by Phil Egan

In the middle of the 19th century, there were over 1,000 sawmills operating in Ontario. It had become the normal course of development when settlers began to establish new hamlets and villages. They wanted to build, and that meant they needed a sawmill.

George Durand built the first sawmill in Sarnia shortly after his arrival in 1833, but more would follow. The largest in the town, however, was the Cleveland-Sarnia Sawmill Company. In fact, it was among the largest in the entire province.

Located on the south edge of Sarnia Bay, the sawmill was at its peak of activity in the 1890s, and it was a common sight in those days to see the bay covered in acres of log rafts waiting to be processed and cut into timber by the company’s massive circular saws. Almost every week, a tug would appear in the bay, bringing another raft of timber from Lake Huron.

The timber itself came from the Spanish River area of Georgian Bay. It had been here in 1872 that 5,301 square miles of timber land thought to be inappropriate for farming had been sold on the north shore of Lake Huron by the federal government. Logs would be cut during the winter months along the shores of the Spanish River and branded with each mill’s unique identification. When the spring floods came, the logs would be tossed into the river together to be sorted later, and floated downriver to Lake Huron. At the mouth of the river a boom was stretched and here the logs were herded into one corner, where chutes led to them being directed into each company’s bagging booms. They were then formed into rafts of 3 or 4 million board feet. When a boom held its allotted number of logs, the assembled rafts were then brought down the lake by tugs.

It was a slow process. The massive log rafts would travel at speeds of one mile per hour or less. The rafts carried lights for navigation, and the tugs were equipped with Madoc whistles, their sound said to resemble the wail of a banshee. It was said that the largest raft ever maneuvered down the lake comprised 97,800 logs.

So much logging was carried on in Sarnia Bay that, over the years, bark accumulation and silt became so deep that the bay had to be dredged. Logs ultimately travelled from the bay by means of an overhead to their final destination in the mill’s saw room.

Much of the northern timber, however, was headed for American mills on the Great Lakes – 300 million feet to Michigan mills in 1894 alone. In 1898, however, an act of the Ontario legislature required that logs cut on Crown lands in Ontario had to be manufactured here as well. This was the death knell of the log rafting business and, as the North developed, the mills moved closer to the source of the lumber.

By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, most in southern Ontario had disappeared.