Crossroads

I’m fourth in a line-up of cars and trucks waiting for the traffic light to turn green at Carrying Place. The red blush of the stoplight mixes with the sheen of sky enveloping the pumpkin tone of ground everywhere. The windshield wipers of my truck swing like a pendulum marking the hours of traditional autumn rains. There is a mystique about this intersection that seems to perpetually call to me. While I sit in my truck and wait on Loyalist Parkway, a section of road with a more recent history, I am reminded of how the intersecting east/west Kente Portage Road holds a story that encompasses millennia.

The Kente Portage Road is written up in numerous promotions as the ‘oldest road in Ontario’. As the lands that surround what is today’s Murray Canal were non-navigable wetlands for early Peoples, the higher ground portage was part of an east/west trade route that linked the Bay of Quinte in the east with Wellers and Brighton Bay to the west.

Below the asphalt at the stoplight lies a bed of limestone, a level plateau that is referred to in the text on a plaque mounted on a cairn that sits at the corner. Erected by the Federal Government, the car-height pyramid of rounded granite stones denotes the Gunshot Treaty that formed the interpretation for an agreement of transfer of lands from First Nations to Colonial interests in the 1700s. In other words, all lands within earshot of a gun being fired became the rightful property of colonialists in this particular negotiation with First Nation leaders.

The family trees of many that currently live in these surrounds can be traced back to the building of the Murray Canal when a call went out for help to undertake its construction, which lasted from 1882 to 1889. Engineers, skilled trades and hundreds of labourers migrated to the region. Once completed, the canal needed a workforce for maintenance and upgrades; in addition, it required various shifts of operators to take care of the manual opening and closing of two road swing bridges—Carrying Place and at Brighton Bridge—as well as the railway swing bridge that was built in the 1890s.

Additionally, many of the sail vessels that came through the canal were towed by horses and mules that laboured under rein while led by teamsters following a tow path that bordered the route from one end to the other; sections of the path remain in evidence today attesting to the efforts that made the canal viable.

Over the years, anecdotal stories have helped me to identify the buildings that originally anchored the hamlet of Carrying Place that centred on the intersection. To my right, on the northwest corner is the structure that was once the Carrying Place Public School. Across the road, a 1960s version of the original post office is still in place. On a sunny day, a shadow length west along the Portage Road is one of two church buildings that contributed to place-making here.

On the east side of Loyalist Parkway and along the Portage Road, a peak-roofed building retains a weathered sign suspended out front that announces Mountain Dew and Village Variety, a once-popular neighbourhood convenience. Across from there sits a second place of worship; meanwhile continuing east along the road leads to water’s edge of the Bay of Quinte. Nearby to the traffic light and on the main road there is an operating garage, a Quonset building currently used as an antique shop and across from it is a fenced in baseball diamond. While a seasonal highlight for me is the eagle’s nest and its activities that resides high on a hydro pole, below it, missing any signs of beautification, the jumble of buildings and parking lots betrays any trace of what was once a tight knit crossroad community.

The irony is that the Kente Portage Road now forms the geographical boundary between the County and the Quinte region and, despite the Carrying Place’s position of honour in the pre-history of North America, there is little here that humanly contributes to either an aesthetic care or honouring of that legacy.