Ada Florence Kinton worried about loss of Muskoka woodlands in late 1800’s

Took exception to the woodsman’s axe

Since the mid 1990’s I have written frequently about a young lady by the name of Ada Florence Kinton. Following her death in the early 1900’s, her family in Huntsville, published the journal she had commenced before arriving in Muskoka, entitled “Just One Blue Bonnet,” most of the text devoted to detailing her work with the founding Booth family, and the world missions of the Salvation Army.
I found the softcover text one day in a second hand book shop, in the Town of Bracebridge. As I am an antiquarian and collectable book dealer, I couldn’t believe my good fortune, to be able to secure this biographical treasure, with many references to the outdoor experiences the young artist enjoyed in North Muskoka. What made her exceptional to me, as both an historian and a Muskoka heirloom collector-dealer, was that it offered impartial observations of building advancements in the region’s fledgling villages, particularly in Huntsville, where her brothers were already prominent businessmen when she arrived from England.
For the purposes of this blog entry, my interest is in her honest appraisal of how these communities were being constructed between forest, rock and water. Ada Kinton was an accomplished artist and teacher who was forced to come to Canada after the death of her father and the settling of the family’s estate. Her mother had died some years earlier. As she already had brothers and their young families in Canada, it was decided she should travel to the new Dominion, until she could make more secure plans for the future.
She arrived in Canada in the winter season and when she describes the lonely and bitterly cold journey to Muskoka, the final leg by horse-drawn sleigh, it’s obvious the adjustment from the old country to new was going to be long and difficult to heart and senses.
During this period in the newly opened District of Muskoka, Ada made many important observations about the living conditions, social and cultural observances, and advancements in civilized existence established by the new settlers to the community; some homesteads created in the English tradition inside and out. She wrote daily notes about what the community looked like, at work during the day, in gay regalia for special events, as witnessed in either full sunlight, or enhanced by the moonlight reflection off the newly fallen snow. What was striking for me was her many sojourns back into the woodlands south of Huntsville, where she sat for hours making sketches of the flora and fauna, some she describes in colorful detail. She would write for awhile, sketch for a time, and then pause to enjoy the many creatures she could see moving back and forth between birch and evergreen.
She makes numerous references to the forests in peril, and the ceaseless work of the loggers to reduce whole woodlots to stubble in a matter of days. It wasn’t simply to provide room for new buildings but rather to harvest the lumber for building purposes. The harvest of timber in Muskoka was becoming a huge industry in the late 1880’s with much timber being exported from the region to other important Canadian centres for milling and re-sale. Ada Kinton had some concern that these thriving forests were going to be toppled without any recognition of what purpose they serve the creatures within. Would they consume every wooded acre in the district?
Ada Florence Kinton saw the beauty in nature at a time when most settlers looked at trees as both a nuisance and a survival material. They could cut and mill it for their own homes, sell it outright, or use it for fuel in their fireplaces. There was always a good and honest reason for hacking down a tree; it was in the way of a future garden, it was worth money, and it wasn’t serving any other useful purpose. She despaired that there was no way of protecting this inherent resource. While some people vacationed to Muskoka to see these woodlands, the loggers raced against the clock to fill quotas for timber to the mill. Needless to say Muskoka communities were stripped rather bare in those early years, part by necessity to establish villages and farmsteads, the other because of plain and simple greed. It was a resource and there was money to be made. Now tell me what’s different today? Even though many folks continue to come to Muskoka to see our beautiful forests, trees still have that nuisance – value attraction that encourages their annual removal a/ to enhance the lake view and b/ to be sold off to build something or other….or burned up in a fireplace.
The honest, untutored opinion of Ada Kinton, in the late 1880’s, was that we were being reckless with clearing. Those who have little use for the pretty picture of nature, might argue, “what do artists know about anything; they just get emotional when they see a tree cut down.” What Ada Kinton saw was not only a beautiful vista in an enchanting region of the world but a critically important habitat for the creatures of the land. Something we forget about today when another wetland or woodland meets the developer’s mission of over-consumption.
On an unscheduled writing pause, I’ve just now come in from a walk down into The Bog, the charming greenbelt across the road from our home here at Birch Hollow. I can’t really describe the pleasure of being immersed in the heart of this amazing little habitat, surrounded by urbanity. There are deer tracks throughout the upper embankment of The Bog, and it has become a great distraction for our dog Bosko….our very own Deer Hunter. There are many Chickadees and Blue Jays flitting branch to branch overhead, and the squirrels have been chattering warnings to the dog since we touched the outside edge of the forest. The sunlight is dazzling off the newly fallen snow, and what began as a seriously cold day has matured in early afternoon to be most pleasant and inspiring. Ada Kinton would have celebrated this place as well, seeing and feeling its intricacies, its abounding life forms above and below. I would feel terror today to hear the start-up of a chainsaw, just as she feared the distant slash of the woodsman’s axe.
In the past few weeks of blog entries, as I’m sure you can read etched with frustration and annoyance, I’ve tangled with some members of local governance about what is in the best interest of Muskoka. As you can undoubtedly sense, the effort has been as fruitless and ignored as Ada Kinton pleas to spare the forest over one hundred years earlier.
When I look out over a perfect winter landscape with its plethora of inhabitants, all creatures great and small, above the snow mantle and below, I can’t help but wonder what catastrophe of man will be great enough in order for him to stop, and ponder awhile, if sacrificing nature for tarmac and urban sprawl all these decades has generated this most recent despair?
I confess to coming to these woods a lot in recent weeks to seek sanctuary from the urban philosophers and their condo aspirations; the commerce seekers, who know how to suck the last shiny penny from our coffers; the land sharks, the speculators who know we’ll buy the monstrosities they build. It seems so impossible that wisdom might prevail at some point, and a government official, an elected representative, just one, would rear up and say, “Enough, enough! We have consumed too much. We have abused our inherent duty to protect our environment. We must conserve and protect before we build one more strip mall, one more condo unit, one more box store.”
Alas, I am but a hopeless romantic, reared on the work of Washington Irving, who adored such natural splendors, enchanted forests and haunted waterways; Charles Dickens who lashed out against the urban sicknesses, and marveled at natural wonders……standing in awe at Niagara Falls having witnessed nothing as its parallel….just as I’ve adored the words of poet Robert Frost, these snowy woods and leaning birches reminding me of his stops along the way…..Wallace Stevens poem, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” where nature, the sea haunts eternal. Yes, I am mired in these antiquated thoughts of nature and its place in our lives. Yet I have no reason to seek escape from these naïve, outdated thoughts,…ones I have learned from sage authority, wise to the ways of life and times; nature and her seasons.
At the age of 52 this year, I’ve written about environmental protection since the mid 1970’s and I can’t look at my home community and find one woodland I was able to protect from urban expansion. Even when I tried (most recently) with a great sense of desperate mission (and dedicated companions), to save a century old parkland in urban Bracebridge, known as Jubilee Park (where I played as a kid), the fight was lost before it began. The open space where I used to take my wee lads to play, when I lived in that neighborhood, will soon be the campus of an Ontario university…..a place of higher learning. It’s just hard to understand, in this newly turned-on world to issues such as global warming and environmental well being, how we can still be so narrow focused, as to deem irrelevant, a little open space for the enjoyment of an old, well populated urban neighborhood. But it happened and those who tried to save it have no choice now but to watch as one vision of future prosperity is replaced with another.
There are some folks I hear tell, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the earth moving equipment, to gouge out and build upon this open space as soon as possible. I feel sorry for them, I really do, and I’d gladly offer them a walk in partnership through this open space at The Bog, if I thought it would soften hearts of stone.
I’ve spent too many years in this mission to promote environmental conscience to abandon it now. I’m only half sorry to have to tell my opponents in their mission to pave over Muskoka that I have no intention of dropping my protest, my pleas for conservation any time soon. While I can’t stop the determination of government to sell the public on the philosophy that “expansion is good, expansion means progress,” I can be a stick in the spokes whenever opportunity presents. While I’d like to see the citizens of Muskoka rally to the cause, I don’t really expect the cavalry will possess many more than the few committed souls who make it a matter of daily life, to guard the well being of mother earth.
You decide what will inspire the human spirit; my choice is a stroll through the woodland. Can’t find a parallel experience strolling through the strip mall!
Thank you for reading this blog editorial.

One historic park down – my highest praise for those who tried to save it!

At the time of this blog’s composition, Jan. 2007) I have just recently learned that a well known public park in Bracebridge, Ontario, has been sacrificed to allow for more urban development. A park that I played in as a kid, a park where my own youngsters came to run off some pent-up energy, initiate a game of baseball and enjoy the recreational equipment, and where thousands of citizens celebrated agricultural society fairs for over a century…, has now become home to a university campus. An important recreational space in a park-starved urban core will be sacrificed for a place of higher learning.
Since this debacle began a year ago, our family had joined up with concerned residents of the Jubilee Park neighborhood, and last winter during a public meeting to discuss the project, I was proud to carry a placard protesting the compromise to this sliver of open space that has been important to the town since the late 1800’s. I was proud to be associated with a group of people trying to protect their rights as taxpayers, as neighbors of the project, and as stake holders in the community. It was as much a wake-up call about the rights and privileges of a municipal council, and how intrusive local government can be when the mood strikes. There isn’t a property owner, a resident of this province, who shouldn’t be aware just how much change can be imposed on a community’s future, a street, a neighborhood, by a group of pretty ordinary folks, who let elected office go to their heads. The next debacle may be in your ballywick. You need to know your rights long before the surveyors and soil testing equipment show up. The Jubilee Park defenders were caught by surprise and had very little time to mount a campaign to save the site. And it cost a considerable amount of private funds to defend those rights thought to have been inherent and non-negotiable in the Hollow neighborhood. Selling off a public park? Who would have thought this would have ever become an issue prior to news of the university project in January 2006?
The residents who opposed the project for sound, logical, good planning reasons, were let down by the judicial process they believed would protect their rights; rights you would, as a citizen of this province, expect would be safe-guarded. An urban park. For urban, inner community kids and adults. It was sacrificed in the name of progress and educational opportunity. I can only ponder if the urban studies department of the subject university would consider it a worthy project to study the action of their own university, to compromise an urban neighborhood’s last morsel of open space.
No matter how many arguments were made in support of the park’s re-development, nothing, not even the most recent judicial decision can trump the reality, a badly needed open space, in an established, historic, urban neighborhood has been unnecessarily compromised, when alternative sites could have, should have been explored. In this day and age when environmental issues are being red flagged all over the place, and global initiatives to spare the earth are launched in weighty succession, it’s so depressing to find that here in the beautiful Ontario hinterland, good urban planning is, well, not of particular interest to the stewards of our resources.
I applaud all those who stood up to the power mongers at town hall, and forced the issue into the public domain….., for everyone to see, and acknowledge the price to be paid, as a mission of council, to inspire long term economic progress. They are titanic builders, having no regard for any encounter with an iceberg(s). One day they will face the true consequence of their imposition of faulty logic. Thank goodness there are still people in our district, who will fight for their rights despite the stacked odds of being out-resourced and out-funded by a determined, narrow-visioned town hall.
Sparing the park was the right thing to do. Thinking about the every day neighborhood uses of the park, the opportunities it has afforded the community generally for decades, would have clearly imprinted a greater need for advance consultation before the deed was announced. The disrespect this group of 2006 councillors demonstrated to the entire town, was as irresponsible to the democracy they are sworn, by law, to protect, as this regional historian has ever seen develop in the history of all our Muskoka communities. It does not paint a picture of good governance for the future and my suggestion is that ratepayer groups and citizen action committees need to beef up their enterprise, their mission statement, or live with a disturbing new trend of….”we’ll do what we want, when we want, to whoever we want!” Consequence free you might say.
To the hale and hardy folks I came to know in this courageous fight to save an historic Muskoka park, “we live to fight another day!”

A walk in a snowy woods to get perspective

I can be steaming mad, on the verge of bursting blood vessels, yet this snowy woodland at Birch Hollow (Gravenhurst) always soothes the savage beast. I can enter here with the taste of fire and brimstone on the tip of my tongue, and editorial rage about to ooze out of my fingertips but about twenty feet into this tranquil enclosure of snow-laden boughs, I calm to the pleasantness of immersion. As this public greenbelt is afforded to the neighborhood here, as a privilege of the subdivision, I do feel great compassion for those in The Hollow neighborhood, of Bracebridge, who have just lost their historic Jubilee Park, for the sake of a new university campus having a place to set up operation. In light of this unfortunate judicial decision to allow the park to be sold-off, I don’t know how we would muster the mission to save this even more vulnerable open space, in Gravenhurst, should it catch the attention of town council on a development binge. To preserve it, would be the most intense, worthwile fight of my life. This place is precious not only to our family but to every resident, every creature, every plant, every tree that thrives here as a result of its continuous well being.
On nights after attending meetings in support of saving Jubilee Park, over the past year, I would walk our dog over into these comforting woods and ponder how any one today, in this enlightened free world, could dismiss the importance of good old fashioned “open space!” Places to unwind, wander, play, and outstretch arms with ample room to spin clear of the citizenry at large. I live in a typically urban settlement, where neighbors mow their grass regularly, all times of day or night, drive two vehicles whether they need them or not, have loud leaf blowers, electronic gizmos that beep, chime and play music, and similarly live in company of pet owning folks who have a penchant for letting their dogs poop on my lawn, regardless if I’m standing watch or not. And when they get ticked off about the length of my blades of grass, my clutter in the driveway and on the lawn, and the garden ornaments I prefer to theirs, they can also amble angrily into these beautiful, forgiving woods on their own, and be uplifted by spirit and solitude to a cheerful life refrain..
While I have to live and work in this urban dynamic, I can not survive without this daily touch with natural immersion. The fact this tiny acreage of trees exists here, is the reason I have continued to reside in Gravenhurst. I would feel much less enthusiastic about my home if this safe haven was compromised in the same fashion, as the Jubilee Park neighbors were robbed of their oasis from the urban hustle and bustle.
Making money off these woods! That’s what it would amount to, if municipal attention was raised about this modest forest amidst urbanity. I have never once thought of fiscal prosperity while walking through this amazing wetland. I have never felt a desire to exploit it because of its urban potential, or to suggest it be the site of condominiums or more residential housing. I have only thought about how much it has improved all the lives of all who call this ballywick “home.” How when we emerge from slumber, and take that first glance out the window, what magnificence we are greeted with, these snow attired evergreens, maples and leaning old birches; the birds and squirrels, the deer and rabbits criss-crossing all the live long day.
If I must, I shall defend this place, this healing wee forest, with whatever is required to spare it from the conquest of the empire builders.
Help save the nature of Muskoka. Protect a forest or wetland from urban misadventure. Look at your closest public park and appreciate, as with the news of the day, it’s an insecure land use at the discretion of those who call themselves good governance.


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