It’s Wayback Wednesday, sponsored by Jamie Lockwood, broker/owner of Sutton Group Muskoka Realty!
From the Huntsville Heritage Collection, donated by Bill Nickalls, the exact date is unknown. Taken at the Huntsville Planing Mills, Huntsville Ontario. The image shows employees loading a wooden cart with large wooden wheels.
We’re not sure when this photo was taken. It was long before pickup trucks came on the scene, a time when wooden wheels and carts were loaded with wood and pulled by horses. Did you know that wood-spoke artillery wheels were used on the first automobiles? By the 1920s many motorcars started using cast steel wheels or wheels welded from pressed steel sections that looked like wooden artillery wheels at a glance.
See more Wayback Wednesday photos here.
Don’t miss out on Doppler!
Sign up here to receive our email digest with links to our most recent stories.
Local news in your inbox so you don’t miss anything!
Click here to support local news
A picture of some ones ancestors? Maybe, but with nothing on the photo giving those names or any clues, you can only guess. There isn’t much skyline to help with the location. If it’s actually in the site of the old Huntsville Planing Mills, the background you can’t see would be the wharves along the river, and then across the river to the swamp that existed on the other side of what is now John street.
The interesting thing in the photo, for me at least, is what I think is a sawdust/shaving flume, that runs across the photo. In steam powered mills, most chips, off-cuts, sawdust and shavings were used to fire the boilers themselves. This flume seems to indicate that excess was blown away from the mill to a hopper where excess could be stored and sold.
Sawdust went to lodges, hotels and sheds owned by people who sold ice. Ice cut from the lakes was piled in shed, with sawdust packed around the blocks, and then meted out over the warm, summer weather.
When I was young, we had an ice-box and an ice shed. When we ran out of ice in late summer, we would buy from Mr. Mcielwain, who delivered along Brunel rd. with horse and wagon. Electricity and a refrigerator put an end to that era.
But sometimes the flume would run shavings straight from the planer. These were used in stables and chicken coops. Plus, when bagged with lime, they were sold as insulation. The house my father built on Brunel road was insulated in this way. The crossers in the ceiling had that shaving/lime mix dumped between them. The shavings helped insulate the house and the lime was to prevent or suppress any fire.
The old Fetterly/Cottrill mill at the Locks, being a turbine powered mill, had no need to fire a boiler, but in old photos, you can see a waste flume going across the river. The heaps of shaving and sawdust were open burned on the other side of the river.
Boilers were the bane of those old sawmills; flame and fuel aplenty, heat and sparks. The results we can read in the history books, telling us that this mill burned and that mill burned and then they did it all over again.
Just at the shoulder of the worker on the left, there appears to be a stack. I don’t think the mill was there. That stack seems to be more in the vicinity of the wharves themselves. Slightly raked, could it be the stack of one of the old lake boats?
But, like the names of the men in the photo, we will likely never know.