Bronte Harbour

Bronte on Twelve Mile Creek
By 1856, Bronte was a busy Lake Ontario port, exporting wheat, building ships, and developing a thriving commercial fishery and stonehooking industry. The town's population grew to 550. With the coming of the railroad, the harbour's business declined and the population went down to 220.

Bronte was incorporated as a village in 1952. Ten years later, the village and part of the Township of Trafalgar were amalgamated into the Town of Oakville.

Read Andrew Armitage's essay "Bronte On 12 Mile Creek"

The Bronte Harbour Company
Unlike neighbouring Oakville, where by the late 1820s William Chisholm had financed a harbour privately, development of port facilities in Bronte was delayed until the founding of the Bronte Harbour Company.  Led by Samuel Bealey Harrison, a politician, lawyer, and judge, residents of Bronte petitioned the government of Upper Canada to incorporate a company to build a harbour at the mouth of Twelve Mile Creek. After a ten-year struggle to obtain support, the Bronte Harbour Company was founded in 1846.  By 1856, construction of Bronte's newly dredged harbour with two piers and a lighthouse was complete. The village's waterfront was transformed from a shallow marshland, inaccessible from the water, to a harbour with sufficient depth to sustain itself as a thriving Lake Ontario port. Vessels could now gain access to Bronte's gristmills and sawmills.

Read Andrew Armitage's essay "The Bronte Harbour Company"

From Boom to Bust, 1855-1877
During the 1850s, a dramatic increase in international wheat prices made Bronte prosperous as a grain handling port. By the end of the decade, over 300,000 bushels were being exported annually from the harbour.  The boom ended when the Grand Trunk Railway line from Montreal to Sarnia passed north of the village in 1856, taking the grain delivery business away from the harbour. Also, the bottom fell out of the wheat market in 1857. Two of Bronte's three grain warehouses were dismantled and shipped to Toronto and Burlington. The third was converted to a general store.

From 1856 to 1877, Bronte's population dropped from 550 to just over 200. It would remain there until the turn of the century.

Read Andrew Armitage's essay "From Boom to Bust, 1856-1877"

Bronte - A Fishing Village
For nearly a century, commercial fishing was a way of life for the village of Bronte. In 1850, the mouth of Twelve Mile Creek resembled an Atlantic Coast outport. Fishing shanties lined the creek, nets hung on reels drying in the sun, and fish boats waited at the wharf.

Bronte was home to one of the largest fleets of fishing boats on Lake Ontario. By 1900 the fleet numbered twenty-two vessels. Built with overlapping planks (lapstrake), with a movable iron centre-board, many of these sturdy fish boats were built by Bronte's Dalt MacDonald.  The catch of whitefish, lake trout, cisco, and herring was smoked, salted, or packed in ice to be sold fresh. Following World War II, with the Lake Ontario fishery nearing exhaustion, Bronte fishermen finally left the lakes.

Read Andrew Armitage's essay "Bronte - A Fishing Village"

The Stonehookers of Lake Ontario
From the 1830s until after World War I, the Lake Ontario waterfront was busy with men mining the shallow waters for shale. Pried from the lake bottom, the blocks of shale were gathered on barges and then loaded onto stonehooking schooners for delivery to urban markets. Many pre-1910 buildings in Toronto, Oakville and Bronte are built on foundations of shale from the lake bottom.

Bronte harbour was home to a stonehooking fleet, several of them built there by Lem Dorland in the 1880s. Stonehookers were small vessels with a very shallow draft and a schooner rig. They could sail fast in light winds.  Lake Ontario's stonehooking industry flourished until after World War I, when Portland cement largely replaced stone as a building material.

Read Andrew Armitage's essay "The Stonehookers of Lake Ontario" 

Yacht Launching in the 1970s
Between 1960 and 2000 yacht building flourished in Bronte and Oakville. In the 1970s as many as twenty major yachts a year were launched at Bronte Harbour.  Yacht manufacturers C&C, Ontario Yachts, Grampian and Bruckmann worked together with yacht designers such as George Cuthbertson, Mark Ellis and others to create yachts that were launched at Bronte. Up to 67 feet in length, these yachts were built for owners in Europe and North America, including such celebrities as Maestro Herbert Von Karajan.  Most yachts were manufactured in factories near Speers Road and taken by truck to Bronte Harbour. However, many were built at the harbour in a large shed owned by Metro Marine.

Read Bill Harris's essay "Yacht Launching in the 1970s"