Many Scandinavian settlers not as lucky
The World Is A Stage
Posted By by Laurel A. Beechey
Posted 5 months ago
SWhen thinking of settlers in Canada we envision the people arriving a century or two ago who carved their little plot of land out of our great wilderness. George Tillson came in 1825, and less then two hundred years later look where our town is today! But take a look at what he had to work with; when he cleared his land of trees he found rich farmland below. What happened to settlers who were not so lucky? My latest project has been researching a community that didn’t fare so well.
In the mid to late 1800’s the Canadian governments was deliberately advertising to entice Scandinavians to Canada. They had two townships set aside in Ontario for them to settle on. They were offering land grants of 100 acres, plus extra land depending on how many children you had and they attracted a lot of people. One of these townships was in what we call the Muskoka today. Most of you know what that land is like, it is where we travel down the highways oohing and awing over the beautiful rock cuts on our way to Huntsville or Parry Sound.
We love the rocks trees and water, but what were they to settlers?
Try to imagine what was like for those Scandinavians to get there with no car or roads. It took months to cross the Atlantic and get to Toronto by boat. Some took a train to Gravenhurst and a ferry up across Lake Muskoka then canoe up Lake Rosseau to Rosseau, but from there they had to walk. Husband, wife and maybe three wee children under six years old had to walk miles carrying everything they owned on their backs. First you walked over 40 miles to Parry Sound. Today that is about a 40 minute trip by car, back then it was a minimum of two days. In Parry Sound they had to wait in an overcrowded town to get their land grand in Monteith Township.
Supplies were purchased and while they where waiting they met up with some other Scandinavians.
Eventually the paper work was done, not an easy task when no one speaks their language and together several families walked the last 40 miles into their new home. There was no nice road that they could take an ox and cart down; it was an old Indian trail that the Hudson Bay trappers and a few surveyors had used. It wound through the towering trees, over rocks and through swamps up cliffs and down gorges. It took two days of exhausting trudging to get the family and all they owned to Bear Lake.
It had taken from the ice break up in the spring to travel to from their homeland to the fall to arrive at their new home. What awaited them? Trees, rocks, a profusion of wildlife and a few Indians. The snow came before many could chop down the trees to make their log homes so many spent the winter in tents. There was no food except what you hunted. The snow stopped trips to town to find ‘food’. If not for the pemmican given by the Indians many may not have survived.
Although we can’t imagine the hardships they endured, these settlers were no different than the Tillsons down here, except for one thing. When they cleared their land of towering trees they found very little arable land, what they found was rock. They did mange to grow enough food to live, but the bountiful, rich farm land they were promised as not there.
Many settlers moved on to Manitoba or further west. At Bear Lake a tiny community developed called Jarlsberg and families settled in and grew. They arrived in 1872.
Within four years they had their own little church, St. Olaf’s built. The trails turned to paths and eventually horses made the trip to town easier.
Twenty years later the railroad came to Jarlsberg and they boomed. Finally there was a way to export their one commodity, lumber. But the seemingly inexhaustible supply of wood did eventually run out and when it did the boom busted. With the advent of better roads and cars, the railroad left and once again Jarlsberg became a little village.
Unlike others in the area, like Sequin Falls, they did not become a ghost town. There are still people living in the village although in modernized homes, and a few original, massive log cabins still stand. St. Olaf’s still reaches up to God and looks like it did 133 years ago; complete with original pump organ. Jarlsberg is now known as Bear Lake and amazingly there are still descendents of the original settlers living in the village.
As the lumber industry decreased and roads became better the city folk came, building their own log cabins but visiting only in the summers. My mother, as a teenager, first went to Bear Lake on holidays from Windsor, in the late 1930’s during the decline of Jarlsberg. Twenty some years later my parents purchased their cottage and I spent glorious summers at the lake always wondering about shorelines deep with sawdust, log ends and dead heads.
Now I know the why, the who and the when. The epic journey and struggle of those settlers should not be for naught and with the help of descendents, villagers and cottagers their story will be preserved.
