Dowling

Dowling
The last flats before the Cambrian Shield

The name

John Francis Dowling

• son of Irish immigrants
• born in 1851 at Lanark County, Canada West
• married James Bonfield's daughter Elizabeth
• became a Liberal MP 1883-86 and 1890-94 - same position as James Bonfield had in Renfrew South from 1875 - 83

Somewhere on the traders river
a fort rises.

Typical wire
from one trader to another,
---
Follow the Ottawa to Lake Nipissing
then hike north.
Or follow the French river
to Georgian Bay then go north
to the North Channel of Lake Huron.
Find a good guide and he'll
take you up the smaller rivers
all the way to Stobie Falls
then to Dowling or Larchwood
via Vermillion Lake.

Make sure you have your
bear grease or you will
die of bug bites !!!
 

Bonfield was Ireland born. He immigrated in 1848 and worked for the lumber merchant John Egan. Then he set up his own lumber store and played politics.

John Egan was 19 years old in 1830 when he came to Aylmer, Lower Canada. He came there to learn the lumber trade in the settlements that were rising along old Algonquin First Nations territory. Ottawa didn't exist then. Bytown was just another settlement like Aylmer in the surrounding valley. Bytown would become Ottawa. Aylmer itself had been named after a British Governor of Canada at about the same time Egan came to Canada.

Likely, long before the Europeans came along, the Ottawa Nation, keepers of the trades according to the ancient Council of three fires treaty, came up this river many times to trade with the Algonquians. The traders river became the Ottawa river and Bytown became Ottawa. Aylmer and Hull were just suburbs of Ottawa.

Much of the commercial lumber industry rising in the Ottawa Valley in the early 1800's was the work of early American business men from Massachusetts. One of them was Philemon Wright.

Typical small sawmill - 1954
Somewhere between Lake Nippising
and Larchwood - Dowling

Egan learnt how to trade lumber with the Wright's then set up shop in Bytown. He partnered up with a son of Philemon Wright when he got into the steamship business. Together, Ruggles Wright and Egan moved merchandise up and down the Ottawa river. Every big time trader of the day wanted a piece of the railway action so he also got into railroads. Egan was associated to the Bytown and Prescott Railway which opened up markets on the St Lawrence river which connected the Ottawa Valley and river to the Midlands. That railway was taken over by Canadian Pacific Railway in 1884 while CPR was expanding its railroad across Canada. The Ottawa river dumps into Lake Nipissing where Worthington took CPR to St Anne des pins, aka Sudbury. By 1885 the Chelmsford Station was active. At about the same time the CPR Sault line was being completed. The Larchwood, aka Dowling Station would be the next CPR stop after Chelmsford once the CPR connected.

The north had opened up and the same traders came on the railroad to work the economy of the north.

In Chelmsford and Larchwood, these merchants and industrialists, were now in Ojibwa territory. However even before the Europeans came along the Ojibwa were not always alone in these vast white pine forests spotted with dozens of lakes. The Ojibwa would have been visited many times by the Cree to the north and the Algonquians of the south. Most of those visits would have been friendly and meant as ways of making life better by bonding through trade.

Some of the Algonquians and the Cree stayed. Most of the European immigrants also stayed and kept on trading whatever they could turn over to make a buck.

It is the way Dowling, aka Larchwood, aka Rheaume's Flats came to be. At first it was a lumber village. Then it was a mining camp with a trading post and a post office likely situated in the railroad station where the old postmaster or factor could send morse codes over the telegraph lines to partners of partners scattered all over the continent and all over the world.

If you can't get the wood pass the falls
you build a lumber slide or timber crib.
c. 1901 at Chaudière Falls.
source - Wikimedia Commons

That's Progress

When trees are like hair on a monkey...
Shave the monkey.
Build an economy.

I can just imagine that James Stobie is sitting at the Larchwood Station and dictating a message to the factor postmaster. That message will reach Violet Stobie who is postmaster at a similar rail station somewhere near Washington, California and the Pacific ocean. Ironically enough, as Stobie finishes his cup of coffee and is leaving to go back to his claims along the Vermillion river, he bumps into Colonel Gordon who is coming into Larchwood to send a message to FW Bradley in Dakota or to O (Ogden?) B Gordon, the mercantile banker, in Nevada City.

But that is just imagination at work. The truth is beyond me.

There were a few pioneering days sawmills in Dowling. One of them was run by the Thompson's. The other Larchwood sawmill was run by the Wilson's. There were also a few of them in Chelmsford. The Chew's and the Coyne's were the sawmill operators there.

Most of these people were from the Midland and Prescott area where the competition for control of the lumber industry was fierce and where another Gordon was at one time running for his life away from Drummond Island and towards Penetanguishene, aka Gordon's Point.

So who were the Thompson's and the Wilson's ?