Living archives

Former rail corridors house a million stories. The narratives can be found hidden in the gullies, at crossroads, in the timbers of bridges, in trees and shrubs that line the way; they remain as a chance to take in the backcountry, to explore an organic passageway through time. While train stations of today are still places of comings and goings, in past eras they provided vital links to the outside; they were the Internet of the day where rail right-of-ways, most often donated land, also accommodated telegraph lines. Today that legacy of land is ideal for recreation while providing uninterrupted passages for fibre optic cables.

I often pass the place where once stood the former Hillier Station. Neighbouring the site today is a recently installed embarkation and information spot, thanks to the volunteer Millennium Trail group in coordination with the County. I refer to the trail as a linear park and further the dream of the early rail builders that one day our trail will connect with others that follow the line up the Ormsby grade into Shield country, to beyond Marmora and Bancroft and Lake St.Peter; to where at one time, the route connected with the east/west Canadian Pacific thread that runs through Algonquin Park.

The original impetus for the Prince Edward County Railway came from a mix of Picton business players and politicians anxious to have land connections to the outer world. The goal at start-up was to tie the County to the Grand Trunk Railway that ran a few miles north of the then village of Trenton. The scale of the grand, mansard-roofed GTR station on the mainline attested to the fact that with the adjoining Trenton rail yards shuttling trains in all directions, Trenton was bound to emerge as one of the busiest rail centres in the country. The Via Rail itinerary nowadays includes morning and evening stops at what came to be known as Trenton Junction; a small kiosk stands on a hill as a waiting place.

That Picton and places like the then busy centres of Milford and Northport thrived on everything related to lake travel, there were tensions, political and otherwise, within the region between those involved in the steel rail and the mariners and shipbuilders. To help placate potential stakeholders, the earliest plans for the rail called for an eastern terminus at the fishing harbour of Long Point at the tip of the County. With marginal lands for farming in the area, those against the plan sarcastically referred to Long Point as ‘hungry acres’, meanwhile the Long Pointers were ready to change opinions during regular brawls at Empey’s Hotel in Milford. More formally, the records at Shire Hall tell of the ongoing deliberations between the winners and losers in the railway plan as being almost as animated as those at the hotel, save for the punches. Finally, any serious attempts at merging the two interests failed as evidenced by the fact that the Picton Station, now the site of Evans Lumber on Main street, was built at what was then the outside of town and the “remotest corner from the town’s commercial hub.”

The considerable gap of getting passengers and goods to and from the Picton dock was first attributed to the extra cost associated with navigating the land formations, while in reality, rail builders thought to save the expense since water travel shut down in winter. Family names like Ross, Bockus, Manning, Niles and Low—earliest of the rail promoters —are demarked on granite markers in Glenwood cemetery.

Along the Millennium trail today, rows of buckthorn speak of an experiment gone wrong when in the late 1800s, seed imported from Britain, intended to solve the problem of soil erosion by planting windrows of the species, did not account for the reality that the genus would be seriously invasive, even at the time. Meanwhile, the apple trees that line the ditches are rumoured to have been seeded by the tossing of apple cores from the passenger trains. There are mile markers, spent rail ties of beech and maple core wood; I have counted two dozen creeks that lay hidden in the overgrowth, part of the watershed of different sections of the land. The former passenger itinerary listed stops such as Canal, Carrying Place, Weller’s Bay (Gardenville), Four Corners, Hallowell and the whistle blowing meant steam locomotive No.6 and engineer Ross Weaver, fixtures within the landscape, were coming through.

Its midday and the cicadas sing to the heat. Birdsong is quiet, but the black flies aren’t. I search through the rubble of the wayside around the former Hiller Station. As I come to the turned over concrete and stone remnants of the foundation, now covered in moss and lying where the bulldozer pushed them to final rest, it’s in my imagination that soon, these remains of the old station will be enlivened through the telling of its chapters within the human saga.