Ghost Towns of Muskoka.

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.

Ghost town enthusiasts who have read Ron Brown’s Ontario’s Ghost Town Heritage (2007) and enjoyed its colour photographs, but who wish to learn more than its brief surveys offer about the history of towns in particular areas, will be looking for regional histories of vanished settlements. For the cottage country in the Canadian Shield north of Toronto, this carefully researched and well-written account of Muskoka’s abandoned settlements is a rewarding choice. Four of the sites surveyed by Brown are included in Hind and Da Silva: Swords, Ashdown (Corners), Cooper’s Falls, and Uffington. To that group the Muskoka writers have added Rosseau Falls, Falkenburg Junction, Dee Bank, Germania, Millar Hill, Lewisham, Monsell, and Seldom Seen (as part of an omnibus chapter on other ghost towns in Muskoka). Their respective approaches may be illustrated by reference to Ashdown Corners.

In little more than a column of text, Brown locates this settlement at the southern end of the Nipissing Colonization Road, at its junction with the Parry Sound Colonization Road, surveys the buildings and some of their owners, and outlines the reasons for its decline and fall. Hind and Da Silva devote 22 pages to Ashdown’s fortunes, in the course of which they breathe life into its history. First they offer an extended overview of the settlement’s encouraging beginning, at the junction of two important colonization roads, and public policy, which offered free grants of land to settlers. We are introduced to the families who settled before James Ashdown, and are made acquainted with the nature of Muskoka’s soils and the rise of a competing centre at Rosseau. Then the authors take up, in more detail, the matters of the Nipissing Road, the McCan family and their carriage and wagon shop, the sawmills, hotels, school, church and cemetery, and prominent families. In every case, contexts are clearly defined. Source materials revealed in the endnotes attest the meticulous nature of the authors’ research.