Reviews of The Fossmill Story

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Friends of Algonquin Park
from the What's new section of the 2000 park visitors guide

Published late last summer, it tells the story of a little village on the now defunct Canadian National Railway line that used to run across the northern part of Algonquin.  Fossmill was actually outside the Park but the Fassett Lumber Company, which established the village, also constructed its own logging railroad south from the village into the Park and right to the shores of Manitou and North Tea lakes up in the north west corner of Algonquin.  The village and its railroad into the Park prospered from 1924 to 1930 but, with the Great Depression and a disastrous fire in the company’s mill, it gradually declined and was finally abandoned in the 1940s.  The father and son team of Doug and Paul Mackey have done a masterful job of conveying the details of how the men and their families worked and lived in the little company town and how they affected Algonquin.

During their research Doug and Paul found some amazing early movie footage of the whole operation and we are pleased to make it available to Park history buffs in video format, and to display it at the Visitor Centre during the week of July 20 to 27, concurrent with a fuller review in that week’s issue of The Raven.  Some people like the book better and other people prefer the movie. Either way it’s a great story well told, and we heartily recommend it to you.

and from The Raven the Friends of Algonquin Park weekly newsletter

A Ghost of Algonquin Past

It is very easy for Park visitors to get the wrong idea of Algonquin's human history. Most people who come to the Park live in cities or other environments quite different from the one they see here. They aren't really equipped to interpret the subtle signs of past human involvement with a place that seems so wild. Besides, they aren't really expecting any such involvement because, to most people, a 'park' means a place preserved in a completely natural state. 

Over the years we have made a few attempts to show just how great our human impact has really been on Algonquin but we will be the first to admit that we have barely scratched the surface of a truly huge subject. That is why we are always delighted when someone comes along to reveal in depth some fascinating chapter about Algonquin Park history that we, ourselves, weren't even very much aware of. 

We can hardly give a better example than a stunning new book published just last summer by Doug and Paul Mackey entitled The Fossmill Story : life in a railway lumbering village on the edge of Algonquin Park. We say stunning because Doug and Paul's book is not only meticulously researched but it is also lavishly illustrated with a treasure trove of hundreds of photos of the town and its people and it is enlivened with scores of eye-witness accounts by former Fossmill residents interviewed in their old age. We can't reprint the whole book here, of course, but we will touch on a few highlights and encourage you to get a copy and see for yourself why we are so impressed.

Now, if you look at our map to see just where Fossmill was, you will see that it wasn't actually in the Park itself. This might seem to confirm your initial suspicion that Algonquin should have been spared this kind of development. We hasten to point out, however, that Fossmill never would have existed if it hadn't been for the Park and it was inside Algonquin that its people and industry had their most significant impact. Fossmill was located just eight kilometres from the northern boundary of Algonquin, on the main east-west Canadian National Railway (CNR) line joining eastern Canada with the west. Shortly after that line was built through Algonquin Park in 1915, a man from northeast of the Park named Foster saw the promise of the railroad as a way to transport logs and he built a small sawmill at a place where the Wasi River conveniently provided water. 'Foster's Mill' soon became shortened to 'Fossmill' but it was only in 1924 that the name really got on the map. That was the year that the Fassett Lumber Corporation moved its operations and workers from Fassett, Quebec (on the north shore of the Ottawa River between Ottawa and Montreal) and built a new town and mill at Fossmill. 

What really attracted the company's management was the hardwoods in the nearby northeast corner of Algonquin Park south of Fossmill. That section of the Park had already been logged over twice for White Pine (including by the famous J.R. Booth) but the first loggers had ignored the hardwoods (like Sugar Maple and Yellow Birch) because those trees don't float and can't be transported by water the way conifers can be. The Fassett people, however, had a plan they knew would work. Just as they did in Quebec, they would use a specially geared locomotive to haul hardwood logs to their mill on a rough, up-and-down railroad that they would audaciously build into the hinterland. Indeed, by the end of their first year, the company's new line already connected their mill with Algonquin's north boundary. By 1928, they had extended it to a length of 12 miles (almost 20 km) right to the shore of Manitou Lake, well into the Park. The next year, having taken all the timber they wanted from the Manitou sector, they lifted the last mile or so of rails, and diverted south for another 4.5 miles, where they used an interesting switchback arrangement to descend right down to the water at the northern tip of North Tea Lake. 

There, the logging train could tap into a huge supply of hardwood logs brought down from the hills surrounding North Tea Lake (fourth largest in all of Algonquin Park) and then hauled across the ice to the log dump at the southern terminus of the railway. Some of this cross-ice hauling, by the way, was done by the traditional horse-drawn sleighs but the company was also a pioneer in the use of trucks and powerful tractors. The tractors could pull many loaded sleighs at once, one behind the other, eliminating the need for many teams of horses. 

Whether the logs came from the big log dump at North Tea or from smaller dumps along the rail line itself, it was the job of the trainmen to supply the logging camps out in the bush and to bring back one trainload of 500-800 logs to the mill every day. At about five a.m. each morning, six days a week, the train would head south from Fossmill into the Park. The locomotive was always in reverse, at the back of the line, and pushing the empty cars ahead of it. This method was used because there was no place to turn around and, of course, when they came back loaded it was better to have the locomotive at the front of the train. 

In 1929 alone, the train took between 150,000 and 175,000 logs out to the mill. Peak production was about 1,500,000 board feet a month of sawn lumber and the men, paid an average of $3.00 a day for a ten hour day, six days a week, were envied by the less prosperous farmers to the north and west of Fossmill. The whole operation seemed a model of efficiency and was the subject of more than one admiring article in the forestry press of the day. 

Nevertheless, big troubles were not long in coming. On September 2nd, 1929, a spark from the train ignited a fire just inside the Park boundary that, in the next 11 days, burned over 16 square kilometres of forest and in the process destroyed one railroad bridge, two old logging camps, one new camp, and over 1000 logs awaiting transportation to the mill. The next year the train had already started three more fires by the end of May, including one that destroyed another 186 hectares. The Park Superintendent, totally fed up by this time with the company's poor safety practises, ordered it to curtail its hauling operations to the night hours when the risk of fire was much reduced. 

Of course, 1929-30 was the start of the Great Depression and the Fassett Lumber Corporation was hit hard like just about everybody else. Sales fell as much as 80%, the average wage was cut to $2.00 a day, and sometimes the operation was shut down completely and the men laid off. Just to make matters worse, at the end of September 1930, a two-day fire in the backlog of unsold lumber (possibly started by someone hoping it would bring about the re-opening of the mill) burned over 12.5 million board feet. 

Actually, the Fassett Corporation and Fossmill limped along much better than most other logging companies and communities over the next few years, but 1934 was the crusher. At the end of May, a train wreck on the main CN line right in Fossmill narrowly missed blowing the village to smithereens. (The train was carrying a load of dynamite which, fortunately, did not explode, although the wreck did kill one hobo who was 'riding the rails' looking for work as so many did in the hungry thirties.) In July, a freak snow storm left so much snow on the ground that sleighs could be used, and then, in August, the final disaster struck. On the 26th, in the space of just 45 minutes, the mill, then valued at $250,000, burned to the ground, leaving nothing but twisted piles of metal and machinery, 100 men out of work, and their families with almost no hope. 

The company could not rationally decide to rebuild, most families had no resources or possibility of relocating anywhere else, and the majority had to go on relief. Only very slowly, over the next ten or fifteen years, did Fossmill finally disappear. For a while, there was a bit of work cleaning up the mess at the mill site and lifting the rails from the logging railway in the Park (completed in the early 1940s). A few young men went off to World War II and slowly the older, unemployed workers and their families drifted away, most notably to the new, nearby lumbering village of Kiosk in Algonquin Park itself. 

The Fossmill story had come to an end. Today, just a few decades later, it would be entirely unknown except for the energy, interest, and enthusiasm of Doug and Paul Mackey. All those of us with an interest in Algonquin Park history owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude for rescuing the facts, photos, and recollections that comprise their outstanding book. It goes without saying that we recommend it highly. 

And That's Not All!

A US publication on logging and lumbering history, and modeling
P.O. Box 219 Hillsboro, OR 97123  1-800-821-8652

Fossmill is just one of the many stories from this region of Canada, and is representative of dozens of other operations of the time.

The Fossmill story alone covers its operation from 1924-1946. But this is more than that – the story is expanded to cover Fossmill's earlier history in Fassett, Quebec and the post history at Kiosk in Algonquin Park. The Park itself had been set up as a forest reserve for the lumber industry.

There are over 350 photos, maps and illustrations in this book. Although you get a good share of family photos and such, a good portion of them are of logging, lumbering and the associated railroad operations. One of the illustrations is the floor plan of the mill. Another illustration shows the layout of a logging camp. And many of the maps detail the railroad lines.

You also get interview with some of the folks who lived this story along with the well researched text. This is a very comprehensive and interesting view of the area and the times.

We have seen a number of books on Western Canadian logging, here's your chance to learn about the logging above the Great Lakes region of Canada. SRG

(Se a review of Logging By Rail in Algonquin Park from same issue)