Canadian Transport Sourcebook

Chapter VI

AT THE ISLAND

1. The Village

In the summer of 1878 the American passenger steamer Admiral ran aground near Alexandria Bay, N.Y.; her captain and purser went up to Garden Island for help in refioating her. The purser afterwards wrote an account of his visit.

He calls the Island "... the most fascinating spot ever visited. It had an individuality... seemed saturated in traditions and memories... swarthy men, speaking strange tongues,... unusual looking steamers lay at the wharves." He speaks of "the quaint village street" and of the litter of ancient engines, chain, anchors, small boats, masts and spars. He found "... everything testifying to many continuous years of hard work, rough experience, wrecks handled, vast quantities of timber cut, shipped and rafted down the river... by a man of rugged character and strong self-reliance." He speaks of "the simple well-ordered village where employers and workmen dwelt together and in the government of which they co-operated in harmony. "

It is curious, in a country of such vast spaces, that such a tiny spot as "the foot" of Garden Island should have been used so intensively. If the same work had grown up on some mainland area, it must surely have spread much more widely. The whole Island contains only sixty-five acres; all the work (except the rafting and other activities on the water) was crowded into less than a quarter of it, and the houses into a second quarter.

Around "the foot," for hundreds of yards, the whole of the shore-line was hidden under wooden wharves. Prom "the front wharf" (where the ferry-boat landed) out to the east and then up behind the Island, was a series of piers—there were perhaps thirty of them in all. These were connected (from spring until the ice came) by booms built of square pine timber two, three or four sticks in width—and they enclosed some fifty acres of quiet, shallow water where the rafting was done. In the winter, a part of this area was crowded with vessels and steamers, either anchored or made fast to the piers, and frozen in awaiting the spring break-up Outside this rafting and wintering space was "the graveyard," where worn-out wooden vessels rested on the bottom, in various stages of dissolution.

Approaching "the foot" on a summer day, fifty or sixty years ago, timber vessels would be seen moored to the first main pier—the Liverpool Holdfast, it was called while their timber cargoes were unloaded by the steam winches of the capstan-house. Beyond them would be others discharging at "the far capstan. " At the front wharf there might be one or two of the river side-wheelers; to go ashore from the ferry-boat you walked across their decks among the wheel-barrows of the "wooding up" gangs.

Landing on the island—you stepped off the wharf on to the solid rock—you had on your right a double dwelling house (afterwards the store and Post Office) and, beyond that, to the west, the old sail loft with the firm's private lighthouse atop of it. Straight ahead was "the shanty," where the Indians lived, to the left were the bake house, the boiler shop, the great eighty-foot sheer legs, the old store. At the corner of the shanty the road turned right (southwest); on your left were a dwelling house, the joiner shop, machine shop, and jig-saw platform. To your right, just behind the shanty, was the blacksmith shop, and then the open shipyard—open, that is, apart from the vessel on the stocks, probably only being framed, in the summer. Across the shipyard were the later sail loft (which still stands) and the ship carpenters' work-shed; over the latter was the "mould loft" where the "lines" of each new vessel were worked out on the floor to full size from the scale model. Behind the machine shop, down at the beach level, were the withe-machine and the steam power plant. Then came the sawmill, facing the shipyard.

Beyond the mill, on the road, stood the firm's office, a little white box-like frame structure. In very recent years it has become a summer cottage, with a verandah on two of its sides. How mystified would be the ghosts of raft foremen, schooner captains, steamer engineers, revisiting it today looking for "the Governor" or "the Boss."

For many years the office was a single room, broken at the middle of one side by a small brick vault, which, aided by a short counter and a standing desk, divided it into two portions. A second storey, with a second vault (and an attic for storage) were added in the middle years of the business; the inner room, upstairs, was Breck's sanctum—its walls were covered with maps of the firm's oak and pine lands in Ohio and Michigan. The front part, upstairs, was the timber measurer's domain. The desks and filing cabinets were of the very simplest type. Originally the office was heated by a wood-burning box-stove and lighted with candles—afterwards replaced by a "self feeder" for anthracite, and by oil lamps. It is difficult to conceive how so much business could have been done, for so long a time, in such an apparently inadequate building—today's "executives" would demand five or six times as much floor area and furniture. The only material thing in which the place excelled was the beautiful paper of the books of account handmade by Whatman or perhaps the close quarters of the old office, with the timber measurer and his boys droning out size and contents of each piece, and with the Custom House officer working at his Serque Book, were a natural part of the general congestion of activity at the foot of the Island.

Beyond the office, on the other side of the road, were the owners' houses. Breck, and from 1881 "the Boss," lived in the first, "the Governor" in the second; behind it he had a big kitchen garden and some fruit trees. Southeast of the garden, across the width of the Island and on the shore, were "the skids," the area where the cribs¹ were built and shoved off into the water. Beyond garden and orchard, up the road, were the barns four of them, all joined to one another; considerable space was needed for horses and feed, in the days before steam.

Past the barns were the schoolhouse and the ice-house; at the to of the road were the Mechanics Institute (later called Public Library) and the Island's only brick house, built by Angus Cameron, the first owner. It was occupied by a farmer who rented the westerly thirty or forty acres from the arm

All along both sides of the road, from opposite the barns on one side, and from just above them (behind the schoolhouse) on the other side, stood the workmen's little houses. There were also one or two side streets of cottages, off the main road. At intervals, on the westerly side, there were gaps between the houses, to give access to the water. Winter and summer it had to be carried to every house.

The houses were all frame, built in pairs. Their sills rested upon light stone foundation walls in some cases, in others on cedar posts. They had no cellars. From the road they looked very much alike, but at the rear they thrust out a variety of lean-to additions. Indoors, the kitchen was the chief room; and its wood-burning cookstove was the chief source of heat, though all the houses had a second stove. Wood fires die out quickly; when the housewife had been away for some time she was always free to "carry fire"—hardwood coals—from her neighbour's stove. Most of the chimneys were brick, but some houses boasted instead an old rivetted Rue from a discarded lowpressure boiler. Some of the stairs up to the little second storey bedrooms, in these houses, were incredibly narrow and steep.

Once or twice, in the middle years, fire destroyed a number of these little houses. "The Governor" built shields, or fire-stops, which could be run in between the houses to keep a fire from spreading. They were of disused iron plates rivetted together and mounted on low wheels.

At the foot of the Island, every inch of ground not used as shipyard, or for roads, houses, and work-buildings, was piled with cordwood and with rafting materials withes, toggles, floats and traverses. There would be larger quantities in the spring, after the winter's hauling, than in midsummer or autumn.

There was some little community life in the village. The Mechanics Institute was the men's club-room, where an excellent library was available to everyone. The Masonic order had a lodge on the Island. Concerts were held in the schoolhouse. "Doors open at 7 p.m.... admission free," says a programme of April 14th, 1889, which runs to twenty-four numbers, seven of them were songs by "children."

On one occasion their predecessors had sung for Royalty—in August, 1860, when the Prince of Wales (Edward the Seventh) arrived in Kingston harbour from down the river. He did not land; his steamer, the Kingston, anchored, and the Island side-wheeler Hercules went alongside. Several hundred children on board some from the Island, including "the Boss," aged nine—"for half an hour sang songs of welcome which they had practised," says a letter of Breck's to George van Camp at Quebec. He adds that the Hercules was "the only boat to give him a welcome."

Service was held every Sunday evening in the schoolhouse; usually it was conducted by the minister from Wolfe Island, Anglican or Presbyterian, but also, occasionally, by men from Kingston. One of the latter, a Methodist, was in trouble with his superiors in that Church because on a one winter Sunday in 1878 he had so far forgotten his high calling as to skate across to the Island.

All in all, the Island village was a quiet and contented community. Its specialized activities, like its situation, cut it off somewhat from the life of Kingston and the surrounding country, yet the summer took many of the men far up the Lakes and down the river. They did not stagnate. The only periods of real isolation were in the early winter when the new ice was unsafe, and in spring when the heavy ice was breaking up. During these few days, necessary trips to Kingston or Wolfe Island were made in "the iceboat, " a big heavy punt on runners.² There was a rule on the Island, long ago, that the expected arrival of an infant within these doubtful times must be reported to the office, so that the iceboat crew might be warned to be in readiness to go for the doctor.

Barque Garden Island, Ready for Launching, 1877

(At left, steamer Raftsman, rebuilding)

River Barge Hiawatha under Construction, 1895

(On same spot as the Garden Island, above)

2. Shipbuilding

Why was shipbuilding begun as soon as Calvin, Cook and Counter took possession of their first small part of Garden Island in 1886, and eight years before "the Governor" came to live on the Island? There is no record that he had been owner, or part-owner, of any vessel while he was rafting timber from Clayton, N.Y., to Quebec. Timber-making and rafting continued to be the main business of the arm during "the Governor's" life—why shipbuilding, then, from the outset, at the Island?

There were no doubt several reasons. One was that timber could not be loaded through the deck-hatches of a schooner, the long sticks must enter the hold through "ports" in the stern—over them were deck-ports, through the bulwarks of the transom (square) stern, to take on the deckload. The Island's need, that is to say, was for a special type; there was plenty of material continually available, in the timber arriving from up the lake why not build their own vessels to carry their own timbers Another reason was inherent in the move up-river from Clayton; the new place of business was close to Kingston, then an important port, full of the shipping of the period—why not try to share in the general carrying trade? The building of schooners and barges for the Island's own use led easily to building for other owners, and to the building of steamers.

Many of the varied craft launched from the shipyard at Garden Island, or owned by the firm, have already been shown at their different tasks—loading timber on lake shore or in port, towing on lake or river, handling the unwieldy rafts in bad weather. Inevitably this has meant some description of the development of different types, and something about boilers and engines. But, however close the relation of the one to the other, the operation of vessels in commission is wholly distinct from shipbuilding.

Wooden shipbuilding has disappeared from the Great Lakes; the art is still practised in the Maritime Provinces, but not on a great scale. At sea, wooden ships vanished sooner than sailing-ships—Conrad's Narcissus and Mase­field's Wanderer were built of steel. On the Lakes wood was cheap, and was not superseded by steel until steam had long been established. The decline of the art was gradual, but easily seen by comparing a survivor from the Garden Island lake vessels of the 1870's or 1880's with one of the last from the yard, thirty years later. There were differences in model—less refinement of line and detail—and differences in finish dictated by higher wages and poorer wood. Nevertheless the Island's vessels, to the end, were in the true tradition, and the latest of them were among the very last wooden vessels built on the Lakes. During the first Great War, the Shipping Board ordered some wooden ships. A visit to one of them, under construction in 1918, was a sad experience for one who had seen "the real thing."

Among the earliest vessels built at Garden Island were the schooner Queen Victoria, the brig William Penn, the schooner Hannah Counter, the brig Lafayette Cook and the little steamer Raftsman—all before 1841. Early river-barges were the Caroline, the Eclipse and the Glasgow. They must have been tiny craft, for a letter from John H. Greer and Company, of Kingston, June 17th, 1847, orders one from Calvin,. Cook and Company, thus: "Please build us a barge same as Glasgow to be finished by Sept. 10th or at latest Sept. 15th. Price one hundred and fifty pounds, to be paid as the work progresses." Three months to build—the barge can hardly have been more than a big "Durham boat."

In 1859 the barque London came out; she was 134′ by 24′ by 10′ 8″, measuring 340 tons, and was thought by the old-timers of that day to be rather big for the Lakes. "We launched our new vessel, the Plymouth, June 1st, just as Mr. Calvin got ashore here from Quebec—she is a beauty," says a letter of 1854. A later letter—the first part of it was blurred in the copying—gives some details of the Plymouth: "... gunwale 4″ thick, butt bolted; spike throughout 10″ by 5/8″, round, and made by ourselves—ceiling, 2½″ plank, except five bilge strakes 5″ to 6″—keelson cedar, great pains taken to obtain it—best of oak used throughout—all frame-heads oil soaked before covering."

Despite this careful work on the Plymouth, the difference between river barges and lake schooners, as to their hulls at any rate, seems to have been slight. In January, 1851, "the Governor" was trying to trade, for some other craft, a lake schooner which had been "built out of one of our largest class River Barges, she cost us £1,250 Cy., she carries 1,500 barrels on the Lake and 9,000 on the River."

As between steamer and barge, however, there was a real difference. On December 3rd, 1852, Calvin and Cook offered to build for Josiah Blood a steamer hull "109′ Keel, 23′ Beam, and 8′ hold ... in a good and workmanlike manner," by May 1st, 1853, at £6 Cy. per ton "carpenter's measure." Or they would build him a barge hull of the same dimensions for £5 Cy. per ton; the steamer hull, that is to say, cost 20 per cent. more than the barge.

Repair of the Island firm's vessels was always a part of the shipyard work, and in the earlier years repairs were made for other owners also. For instance, February 20th, 1845, a letter from James Pierson guarantees payment by his son, Captain Joseph Pierson, for lengthening, repairing and fitting out his schooner, the General Brock. In May, 1848, the firm was supplying a new centreboard, and "fixing the floor for the stone" in a little vessel—probably a "stone-hooker." In November, 1852, Calvin and Cook, declining a repair job, said that it was "almost impossible to get carpenters ... wages are about double what they were last year." The schooner Omar Pasha, a regular trader to the Island with timber, in November, 1859, paid $90 for a new mast and about $50 for "setting it up." In 1850 the schooner Dolphin had some small repairs done, $21.50.

It was the firm's policy, for very many years, to "lay down" a vessel every year. This meant two things; first that the shipyard was always active, and ready to do the firm's own building and repairs; but second, it meant that buyers had to be found for many of the vessels built. A number of those built for sale were large river barges for the Kingston and Montreal Forwarding Company. Some were given Indian names—Dakotah, Cherokee, Hiawatha; others were named for birds—Thrush, Condor, Lapwing. There may have been twelve or fifteen of them in all; they differed little from the lake schooners in size. Not needing timber-ports, however, they were built with the conventional round stern, and with an open deck-rail which was lower than the closed bulwarks of the lake craft. The earliest of them carried about 25,000 bushels at 9 feet draft, those of later years rather more.

Only one vessel for salt water was built in the shipyard—the barque Garden Island⁵ launched in the spring of 1877 after being nearly two years "on the stocks." She was "all oak frame and planking" and was built "under the inspection of Bureau Veritas to class AI for eleven years." Without question, the Garden Island was the finest product of the shipyard in all its seventy-five years of work . She cost far too much, however, to compete on even terms with the more cheaply built Quebec ships of her day. Yet the Island firm kept her busy for seven years before selling her to Norwegians—carrying her owners' timber from Quebec to Britain was her summer work. The records of the Quebec office are full of correspondence about the Garden Island's cargoes and voyages, especially letters to and from. her captain, William Zealand, and the firm's British agents, Edmiston and Mitchells of Glasgow.

In the early years of the yard, its ship-carpentry was all done by hand. The saw-pit still existed in the 1890's, and was used occasionally, though the steam sawmill with its gang-saws had been in use for many years. Other mechanical helps were the jig-saw, and the band-saw that followed it, which cut various bevels and curves. Still later came compressed air for boring holes and for driving bolt or spike into them. Beside the sawmill was the steambox where the heavy planks were made pliable enough to be forced into the necessary curves, especially at bow and stern.

It is not a little sad to recall the vanished handicraft of wooden shipbuilding—the skilled use of edged tools, the steady eye, the patient fitting, that went to the shaping and setting in place of the great pieces of oak.

The Island yard did not turn out all the small boats which were needed for the firm's lake and river vessels. Many of them were bought in Quebec and carried to Garden Island by the steamers returning after landing the rafts. In the busy years of shipbuilding at Quebec there was a thriving business in boat-building, for new ships, for replacements, and for general use—between ship and shore, for example. (Long ago, when warships of the old North Atlantic squadron visited Quebec each autumn, the boatmen were busy ferrying civilian visitors to and from them in these locally built craft.) One kind of boat used by the Island firm, however, was always built in its own yard—the heavy, stout craft which went down the river with the rafts. Only when running the rapids was "la barge" hauled out on the "cabin dram." These boats could carry twelve or fifteen men.

The sail loft⁶ was not so important to the shipyard after the coming of the lake steamers, and the tall-sparred schooners had become tow-barges—in the days of sail it was all-important. The first sailmaker and rigger was Joseph Dix, a Welshman who came to Garden Island in 1889 to work for "the Governor." Dix's sons followed him in his skilled and interesting trade; the youngest was still with the Island arm down to the end, in 1914, and was in charge of Garden Island itself for many years afterwards.

Besides their work directly for the shipbuilding, the Dix men were the Island's experts in arranging the gear for all heavy lifting or pulling—boilers and engines into or out of steamers, and hauling out vessels for repairs.

As long ago as 1882, nearly thirty years before the last wooden hull was launched from the Island yard, H. A. Calvin was thinking of iron vessels the day of steel ships had not yet come. He wrote to Edmiston and Mitchells, giving them a description of the usual style of lake steam-barge, and asking them to find out whether such a craft, of about 550 tons, could be built of iron on the Clyde and come out to the St. Lawrence under her own power. What would be the cost per ton? Nothing came of it, perhaps tradition was too strong. Later developments showed that "the Boss" was right; the days of the wooden vessel were numbered, on the Lakes, even in the early 1880's.

3. Wrecking

Wrecking and salvage, as one of the Island firm's activities, grew naturally out of shipbuilding, freighting and towing. Any vessel may meet with accident—why not be prepared to succour their own vessels when need arose, and those of other owners as occasion offered?

All through the letter-books there are copies of bills for wrecking. They are addressed in the customary way to "Owners and Underwriters," too often without giving the situation of the accident. When the account was disputed, or when explanations were asked, there are letters which disclose where the work was done. Enough can be traced, however, to show that the Island firm had a big share, for a long period of time, in the marine salvage work done on Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence.

In the busy middle years, 1850 to 1880, there are many offers to take on a small wrecking job for a "lump sum," up to perhaps $1,500, on the "no-cure-no-pay" basis. The firm did a much greater number of jobs in this period than in the next thirty years, but they were of a smaller average size. The little schooners, especially, seem to have got into difficulty very often.

There is an interesting series of letters about the schooner Globe, which went ashore in a snowstorm, mid-December, 1851. (Lake sailors took great risks, a century ago, in their little sailing vessels—mid-December finds almost all the great steamers of today snug in winter quarters.) The Globe had grounded in the Bateau Channel between Wolfe and Simcoe Islands, and within sight of Garden Island; on December 27th "the Governor," after visiting the vessel, wrote to her owner, James Cotton. About 1,000 barrels of her cargo had been got ashore, "I have secured the flour as well as I could" (he wrote), it was safe from wet but not from fire. The vessel is leaking, she ought to be hauled out and caulked—"This we can do for you if you think proper to give us orders." Evidently the orders came, for in January, 1852, "the Governor" had examined the vessel and suggested further work which needed to be done. In April, Calvin and Cook rendered Cotton an account for the repairs, £119 9s. 9d., and said they had drawn upon him for that amount, at four months. No charge was made for storing her cargo in shelter at the Island. In May, the arm was finding cargoes for the Globe, on Cotton's behalf.

Not every job worked out so satisfactorily. There was one in 1857 for which, apparently, the Island arm received but £440 in settlement of an account for £1,664 against the propeller J. W. Brooks, and that only out of the sale of her cargo.

A serious wrecking effort which failed was the attempt to reheat the side-wheeler Grecian, ashore in the Split Rock rapids in the summer of 1868. The account against the steamer, $2,007,50, was largely for salvage of cargo. Thirty years later the diminished wreck of the Grecian, obstructing the swift heavy current like a great submerged rock, still created its own set of waves in the Split Rock—they were not pointed out to steamer passengers.

In 1872 Calvin and Breck had two considerable wrecking assignments in the river below Montreal. In June they raised H. and A. Allan's steamer France, sunk five miles below Montreal, and in September released the steamer Vicksburg, stranded below Quebec. The ownership of the Vicksburg has not been traced, but the name would indicate American registry. The Island side-wheeler Wellington took men and pumps to both; the bills for wrecking services, as copied into the letter-book, were about the same—$10,944 and $10,516 respectively.

A long "catalogue of the ships" might easily be made from the record of the Island arm's wrecking work The propeller Lake Michigan was pulled off the rocks above the Galops rapids in August, 1879; the side-wheel passenger steamer Corsican, sunk in South Bay, was raised and brought into Kingston in November, 1875; the Corsican was also released from Duck Island in September, 1892; the side-wheeler Magnet, aground in one of the rapids, was released in June, 1894—apparently this was a rather difficult bit of work. There were numerous rescues of schooners aground at the entrances to Kingston harbour. And so on, to the end of the chapter.

The wrecking pumps which "the Governor" invented were worked by the "walking beam" of a side-wheeler's engine "a moderate sized engine will carry six of them," he says in a letter to the Secretary of the Navy at Washington.⁷ The pumps were 3′ square, built of wood, and lined with iron plates for the 7 feet where the plunger travelled In later years they were superseded, first by rotary steam pumps and these in turn by the modern centrifugal type.

Another wrecking appliance of "the Governor's" was a set of strong tightly-caulked oak boxes, about 20′ by 10′ by 6′, which were allowed to fill alongside a sunken vessel, then fastened to her hull and pumped out, to raise her from the bottom. The theory was good, but the boxes did not work well in practice, and were discarded.

Yet how interesting it might be to modern salvage engineers, if some of this old-time amateur apparatus could be brought back and seen at its work.

4. Amateur Engineering

"We have a horse power withe machine, just started, that twists withes very fast ... it saves the labour of as many as twelve men, in my opinion," says a letter of August 26th, 1854, to George van Camp of the Quebec office. Up to this time, the withes had been softened for use by manpower, by rolling them up on drums between pairs of six-foot wheels such as were used for steering the river-steamers. No drawings or description of the "horse power withe machine" have survived, but it remained in use for some twenty-five years, when it gave way to a steam-driven machine invented by one of the Island's amateur engineers. This machine—or machines, for from the 1880's there was a pair of them—ceased work only when the rafting came to an end in 1914.

It would be difficult to describe this steam withe-machine in any detail, elaborate drawings would be needed. Suffice it to say that the machine did three things simultaneously—it gripped the withe at the butt, twisted it (to break open the fibre) and wound it around a revolving drum which at the same time moved towards the revolving jaws which held the butt. When the steam was cut off, the withe, as it unrolled, whipped violently back in an attempt to regain its original straight line. Many a visitor, mechanically inclined, has watched this unique machine at its task—fascinated.

The picket-machine was another special contrivance of the later years; it must have saved an enormous amount of hand labour, for thousands of pickets⁸ were used each season in the rafting. Each was.made from a 30-inch length of hardwood sapling, about two inches in diameter. This was chopped to a square at one end, which was then set in a rapidly revolving holder. A knife in a frame (something like a giant pencil-sharpener, except that it did not cut to a point) was brought down over the whirling stick, paring it smoothly to about an inch and a half diameter almost to the butt, where a lump was left between the round stem and the square end—as it were the head of a great wooden bolt.

The holes into which these pickets were driven (in the floats and traverses of the timber-cribs) were made by another local device, the steam "boring-machine." Its belt-driven auger was at the end of a long, jointed, moveable arm a kind of crude forerunner of the modern portable drill driven by compressed air or electricity.

Unloading timber at the Island was slow work in the early years. A letter of Calvin and Cook, October 30th, 1851, tells a timber-man that two more capstans would be erected during the winter, making seven in all, with two horses on each, and all working eleven hours a day. They hope that "no vessel will be under the necessity of lying here more than one day." Like the horse-driven withe-machine, these horse-capstans were used until the 1870's, when they were replaced by steam winches—but the buildings containing the steam gear were called " capstan houses" down to the last years of the business. It is unlikely that these horse-capstans and steam winches differed much from those used at other places where timber was unloaded—at Clayton, N.Y., for example, but one application of the steam gear was perhaps unique. In the 1890's the firm built three or four flat floating boxes, about thirty or forty feet square by six feet deep and installed on each a small boiler and a pair of winches—the whole affair was called, oddly enough, a "pontoon." These mobile machines were used at times for unloading vessels, but their chief use was in loading the cross-tier and the top-tier of drams of pine timber.⁹

The half-mile frontage of wharves, and the twenty-odd piers, at the foot of Garden Island and behind it to the south-east, were not remarkable as engineering work. There has been almost nothing left of them, for many years past. They were all of wood, usually of the "floats" used for the rafting cribs; they were built in the winter and sunk through the ice, tier by tier, with heavy blocks of limestone. Their unseasoned wood, above the water, suffered quickly from the weather, they needed much repair.

"The Governor" tried to stop erosion of the south-west shore of the Island by building several hundred feet of his usual stone-loaded open pier-work, just outside the beach line. It was a failure, of course, for the wave motion passed through it the erosion was stopped in later years by revetting the banks with small boulders.

It has already been said that none of these wooden piers could have been at all permanent,¹⁰ and that long life was not expected of them. The single exception to this rule was the outside pier of the long breakwater which sheltered the main deep-water wharves from the westerly gales and from the ice-shoves in the spring. This pier was very solidly built of square timber carefully fitted together. "The Governor" himself probed the limestone bottom the water is some thirty feet deep and designed the lower tiers of timber-work to fit its irregularities. Except for its upper timbers, tom away by the ice in recent years, this pier still stands, and the water around i't is still a haunt of black bass.

One very small bit of permanent engineering work, at Garden Island, has been the source of many questions in recent years. At various strategic points—in what was once the shipyard, and near the main wharves, for instance—there are to be seen heavy wrought iron rings, ten or twelve inches in diameter, held by stout eye-bolts sunk four or five feet into the solid limestone, and set in molten lead—"lead in the rock forever," as Job desired. These were used for anchoring the horse-capstans to "haul out" a vessel for repair, for holding the guy-ropes of the hoisting-mast beside a vessel under construction, and for other similar need of a good hold, or "holt" as the workmen would have said.

Boilers, engines and winches, for lake and river steamers and for use on the Island, make up the bulk of the engineering work in the story of the business. Its beginnings are difficult to trace, but the first of it was probably repair and maintenance work for the firm's earliest steamers.

However, an order given by Calvin and Cook in August, 1851, to Frothingham and Workman of Montreal, would seem to show that the Boiler Shop had already become a busy place. Eight tons of plates for boiler "shells," two tons for Ranging, and several hundredweight of rivet iron, were not being bought for small repair work.

There is no evidence that the firm ever built a complete engine for a side-wheel steamer, but it is plain from the records that something more than just repair was often done. (It should be said here that there was no foundry on the Island; all castings were bought, chiefly from Davidson and Doran, afterwards The Kingston Foundry.) More than once, the boiler and engine of a side-wheeler were removed, put into order, and installed in a new Island-built hull. Sometimes a new boiler was built, and only the engine re-used. These side-wheel engines were simple machines. They were driven by low steam-pressure, their motion was slow, and their cumbrous parts were very loosely knit, as compared with modern engines. The engineer of an Island side-wheeler, in the 1860's, was able to bring the steamer home, when the crankpin of the engine broke, by fitting a temporary one made from a piece of hardwood.

When steam succeeded sail on the Lakes there was an inevitable increase in the bulk of work done in both the Island's Boiler and Machine Shops. Not only so, but the quality of the work itself ceased to be "amateur" and became equal to the best that was being done elsewhere. Many small boilers and steam-winches were built for handling timber at the Island and on the lake vessels. In 1894, a fore-and-aft compound engine of some 500 H.P. was built for the arm's new screw-wheel river tug, the Reginald—later sold to the Imperial Oil Company and by them to the Waldie lumber firm. A few years later a much larger engine, triple expansion, was built for the lake steamer India, launched at Garden Island in 1899. These and other engines were completely successful in operation, but the boilers which drove them were ordered elsewhere—the Island firm, in the last years, built more engines than boilers.

For a few years Garden Island could boast of its own railway line; from a point at "the foot" it ran for a few hundred yards up the island among the piles of rafting material. The old schooner Denmark was fitted with tracks and ferried over cars of withes, traverses and floats from the railway sidings in Kingston. The saving made in handling the materials was much less than had been expected, and this "car-ferry" idea was given up. A little horse-drawn flat-car continued to use the tracks for moving heavy gear about—horses had been used also to move the full-size flat-cars.