The ‘Toad Town’ Crossing

One morning in the spring of 1914 a mixed train made its regular stop at the place where I stand today. Two young men from Trenton stepped down and waved to the conductor as the train carried on its run to Picton. Arnold Campbell and Bruce Sutcliffe gathered their gunny sacks from the Carrying Place platform before walking the tracks to a nearby junction that tied into an abandoned siding. Following the quieted spur line they could hear the train whistle call from a mile away at the ‘Toad Town’ crossing, the nickname often lent to the hamlet of Gardenville. The familiar trek would lead the pair to Pine Point on Weller’s Bay where remnant piles of coal and iron ore sat at water’s edge.

The men had been contracted to take down the old brick roundhouse that stood nearby. The work paid a mere 10 cents for every hundred bricks they removed and stacked, but the building with its towering chimney was mammoth in size, big enough to house eight steam engines. Besides, there was also the job of dismantling an adjoining machine shop on what was known as ‘the Company’ site.

As I follow the Millennium Trail close to the Old Portage Road, there is promise of first snow in the air and I shove my hands into my pockets. The borders of the ghost rail line are curtained in a delicate lace of mixed hardwoods stained in the inks of approaching winter; tall birch point to the sky in a texture stitched with the red and ochre wool of ash and maples. Treetops of cottonwood and flutter- leaf poplar celebrate a slight breeze as a lone crow with a sharpened call charges the still of early day.

I note the evidence of fellow travellers; the scat of bear and brush wolves is littered here and there amongst the coarse gravel. Then I spot a section of steel rail camouflaged under wild grape vines that, now spent, are draped over a jumble of horse tail and squirrel corn. Moss covered rail ties ride atop a dykeshaped mound that separates from the main rail bed before vanishing into a chaos of basswood and yellow sweet clover.

In 1881, a prospector by the name of Harry Johnson hit upon a mother lode of iron ore 100 kilometres from here, up in North Hastings. He partnered with William Coe of Madoc to undertake what was billed as “the world’s biggest iron ore operation”—the Coe Hill Mines. Within weeks the McMullen brothers of Picton bought up the fledgling Prince Edward County Railway and drove the line north of Trenton to the pit head at Coe Hill. The brothers had a contract to deliver 400,000 tonnes of ore to the furnaces of Cleveland and for this the rail needed shipping access to Lake Ontario. A bonanza ignited when ‘the Company’ snapped up land on Weller’s Bay and hundreds of workers poured in on the heels of surveyors. Mountains of fill were dumped to shore up a rail bed over marshland; a harbour was dredged while a thousand foot wooden dock was hammered into place. On June 2, 1884 the first ore cars shunted down the tracks to awaiting ships. By the fall of that year over 12,000 tonnes had gone out on schooners that returned with loads of coal to the Weller’s Bay Docks, an operation the Trenton Courier described “as a place of no small importance.”

A year later the shipments reached 40 carloads a day and that’s when the news arrived from Cleveland: the Coe Hill ore was “too rich in sulphur to produce good steel.” As quickly as pay dirt had been found, a fortune vanished and the roof fell in on the enterprise.

As I continue my hike I think about the ‘ore rush’ and Campbell and Sutcliffe and their efforts to keep “three squares a day” on the kitchen table. I consider the many houses and buildings in the surrounds that were built of timbers and bricks from the ‘the Company’ site. While others attempted to capitalize on the facility, none lasted and nature eventually reclaimed what was hers. I arrive at Gardenville and the ‘Toad Town’ crossing and stoop to collect a handful of marble- sized iron ore pellets that in more recent times were hauled by train from the mines at Marmora to Picton Harbour. Evidence underfoot can be telling, especially in the chill of an October morning when the trail cannot deny a part of its true identity. It is a corridor of unrequited dreams.