Wayback Wednesday, sponsored by Jamie Lockwood, broker/owner of Sutton Group Muskoka Realty!
From the Huntsville Heritage Collection and Muskoka Digital Archives:
In 1898, James and Elizabeth Hanes sold Lots 43 & 44, Plan 21, on Walpole Street to Oscar and Ada Wieler, who built a two-storey house with a large front deck off the second floor.
Oscar was a tinsmith and plumber who came to Huntsville in about 1890 from near Hanover, Ontario. He worked for White Brothers Hardware before starting his own business at 86 Main Street East.
An 1894 advertisement in the Forester read, “Oscar Wieler, Main Street, manufacturer of cheap tinware, creamers, sap buckets, stoves for sale.” The business later moved to 30 Main Street East. Oscar married Ada Ullman of Huntsville, whose father was the stagecoach driver between Bracebridge and Huntsville.
In 1908 the house was sold to Arthur Paget, who came to Canada in 1898. He sold the house in 1919 to Claude and Lillian Fowler, and then in 1921, it was sold to Kenneth and Lulu Rose. Kenneth was an engineer who had worked in Central and South America in railway construction. He came to Huntsville in 1923 as a district engineer for the Department of Highways and supervised the first government-improved roads in Muskoka.
Lulu died in 1931, and Kenneth remarried Beatrice Ireland. He died in 1940. In 1947, the house was sold to Bob and Jane Hutcheson, who made many changes. It was sold in 1961 to Robert S. Claus, who was a school inspector for the District of Muskoka. He was probably responsible for the additions to the north and back of the house.
In 1982, Robert’s widow sold the house to Robert Roper and Margaret Armstrong. In 1985-86, it was sold to Giselind and Herbert A. Fuesor. In 1987, it was sold again to Thomas and Janet Roberts of Hillside, who made it into a duplex.
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My grandfather sharpened the saws for the Bethune company and either muskoka wood or the Huntsville one. We donated his tools to the pioneer village.
Bob Hutcheson pointed this house out to me a while back. He said that the home has a timber in it that bears the ‘JW’ hammer stamp of the Whiteside Lumber Company. John Whiteside was one of the many early mill owners, a member of the Big East River Improvement Company and one of those who ran logs on some local rivers.
Logs run on some streams and the Big East in particular would become quite intermixed during the drive. They needed to be sorted so they could be sent to the proper mill: and the man whose crew had cut the logs. In early days the initials or symbol of the owner would be welded onto the face of a big striking hammer. The stamp would be struck into the end of the log.
When the logs arrived at the ‘sorting jack’, they could be identified by the stamp and sorted into rafts or booms for the proper mill. It wasn’t a great system and there were often squabbles over a mill cutting another mans’ timber.
But by the ’20’s there were only 3 companies left in the drive business, and a painted colour code was agreed upon. Huntsville Lumber chose red. Muskoka Lumber chose white and Bethune Pulp and Lumber chose green. Didn’t eliminate the squabbles but it helped.