Gardenville Bridge

It’s a Saturday morning. Big sky pours over the wetlands that surround me. The former railway bridge that crosses this bay mouth sanctuary offers a stage from which to take in nature’s peace giving moments. The timbers and floorboards of the overpass expose the wear marks of decades of traffic; leaning on the weathered barrier I get a whiff of the tang, the recognizable smell of bog and decay. In the waters below the bridge, an autumn palette of earth colours is mirrored in the current and mixes with the fallen leaves that have gathered mid-stream. Allround stillness pervades, seemingly to reveal a story that has been captured in the flow of the creek that slips below the planked crossing.

While we think of an active railway rumbling past here as something far removed in history, it is in recent memory— it was in the winter of 1998 that the last outgoing train carrying cement from the Picton plant growled its way over this crossing. In an application to abandon the line at the time by the then owners, CN rail, the 36-mile section that ran from Trenton Junction to Picton was called the Marmora Subdivision, while the branch line that splits off near present day Canadian Tire and is now part of the Millennium Trail was called the Bethlehem Spur. How these seemingly unrelated names apply to the County’s story originates in the rail line’s musical chairs change of purpose and ownership over time.

The rail outfit originated as the Prince Edward County Railroad in 1873. The PECR ran into opposition from the beginning, as it was perceived to be a threat to local lake shipping, a mainstay of County transportation in the now gone era. Soon after the line’s completion, William Coe discovered iron ore in Madoc, Ontario and brought in partners including G.W. McMullen, a Chicago based railway builder who was born and raised in Picton. McMullen knew the landscape well and recognized the possibilities. Together with other investors, a mining/rail syndicate was formed that in turn acquired the railway line from the original builders. To satisfy delivery of iron ore, nearby to where I stand today, the entrepreneurs extended a branch line and port facility at Weller’s Bay to ship product to the steel mills in New York State. When the ore was soon discovered to be of inferior quality, the operation went bust, but remnants of that spur line can be spotted today.

The railway was subsequently taken over by new players who, through the war eras and the period of the Great Depression of the 20th century, catered mostly to the canning industry, farming and the shipping of coal for the heating of County homes and businesses. Meanwhile, in a government airborne survey in the summer of 1948 using the then new science of geophysics, a mother lode of magnetic iron ore was identified 120 feet below a solid overburden of limestone at Marmora, Ontario. The 75- acre ore body was sold to Bethlehem Steel Mills in New York state; the rail line from Marmora to Picton was acquired by Canadian National Railway and beginning with the first shipment of magnetically separated pellets of ore—hematite—a daily train of 30-35 cars left Marmoraton Mine bound for Picton’s deepwater harbour. There the ore was loaded onto 25,000- ton ore boats and until the mine was depleted and closed in 1979, over half a million tons of hematite a year were shipped from Picton harbour to the steel plant at Lackawanna N.Y., 211 miles across Lake Ontario. By then, Lake Ontario Cement had began operation in 1958 and relied on the railway for winter shipping of their output to markets.

The renamed ESSROC cement operation, along with other businesses, led opposition against CN closing the line in 1998, CN appealing to the transportation agency that the line was no longer economically viable.

Nowadays, the former rail bed that once linked us to those of the 300 Marmoraton Mine workers and their families to the north of us plays a role as a linear park that joins many of the County’s places. Yet that connection can still be felt if you wait in the silence at the Gardenville Bridge. You’ll hear the rumble of ore cars echo through the watershed where families of merganser ducks fix a path through marsh grasses; where birdsong repeats through a forest of bulrushes; and where a mud turtle stirs by the shore.