”
But there was a time before even the immense darkness of the forest and its native population, when the region was covered by the last Ice Age. A glacial sheet covered all of this territory so that it resembled the gravest portions of the Arctic and Antarctic. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia this Ice Age conformed to the Pleistocene epoch of geologic time, “. . . during which periodic, extensive glacial activity occurred in many parts of the world. This period began two to three million years ago and lasted until 10,000 years before the present.”3 It is the conceit of humankind that the life of several million years can be reduced to so little space in the history of an area.
As the Ice Age slowly closed the glacial sheet stopped at a point which, in the area of Bowmanville, conformed to what would be the northern concessions of Darlington and Clarke Townships. A great ridge of deposits was left here to become the Pine Ridge and below which the springs arose which flow south as the two main creeks, Bowmanville and Soper, which define Bowmanville’s old western and eastern boundaries.
The ice continued its retreat, and as it did and temperatures rose, a great lake known as Iroquois filled a basin to the south which conforms to present Lake Ontario. It was in fact larger and covered the southern parts of the later township of Darlington to a point roughly equivalent to the fourth concession. All of Bowmanville as we know it was underwater.
Boys skating on the frozen pond of the Vanstone Mill, December 26, 1916. This picture provides an excellent view of the west end of town at the time.
As the lake fell to its present level the land’s lacustrine sand and clay were exposed. The sand and gravel which lay to the north were cut by creeks flowing south, creating the valleys and hills which characterize the area.4 The interlobate moraine left by the ice age proved to be an excellent aquifer for well water north of Bowmanville.
Underlying all of this, and the oldest feature of the entire area, are the Ordovician rocks of the Cobourg, Collingwood and Gloucester formations. According to the 1962 study by School of Architecture students at the University of Toronto, “Well records indicate that the depth to bedrock varies from a minimum of 54 feet to a maximum of 200 feet or more.”5
This rock, part of the very foundation of planet earth, will remain long after any trace of the present community has been washed away by time.
Notes
1 Edwin Guillet, The Story of Canadian Roads. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), p. 52.
2 John Squair, The Townships of Darlington and Clarke. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1927), p.2.
3 N.W. Rutter, “Ice Age,” The Canadian Encyclopedia Second Edition. (Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers, 1988).
4 Squair, p. 1.
5 Students of the Division of Town and Regional Planning, School of Architecture, University of Toronto, Official Plan for the Town of Bowmanville (1962), p. 11.
Chapter Two
A Deed of Conveyance
“I believe Indians fear loss of meaning—that is, memory—beyond all other losses, because without it one can love nothing. After all love proceeds from memory, and survival depends absolutely upon memory.”
– William Least-Heat Moon, Prairyerth
Change is never some anonymous, inevitable force acting like a law of nature. It is at least partially, and often largely, the result of human actions and choice. Such was the fate of the original native inhabitants.
There appear to have been few natives in the area at any time. Residence may have been limited to the summer when creeks flowing into Lake Ontario were stocked with fish.1 That use corresponds to the recreation of later Bowmanville citizens for whom fishing in the Bowmanville Creek below the Vanstone Mill is perhaps their strongest authentic connection with the surrounding environment.
According to archaeological evidence native contact with the area dates to the European time of 1000 BC, often referred to as the Woodland Period. From perhaps 700 BC to 1000 AD the Point Peninsula Culture covered this area and much of Eastern Ontario. Ontario Iroquois then dominated much of southern Ontario from 1000 AD to the coming of European contact. Their lifestyle was characterized by a corn economy supplemented by fishing and hunting. By 1400 the combination of beans and squash with corn diminished their reliance on hunting.
Contact between Europeans and natives began in Ontario in the 17th century, but such encounters would have been casual and rare in the area of Bowmanville in this period. Still, arrowheads and pottery fragments occasionally rise up from the earth to remind present day residents of a native presence. In her remarks on returning to Bowmanville for centennial celebrations in 1958, Minnie Jennings recalled an old Indian burial ground at the site of the Medland home on Liberty Street. She also told stories that had been the material of her own youth about a native battleground on the Vanstone’s Hill, with a tribe on the hill attacking a tribe as it came down what would become the Kingston Road. “My