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Sawmills on the Sixteen: by Deborah LerechThe first order of business for any settlement in Upper Canada was the construction of a sawmill to aid in clearing valuable farmland. In the generation before the founding of Oakville the government often aided the settlers to complete mills. Isaiah Skinner's proposal in 1799 is a perfect example. In order to build a new grist and saw mill on the Humber River at his own expense of £1500-2000, he requested that the government "furnish millstones, iron and nails and a set of good saws". 1 Loyalist settlements in Midland, Niagara, Home, Gore, London, Western and Newcastle Districts were in development from the earliest days of Upper Canadian settlement after the American Revolution(1783-1800). For the increased population who needed farmland to grow produce the mill was a necessity. There was an economic basis to the practice of milling lumber as well. The Upper Canadian farmer followed "precedent by seeking a return from the timber cleared off his land". 2 Although many trees were simply girdled and left to die, others were purposely cut and sent to the saw mills. Rafts were often used as vehicles for the transport of other commodities also 3 including the pot and pearl ashes that were produced from burning excess, unneeded wood from the forests. 4 In the decade before 1800, Upper Canada was exporting potash as well as barrel staves, if they were not already exporting wheat. 5 When the Napoleonic Wars closed the European ports from which Britain also obtained lumber, "fresh impetus was give to the Canadian trade". 6 However, by the time that Chisholm bought his land, the Canadian lumber trade was already strong. 7 On the Mississauga lands that were yet to be purchased at the north end of Lake Ontario, no mills were in construction at the end of the eighteenth, nor at the beginning of the nineteenth, century. 8 Unlike York (Toronto), in the Home District, which used the entire output of its 106 mills by 1830, Trafalgar had no mills before Chisholm's intervention in the late 1820s. 9 The sawmill in any town was most often started by one of the "more affluent of enterprising settlers," and the mill "was the nucleus from which many a village and town grew". 10 The building of Oakville's grist and sawmill began during the winter of 1827-28 with the construction of a dam. A dam was an essential part of the construction of a mill. The best time to build a dam was in winter when the water was low. From records at Pickering it can been seen that in that year the water was especially low in creeks throughout the region; so low, in fact, it forced many mills to cease grinding altogether. 11 The site William Chisholm chose for the mill was the "head of navigation on the Sixteen, where the rapids end and the water runs deep for about a mile before entering Lake Ontario". 12 In 1830 the sawmill went into production. Stone from the river, lumber, as well as all the other parts had to be brought in by ship. The average water wheel was approximately twenty-four feet high and "was made to revolve by the weight of the water falling upon it from above." Attached to the wheel was "a revolving shaft which extended to the top of the building. All the machinery in the three-storey mill was run by attaching it by leather belts to this shaft". 13 The importance and pre-eminence of the mill can be seen in context to the next closest mill site on Bronte Creek, which was purchased by Joseph Hixon in 1826, but was not developed until 1837. 14 By the late 1830s there were four independent mills in addition to Chisholm's along the Sixteen; "wherever a meandering stream could be made to turn a water-wheel, a sawmill soon appeared". 15 East and west of the Sixteen settlers erected sawmills and gristmills. As a result of Chisholm's early resourcefulness however, the development of this area proceeded much more quickly than that of his counterparts' lands elsewhere in Halton County. The timber that was removed from the area around Oakville in the 1830s and 1840s was in high demand. Building projects as well as shipbuilding, especially white pine for masts, and all manner of household goods including barrels required wood. The forest around Oakville was, as the name suggests, made up of white oak as well as pine. Red and white pine were just as useful, especially in the shipyards. Oakville was "in the heart of the white pine forests" and white pine was used for goods "from matches and venetian blinds to shipmasts for which it was extremely suitable". 16 White pine was also well adapted to shipbuilding as well as heavy construction work, particularly construction undertaken near or under water. 17 Barrel staves made of oak, in comparison to the large scale projects made with pine, are themselves "major products which are often underestimated in secondary sources". 18 Barrel staves' usefulness came from their manufacture into different sizes--West Indies, standard, and pipe. 19 Oakville's barrel staves were sent to England and then sent from there to the West Indies for the sugar trade. On the east back of the Sixteen at "the curve south of the mills" a "wooden slide was built, down which staves were slid one by one onto the decks of schooners". 20 In the middle of the 1830s the United States began to purchase large quantities of "the secondary product of the timber industry, sawn lumber". 21 In Trafalgar Township "the large timber was coming to an end, and with it the stave industry." In 1840 more than "31,000 cubic feet of pine and oak timber went out of the Port of Oakville, but five years later only a little above 3,000 feet was exported. Thereafter none went out". 22 In Oakville, as in most other parts of the province, lumbering was, or soon became, subsidiary to agriculture. 23 The demand for sawn lumber, however, continued with the introduction of a railway in conjunction with the Erie Canal in the 1840s. The US demanded mostly sawn lumber which resulted in an increase in the number of sawmills in Upper Canada. Later, as British preference for Canadian lumber ended and as Britain turned to free trade, the American market began to become more accessible. In conjunction with this change, square timber making dwindled and the sawmill began to prevail everywhere. 24 It is true that the heart of a nineteenth century town in Upper Canada was the mill, even in the backwoods where there was no connection to a large body of water. Though Oakville was on the lake and had access to the shipping routes directly, the local importance of the mill to the early development and prosperity of the town is as important as the harbour that would ultimately be the symbol of the town. Bibliography Footnotes
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