It’s Wayback Wednesday, sponsored by Jamie Lockwood, broker/owner of Sutton Group Muskoka Realty!
This is Huntsville’s Main Street in 1944.
Prominent on the north side of the street is Ecclestone Hardware (now the location of Huntsville’s Hometown IDA Drugstore). The business was owned by George W. Ecclestone, a Bracebridge businessman and former MPP—he represented Muskoka for 18 years—who bought the building in 1931. On Sunday, February 20, 1944, a fire destroyed the grocery section of the next-door Huntsville Trading Company along with the Ecclestone’s Hardware. Firemen battled for more than 12 hours to control the fire.
Huntsville Trading Company (more recently Flotron’s and Sharpley’s Source for Sports) was one of the most successful retail operations in Huntsville at the time. Owned by the Ginsburg family, Max and his four sons Morris, Israel, Abraham, and Samuel.
That fire wasn’t the first the family experienced. The Ginsbergs arrived in Huntsville in early 1918. In May 1918, shortly after setting up their first store, it went down in flames. Undaunted, they purchased the property on the north side of the street, and the rest is history.
Photo: CN Images of Canada Collection; details courtesy of Huntsville: With Spirit and Resolve
See more Wayback Wednesday photos here.
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Allen Markle says
Love these old photos! Revelations abound. Like: it appears there are parking spots on Mainstreet? And truckers are already practicing for a run to Ottawa and parking in front of the Parliament buildings.
A single ray of sunshine just flashed across my screen.
More on the way I hope.
Brian Tapley says
I like Allen’s comment about parking.
A street can look as nice as you like on paper or with a drone fly by but people simply will not actually shop unless they can easily get the product they are shopping for home to the point of use.
In our society they need to do this with a car of some type.
The simple truth is that if you want to sell anything more significant than what can be carried in one hand then your customer had better either be able to park fairly close and easily to your point of sale or you had better provide delivery.
If you provide delivery the customer does not even need to visit the town, let alone your business location so parking become irrelevant and your phone or web site takes over the whole job. If your business needs to sell in person, you will lose out to any mall where parking is free, easy and plentiful no matter how pretty your street looks.
By the way, when people have been using a sort of de facto pedestrian crossing on the corner closest to the Royal Bank for as long as my memory goes back, why did we put the nice new official crossing on the other side of the intersection? There must be a good reason but I’m darned if i can see it. I’m wondering if it might work better if there was a pedestrian crossing maybe 80 to 100 feet away from this intersection on both sides and none at the intersection itself. This would make traffic flow easier at the actual intersection and put the pedestrian crossing in an area where it was all by itself, easier to see, safer to use? I wonder how this might work out?
Allen Markle says
Brian Tapley: At risk of being part of a ‘mutual admiration group’, I will say “Good point!” Why indeed move a normal migration path! We, the local herd, will gravitate to that traditional path.
Might I once again mention the positioning of the cross-walk switch at the bottom of Yonge Street in the west end.
I served on safety committees for about 30 years, at WH and KC, and it was of paramount importance that you never resolved a hazardous situation by creating another.
No one, ever, taught a child to walk along, or cross a road with their back to oncoming traffic. And only with extra caution near turning traffic.
Descend Yonge Street sidewalk, and you have to do both. And also to search for a switch that is neither visible or marked.
We had a meal at the restaurant near there, watched lots of people cross, and only saw the light used once. That was by someone coming from town. They then walked diagonally across the intersection.
These are safety measures to be sure, but they are not reasonably employed.
Stay safe everyone!