It’s Wayback Wednesday, sponsored by Jamie Lockwood, broker/owner of Sutton Group Muskoka Realty!
Can anyone name this dam on the Big East River system? Photo: R.A. Hutcheson, 1949 on Muskoka Digital Archives.
As well as controlling water levels, the Big East River system was used every spring for log runs. The various lumber companies in the area stamped their logs and sent them down the river with the spring runoff. On entering Lake Vernon from the river they were sorted by the stamps according to company, into booms and towed by tugboat to the various mills for cutting. The last log run in the Huntsville area via the Big East River was in 1937.
See more Wayback Wednesday photos here.
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This looks like the area where the old Hogan Dam stood, with those high hills and that cliff on the north side of the river. There was not much left at the site when I was through there with my Dad an uncles.
It was just a flood dam to aid with the movement of logs. It and the old West Scott dam brought timber and water into the Big East, between McCraney and Finlayson dams. For the last 10 or fifteen years of its’ existence, it didn’t have any logs to move. Anyone paddling the river today should be able to pinpoint where it once stood.
If it is the old Hogan Dam, like all the dams on the Big East drainage system, it had been built and maintained by the Big East River Improvement Company. The company was organized in the late 1800s by the timber companies that were running logs from the western edge of Algonquin Park to Lake Vernon. In the 20s, with some original members gone and a couple of new ones, it became the New Big East River Improvement Company.
Members were required to pay their share for cleaning up the river, and building and repairing the dams and chutes needed for the spring log run. They were each required to pay an agreed upon sum per thousand feet of scaled timber.
I believe R. Hutcheson was the last shareholder in the company, when it and the dam sites were taken over by the Department of Lands and Forests.
There was some grand trout fishing along the river, before the days of bass and pike. I wonder if they are all the way up the river now. I used to walk up there with my Dad and Father-in-law, when we were still able. There was a place there we called the ‘Glory Hole’. A couple of hundred yards of river, where McCraney creek, Mink creek and the Big East all join together.
Lord, that was some kind of walk, but some kind of fishing too!