Real Talk!

In 1956, the Dominion Tar and Chemical Company of Montreal (Domtar) merged with the Howard Smith paper company of Trenton, owner of 40,000 acres in North Hastings county, including parts of Marmora, Madoc, Tudor, Lake, Limerick and Wollaston townships, around the original village of Gilmour. This merger had in its control, a block of land, consisting of about 65,000 acres on the Canadian Shield, that became known as the Gilmour Freehold.

It all began in the 1830s, when the Gilmour Brothers logging company of Trenton, Ont., was granted a mass of acreage in Eastern Ontario, reaching into Algonquin Park. For the following 50 years, the company took all of the pine (& other valuable timber) north of today's Highway 7 and floated them to back to Trenton- marking the beginning of the Trent Canal System.

By 1888, the Gilmour company employed 600 loggers working year-round. Up to 800 were employed in the mill, producing lumber, doors, windows, shutters, cheese boxes, nail kegs, baskets, lath and pickets. Before the wood ran out, they were annually exporting 19 000 hardwood and pine doors to the U.S. and Europe, as well as 75 million board feet of lumber.

By the turn of the century, the woods of Eastern Ontario were littered with slash and debris from the logging operations. This became fuel for the major forest fires that ravaged the land in 1891, 1905 and 1912.

In the early 1850s, the government tried to promote settlement in this desolate area by building the Hastings settlement road from Belleville to Bancroft. The road took many years and dollars to navigate the ridges and small lakes and streams in the region- not to mention the rocks and swamps.

The Loyalist settlers found that the 50-acre Crown grants contained little fertile land, barely enough to sustain feed for their cattle. No more than fifty years later, there was little sign that any settlement had ever taken place. Abandoned homesteads dotted the landscape and would succumb to the fires or become overtaken by the forest or flooding.

Come 1900, the International Nickel Company took over the land, for the mineral leases. They gave the above-ground rights to small sawmill operators who made packing crates and ammunition boxes for World War I. The minerals were not as abundant as first thought and the mines were destined to an early closing. The Central Ontario Railway, from Picton to Bancroft, (built to service the mines)also disappeared.

Domtar has been rehabilitating the property for a number of years and the land is productive again, today.