Almaguin Chronicles: Memories of the Past.

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Readers may well wonder where “Almaguin” is.  Almaguin, like Algoma, is a made-up name, the product of a contest sponsored by the Magnetawan River and Lakes Tourist Association to define an amorphous region to the north of the Muskokas and Huntsville, east of (and emphatically separate from) the Parry Sound region, south of the French River, and west of Algonquin Park. Some must have thought this a vainglorious attempt to make something out of nothing, but in fact the word was shaped from the first two letters of Algonquin, the first three letters of Magnetawan, and the last three, “uin” (pronounced “win”), from an effort, ala Longfellow, to invent something Indian-like. Chronicles conveys a license to tell stories, without any obligation to weave the disparate narrative strands into a whole cloth.

From these rather unpromising beginnings, Astrid Taim has pieced together stories that residents and visitors alike will certainly enjoy reading. She begins with a chapter about David Burk and the founding of Burk’s Falls south of North Bay. In the next chapter, she associates Emma Louise Anderson (who died just short of her 103rd birthday in 1974) with the arrival of the Grand Trunk Railway in Sundridge and an automobile trip from Cleveland, Tennessee, that ended short of North Bay, in Burk’s Falls. The chapter on the railroad ends with an account of four Sundridge men’s expedition to the Klondike gold field in 1898. The chapter on Clarence Brazier, a river driver who turned 100 in 2006, provides an excellent account of hardscrabble beginnings on inhospitable soil, family tragedy, running a hunting camp, entertaining loggers for cash, and working log drives. Chapters on child care, South River and the Standard Chemical Company, Pickerel River logging, the Lost Channel, logging’s last stands, the boat-building Walton family, and other notable figures and significant towns follow.

This is a “jump-in-anywhere-anytime” book, and certainly one of the more rewarding examples of the genre.