Across Canada jails were as different as the places in which they stood. Some were adequate but others not, most showing in common simply that those who built them wanted to create rudimentary facilities for the least amount of money. With limited funds for schools and none for a hospital, Bracebridge council’s impulse to frugality blended with a common belief that criminals needed nothing more than the bare minimum. Jail was a place where they were placed to be kept away from society, on a par with the bleak asylums with barred windows and locked doors where “crazy people” were incarcerated.
The first Bracebridge jail was built of logs. It sat in the centre of the settlement, at the corner of Dominion and Ontario streets. Like most early structures in the community, the jail featured natural elements, from its sturdy log walls right down to its bare dirt floor. No sooner had the facility been built, in anticipation of crime to come, than a collection was taken up to pay bail for its first occupant. Enthusiastic locals chipped in a total of twenty-five dollars. This relatively large amount was then held in trust for the benefit of the lock-up’s first customer. It was a whimsical Bracebridge concept for celebrating the jail’s inauguration with its prisoner’s immediate release, an inventive equivalent to an official opening ceremony for the new facility.
This log jail still exists today. It is not a heritage attraction for a town dependent on tourism, as one might expect, but a storage building at a private home along Santa’s Village Road on the west side of town. Its ancient log walls are now covered with board-and-batten. Geraniums in planters decorate its exterior to complete the disguise.
The first Bracebridge jail, shown as it exists today — its log walls covered with siding, decorated with flowers, serving as a storage shed.
The structure was hauled to this location more than a century ago from its original site, to make way for a large, wooden, provincial government office building. That, in turn, gave way in 1900 to Muskoka’s red-brick district courthouse on the same location.
As life in town became testier and occupants in the jail more frequent, feeding the inmates became an item of business. Robert White, who operated a grocery store and bakery in a block of brick buildings at the corner of Manitoba and Mary streets where St. Thomas’s Anglican Church stands today, bid on and won the contract to be “keeper of the gaol,” which primarily meant providing prisoners their food.
White sometimes sent his young employee, Gerard Simmons, with these meals. On one occasion Simmons took the tray of food to two inmates, finding the door locked and the windows secure but the prisoners gone. “Just as he was turning away to take the food back,” recounted local historian and magistrate Redmond Thomas of this episode, “he heard loud yells of ‘Wait! Wait!’ and saw two men run from the British Lion Hotel which was just across the street.”
The day before, this same pair, workers building the railroad through town, had received their pay “and in the evening had invested freely in alcoholic beverages and become so riotously drunk that they had been run in.” The next morning in the jail they “had an awful thirst and still some cash left. Right across the street they could see an oasis, the barroom of the British Lion Hotel,” explained Thomas. “The more they gazed at the British Lion, the thirstier they got.” Their inspection revealed the prison door was strong, and the windows securely barred. “But the floor! Ah, the floor! It was only earth! If a little chipmunk can dig a hole in the earth surely two husky men could dig one, too. They burrowed out of the jail and adjourned to the British Lion to slake their thirst.”
Yet, as Thomas also noted, “hard-working construction men need food too. Why buy a meal at a hotel when the public purse furnishes one for free at the jail? Why, indeed!” So, as the escapees monitored the time they should remain at large, sipping their drinks while watching through the barroom window to make sure they did not miss a free meal, they spotted young Simmons arrive, “gulped down the last of their drinks and hied themselves back to the jail for victuals!”
The inadequacy of this simple jail was on a par with other facilities forming part of the Bracebridge institutions for the administration of justice, matching for example the equally rudimentary nature of the inaugural courtroom established in Bracebridge in 1877.
Yet, the growing town was all for progress, especially when a senior level of government could pay for new facilities. Bracebridge not only needed a local lock-up, as any town might, but in addition required, as capital town of the District of Muskoka, a district jail. Because that was a responsibility of the provincial government, as part of its constitutional jurisdiction over administration of justice, the Ontario government of Premier John Sandfield Macdonald came under increasing pressure from Muskoka councils and Muskoka’s representative in the legislature, J.C. Miller, to act. In 1879 a new building housing five cells was built under a contract let by the Ontario Department of Public Works by low bidder Neil Livingstone of Gravenhurst.
This new structure was made of brick, the construction material of choice in Bracebridge after the Gibbs & Griffin brickworks had begun manufacturing locally in 1871. Solid brick walls would not only be more resistant to fire, but harder for escapees to work through than the earlier log walls and dirt floor. Erected on property reserved for the provincial government near the Land Registry Office on Dominion Street, this new lock-up inaugurated a district jail serving all Muskoka.
As part of Muskoka’s emerging facilities for the administration of justice, the jail was an improvement for incarceration of prisoners, but the district was still minimally served. A decade later, in November 1888, a grand jury in Bracebridge inspected the place and the jury’s foreman, Thomas Myers, reported to Sheriff James Whitney Bettes how “they found the gaol scrupulously clean and well aired” but recommended “a larger building, more sanitary appliances, and a safer enclosure for the yard to prevent the escape of prisoners when out for exercise.” The jurors were also concerned that the district had no provision “for insane persons awaiting the pleasure of the lieutenant governor for their removal to an institution.” In short, mentally ill persons were being kept in the jail alongside other prisoners.
James Boyer was acutely aware of the problems with the Bracebridge jail, both as magistrate and town clerk, and in 1889 helped persuade council to take the recommendations of the grand jury to heart. Council voted to send Mayor Armstrong and Councillor Hunt to Toronto as a two-man deputation authorized to discuss with Ontario’s premier the need to build a new jail for Muskoka District, the existing building “being altogether too small, insecure, and unsanitary.”
Still, another decade later, this situation had changed little. Despite recommended improvements, no further public money had been directed to these facilities. The authorities clearly knew how inadequate the district jail was, as is shown by their action in 1898 at the conclusion of the sensational murder trial of William Hammond from Gravenhurst when the prisoner was removed to Barrie for incarceration because it had a stronger jail. Hammond was securely held there, until brought back to Bracebridge for execution.
Harshness handling outsiders and misfits was an outcome of the era’s view of human character, but it was also a measure of the society’s lack of institutions and absence of procedures to cope with broken people. A bleak episode occurred during the winter of 1904, revealing a continuation of the same institutional conditions and outlooks as when the 1890s cases in this book arose. In February that year, John Eastall, an elderly man, had been sent from Huntsville to the jail in Bracebridge because he had no place to go and no one to care for him. Shortly thereafter he died. The old man, an early and respected pioneer in north Muskoka’s Sinclair Township, had been admitted
The log-cabin jail was replaced by a brick jail, which in turn was supplanted by this 1904 stone jail, which stood behind Bracebridge Town Hall, a half-block from the new District Court House. Six decades later it was torn down to put up a parking lot.
to hospital in Huntsville when his neighbours found him with hands and feet frozen. At the hospital, he was found to be mentally unstable and could not be kept there. Without facilities