FROM ITS SOURCE in the Osprey Wetlands in the Dundalk highlands, one of the highest points in Ontario, the Saugeen River winds toward Lake Huron about two hundred kilometres to the west. The river, one of the larger ones in the province, gathers strength along the way, fed by numerous smaller creeks and waterways, several of which also have “Saugeen” in their names (derived from an Ojibwa word meaning “mouth of the river”). The gentle hills of Grey and then Bruce County overlook the river as it flows through Hanover directly east of Walkerton. Once a logger’s paradise, much of the original bush has long been cleared, leaving small stands of maple, birch, cedar, and poplar that still feed area lumberyards. In the spring, deep winter snow melts away to reveal fields stubbled with last year’s corn. This is primarily cattle country, mostly beef, but there are also dairy, sheep, pig, and poultry operations. In the sky above the ubiquitous round concrete silos topped with colourfully striped metal domes, Canada geese honk and turkey vultures search for carrion. Groundhogs peep from their burrows on roadside ditches as tired brown fields turn almost overnight to shimmering, verdant green, at times overlain with impossibly yellow dandelions. Freed from a seemingly endless winter of confinement, cattle graze contentedly, while songbirds search out a nest, occasionally choosing an unused roadside mailbox. In the mist of dusk, a horse-drawn buggy clatters purposefully along the gravel shoulder of the highway, just a metre or so from the trucks and cars whizzing by. At the reins, a bearded, black-clad Old Order Mennonite heads toward a destination he’ll never seem to reach. It’s hard to tell if he’s going backwards or forwards in time, but it’s safe to say that even on this glorious, sunny dawn of the new millennium, there’s not a soul in the nearby town that wouldn’t want to turn the clock back on the disaster of May 2000.
Just shy of Walkerton, the Saugeen drifts south to a meeting with Otter Creek as it loops back sharply almost due north and makes its way into the proud capital of Bruce County. The river is about fifty metres wide where it approaches the Highway 4 bridge to Hanover at the northeast corner of town. Generally placid in the winter, the Saugeen loses its calm in the spring. Fed by melting snow and seasonal rain, the icy water roars over the dam built years ago, often spilling into the low-level plain in the valley. Levels fall sharply in summer months, allowing the adventurous to walk along the concrete ledge below the dam all the way to a sluice cut out toward the far end. Near the sluice, outdoors enthusiasts have built a fish ladder so the salmon can bypass the dam. It wasn’t that long ago that an eight-year-old boy slipped from the ledge and disappeared in the maelstrom below the sluice. It was left to Irwin Lobsinger, the town’s former mayor and long-time volunteer firefighter, to come up with the old-fashioned way to find him. Lobie made up a bundle of blankets to approximate the boy’s weight, attached it to a length of rope, and threw it into the water where he’d disappeared. When the bundle came to rest, Lobie rowed over and found the body, a cruel reminder that hidden in the life-sustaining water lurks an ever-present danger.
Once past the bridge, the river hugs the north edge of town as it flows westward, a high bluff to the north, a grassy, and treed plain to the south. Just past the second bridge, across from Lobie’s Park and the old iron foundry, Silver Creek emerges from under a building and empties through an arched stone tunnel into the river. It was in April 1951 that the normally innocuous creek flooded amid torrential rain and mild weather, washing out three bridges in the process. In the 1960s, the floodprone creek was rerouted upstream to spare the homes and yards that line its banks.
From its meeting point with Silver Creek, the Saugeen flows almost due north to Paisley and a rendezvous with the fast-flowing Teeswater River, whose waters have pushed north through the Greenock Swamp. The swamp is perhaps the single largest forested wetland in southern Ontario, although its vast, magnificent stands of old white pine are long gone. Huge canals dug by hand in the late 1800s provided logging access. For a quarter-century, millions of board-feet of white pine were taken, some finding its way to the fine furniture factories for which the area was once renowned. In the 1920s, with much of the logging heyday over, the labyrinthine canals in the inhospitable swamp proved to be an ideal hangout for bootleggers defying Prohibition. Still, even now, the wetland acts as a giant sponge for the Teeswater as it rushes to join the Saugeen, which presses onward past Port Elgin and onto Lake Huron hard by Southampton, 345 metres below the highlands from which it sprang.
Walkerton, one of dozens of small towns and hamlets that dot the landscape of Bruce County, owes its existence to the Saugeen. Its waters supplied the power needed for the saw- and gristmills that Joseph Walker built in the mid-1800s. But the large-scale logging and land clearing that came with the early settlers also left the town prone to flooding. Spring is the most dangerous time of year; a sudden mild spell, especially if compounded by heavy rain, can create a fast snowmelt. As far back as 1891, newspaper reports from Toronto, about two and a half hours and a world away, describe floodwaters washing out the bridge that gave the town road access to the north. In March 1929, merchants and shoppers on Durham Street, the town’s main road that everyone simply calls Main Street, found themselves trapped in their stores as the Saugeen spilled its banks, sending waves of muddy brown water gushing down the thoroughfare, and tearing up the recently laid cement sidewalks. Boats ferried them out. A boy drowned in the raging waters as he tried to cross the street to take a pair of boots to his father stranded at the old station. They found his body in a field. Record snowfall led to another severe flood in 1947, prompting the town to begin constructing a series of dikes. Seven years later, those dikes saved the town from catastrophe. It was in October 1954 that Hurricane Hazel swept north up the Atlantic seaboard, causing devastation and loss of life in Toronto before it blew itself out. On October 16, the Saugeen crested almost 3.5 metres above normal. The lower end of town was again under a metre of water, but there were no deaths.
Walkerton is not a whole lot larger than it was fifty or even one hundred years ago. It is not a quaint town. It is a working town. It is sturdy, not pretentious, like the tough-minded pioneers who founded it. There is little that grabs a visitor’s attention on a casual drive through. Its charms, of which there are more than a few, are mostly hidden. The area offers deer hunting in the fall, and the summer Saugeen provides pleasant if not spectacular canoeing. But it lacks the beach playground allure of a Port Elgin or Kincardine – it is not a tourist town. The simultaneous arrival of more than a few score overnight visitors taxes the capacity of its three motels. Coming west from Hanover over the bridge near the dam, Highway 4 runs into Durham Street. The small stores that line the 250 paces or so of the main road are tidy and utilitarian. The buildings, even the public ones, exude a humanscale sensibility rather than an imperial folly. There is a sense of history embedded in every street name, in the faded yellow brick houses and weathered stone churches. There is a spaciousness without sprawl: Walkerton is cradled on three sides by hills. Stores and schools and churches and bars are all close at hand. A casual dress code prevails. This is jeans and baseball cap territory. It’s the kind of town in which an unveiled bride, in full splendid regalia, can enter a packed bar at midnight on a Saturday and still have trouble catching the eye of the harried servers, perhaps even of the patrons who find it difficult to avoid stepping on her train. It is not a welcoming community, but it is a friendly one. The extended family, social, and church ties are strong. There are few visible minorities, yet there is a tolerance for diversity and a certain measured acceptance of eccentricity.
If Walkerton owes its existence to the Saugeen River, it owes its name to Joseph Walker, who arrived in May 1850 not far from what would one day become the Biesenthal farm to stake his first plot in the Queen’s Bush. The vast swaths of untamed and unsevered territory had been home for ages to the Iroquois, Hurons, and Ojibwa. Settlement of the bush was encouraged, in part, to deal with the “Indian problem,” and Walker was part of that pioneer wave. Described as short and squat, Old Joe as he became known was a miller raised in County Tyrone in Ireland and had connections to the Family Compact, the ruling elite of the pre-Canada province of Upper Canada. He’d spent time in the Toronto area before taking the plunge into Bruce County. When he clapped eyes on the small valley with its wild fruit trees and bush, Old Joe knew he’d found his spot. Armed with coveted mill rights obtained through his family connections, the forty-nine-year-old Walker set to work building a log cabin that would become the centre of his operations. He acquired ten farm lots in the valley. With the help of son William, he started the arduous task of clearing the trees for a sawmill he erected along the meandering Saugeen. He built a dam on the river for power, and had the mill machinery dragged in through the bush. By early 1852, Old Joe was in business. A year later, he borrowed $1,600 to build a gristmill, and again had the machinery dragged in through the bush. Walker also built several bridges over the river. One was ten kilometres upstream just outside Buck’s Crossing, the settlement founded a few years earlier by Abraham Buck that would later become the town of Hanover.
Walker became reeve of the newly incorporated township of Brant. By 1857, he started to subdivide his ten farm lots, giving birth to a new town. The post office, which until then bore the Brant township moniker, was changed to Walkerton. Undaunted by the fact that it met none of the requirements, Old Joe set his sight on having the fledgling town declared the capital of Bruce County. When the Governor General granted him his wish that same year, other towns, which felt more deserving of the honour, howled in protest and the proclamation was set aside. A portrait done about this time shows Old Joe smartly dressed in a bow tie, his face framed by a mop of grey hair that covers his ears, some of it spilling in curls onto his large forehead. A thick scraggly beard hangs from his neck behind a clean-shaven chin. There’s a hint of defiance in his eyes. Along with his strong political connections, he was after all one of the most prosperous businessmen in the county. Until the big crash of 1859. For several years, municipalities and settlers alike had borrowed heavily to buy property in hopes of big returns. But the buying spree drove up prices to the point where railway expansion was no longer viable. The speculative bubble burst. Municipalities found themselves strapped for cash or deep in debt, prompting the government to shut down the Municipal Loan Fund on which they had drawn so heavily. British investors began withdrawing. Then in 1858, drought struck Bruce County, causing massive crop failure. Even by pioneering standards, times were tough. The local newspaper accepted firewood for payment. The county exchanged flour and seed-grain for road work in an effort to stave off widespread starvation. The economic slump deepened with the turn of the decade and the American Civil War. In an early example of the perils of globalization, millions of people lost their jobs in England as imports of cotton from the United States dried up and British credit to the New World tightened further. There was no grist for Old Joe’s mill and little demand for the lumber that had once kept his sawmill buzzing. Heavily leveraged, he went bust and was forced to sell off his holdings at fire-sale prices. By 1863, he’d sold almost everything, much of it to his influential friend, George Jackson, the Crown land agent who had turned federal politician and whose name still graces one of Walkerton’s main streets. There are those who say Jackson merely took title of Walker’s properties so they couldn’t be seized and that he would later return them. In 1865, with Jackson’s help, Walker at last won his crusade to have Walkerton designated the county town and he soon became its first mayor. But his days as tycoon were essentially over. Now approaching his seventies, Walker packed up in 1870 and headed north to Manitoulin, said to be the world’s largest freshwater island. There he erected another gristmill. He died a couple of years later. The exact whereabouts of his grave are unknown.
In 1871, the settlement Walker had founded was finally declared a town by a special act of parliament. With just 995 residents, it didn’t even meet the requirements for incorporation as a village. Still, the pioneers came, a hardy mix of mostly Irish, German, and Scottish settlers. Ever so slowly, Walkerton grew into a mini-hub for the farmers and loggers who braved the long, harsh winters and endured the short, hot summers. To the south and east, the province began its rush forward into the modern era, mostly ignoring the insular town and its hardscrabble inhabitants, who were more than happy to edge forward at their own quiet pace. Occasionally, big-city media did pay attention, such as when the Globe newspaper in Toronto reported on the floods of 1891. Toronto also watched closely in 1928 during a bitterly fought municipal election. The campaign pitted candidates in favour of getting the town’s power from Ontario Hydro, the province’s publicly owned electrical utility, against those who favoured staying with the local Walkerton Electric & Power Company. The company, which had begun supplying water-generated power for night use at the turn of the century, was the forerunner of the public utilities commission that Stan Koebel would one day run.