Welcome to Wayback Wednesday sponsored by Cavalcade Color Lab! Every week, we’ll be sharing a vintage photo and asking our readers to chime in with anything you can recall about the photo, other related memories, or even a funny caption. Have some vintage photos of your own? Send them to [email protected] and we may share them with our readers!
Do you recognize this Huntsville-area community? Any guesses on what year this photo was taken? Can you name any of the families who lived in these homes? (Photo courtesy of Muskoka Heritage Place.)
Scroll down to see comments on last week’s photo.
Wayback Wednesday is sponsored by Cavalcade Color Lab
Most who responded to this photo identified it as Blackburn’s Landing or Blackburn’s Marina. Shown here is Blackburn’s Boat Works. We don’t have a date for this photo, unfortunately. In that location now is Boston Pizza, and the marsh across the road is now the plaza and parking lot affectionately known as “Beer Lake” in the spring.
Some Doppler readers suggested the photographer’s vantage point was the Anglican Church, some a nearby home. Others offered up a few more details:
This was Blackburn’s Marina when I was younger, I was told that there was a sawmill there prior to this so maybe this is part of that sawmill. Dad always told me that there used to be lots of muskrats in the swamp and the mill gradually filled it in with sawdust and stuff. The businesses along the main street that backed onto this swamp did their usual thing in those days and dumped everything they did not want into the swamp, hey it’s a Canadian “thing” to do this. Now we get folks that know nothing of the history and they complain that the parking lot is “falling apart,” floods with every rain and so on. Well gosh, it’s like a land claim. We stole it from the muskrats, filled it with junk and only just high enough as fill costs money and then built on it… You wonder why things sag and fall apart!
This house originally belonged to my great uncle, Norm Ware, where he raised his 5 children. He was an original partner in Ware Bros. grocery store in the Ware block with his brothers Ernie and Bert Ware (my grandfather).
GAIL ORR:
The vantage point is the house on the top of the hill beside the Anglican Church. I think you might even have to be on the top floor to get that vantage point.
I agree with all comments as well. The first thing I envisioned was Blackburn’s Marina, but it does look like a saw mill. I notice that there are no vehicles nor piles of material around it,… maybe shut down by then? – just before Blackburn’s Marina? I agree with Gail Orr on the vantage point. I notice what appears to be the peak of a roof near the bottom left corner, so possibly the top floor or even the roof of the church. I’d love to know the date of this image and also, what was the two+ story building (with two roof lines…veranda and posts?) …. middle left side, behind the row of buildings on the river front.
Hi. Would you happen to have any photos going back to the 50’s and 60’s of Mayshore Cottages, run by Raymond May and his wife. These wonderful wooden cottages were on what is now Hutcheson Beach Road.
We rented cottages from the May’s for 18 years. The cottages were left to decay, and it broke my heart each time I came to Huntsville.
It would be great to see some pictures from that wonderful time.