Timber men wrecked county bridge in 1863

The following is a re-print of a past column by former Advertiser columnist Stephen Thorning, who passed away on Feb. 23, 2015.

Some text has been updated to reflect changes since the original publication and any images used may not be the same as those that accompanied the original publication.

Over the last two weeks this column has covered the history of timber drives on the Grand River, an activity that ended a century ago. During the logging days there were conflicts with other users of the river.

In most cases of conflict, the situation was resolved amicably. Millers who owned dams usually provided a slide so that timber could be floated past the dam easily. Indeed, often flour mill owners conducted a sideline in saw milling, and therefore were in sympathy with the concerns of lumbermen.

Bridges were a different matter. Abutments, if too close together, could cause floating logs to jam, creating a situation dangerous to sort out, and one which frequently resulted in damage to the bridge, deliberate or otherwise. Even worse were bridge piers in the middle of a stream.

Municipalities and bridge builders soon realized that improperly placed piers could also cause difficulty with ice jams, and that piers were something to be avoided altogether if possible if they wanted the spans to survive spring floods. The reduction in impediments to the lumbermen were a side benefit.

Still, there were cases of confrontation that wound up in court. With case law in such matters complicated and somewhat ambiguous, lawyers could earn substantial fees as those cases dragged on. 

In general terms, the first user of a piece of river possessed rights that had to be observed by other, subsequent users. At Elora and Fergus, dams and bridges were in place long before the log drives began. Upstream, quite the reverse was the case.

In Wellington, the biggest legal battle involving timber men began fairly early, in the spring of 1863. During the previous summer, with a grant from Wellington County council, the townships of Amaranth and Garafraxa built a bridge over the Grand River near Waldemar on the town line. Amaranth was then a part of Wellington, and Garafraxa had not yet been divided into East and West. The road across the bridge was not then a major one, but it became so subsequently, as provincial Highway 9 and later County Road 109.

Though no engineering details of that 1862 bridge survive, it seems to have been built cheaply, with at least one centre pier. During the spring timber drive in April 1863, the bridge caused major problems for the men running the timber drive. Frustrated with the resulting log jam, the crews chopped away at the bridge and succeeded in pulling it down. 

Those in charge of the crews said nothing. They seemed to be peeved that the township councils never consulted them about the design of the bridge. They believed they were well within their rights, having conducted log drives out of the Luther Marsh for several consecutive years.

Naturally, there was trouble. Several settlers, who were in the habit of using the bridge to get to and from Orangeville, took the matter up with warden George Elliott. He added the matter to the agenda of the county council meeting held during the first week of June 1863. The county’s road and bridge committee discussed the matter and recommended council commence a legal suit against the timber men.

Interestingly, the perpetrator of the destruction of the bridge was not a fly-by-night operator, but James Wilson, owner of the Monkland Mills in Fergus, who was then operating a sawmill across the river from his flour and oatmeal mill. Wilson was well connected and influential. He had a solid legal opinion that, given the circumstances of the affair, he was within his legal rights to destroy the bridge.

The county began legal proceedings against Wilson and the other timber men, but pursued the matter cautiously on the advice of county solicitor Donald Guthrie. Though no documents from him have survived, it appears that Guthrie believed the county’s case to be weak.

The case did come to court, but was several times postponed, once for over six months because a key witness was out of the country. The 1864 county council, with William Leslie in the warden’s chair, reviewed the case, and decided to obtain a legal opinion from John Hillyard Cameron, who was arguably the top legal mind in the province at that time. Cameron argued many of the important criminal and civil cases during the 1860s, and had an active career in politics as well.

County council wanted a clear basis for their case, and a general opinion, as expressed in the motion by council, “as to the extent of the powers possessed by parties engaged in driving lumber upon the Grand River, to injure or destroy bridges or dams erected upon such river.”

Evidently, county councillors feared that similar cases might arise in the future.

County councillors received Cameron’s opinion in time for their meeting in June 1864. (In the 1860s county council usually met only three times per year.) Unfortunately, that document has not survived, and there is not even a summary in any of the council minutes or newspaper accounts of the meeting.

Nevertheless, it seems that Cameron perceived the county’s case as weak. The county referred his opinion on to the councils of Amaranth and Garafraxa. It is also possible that Cameron had advised that the suit should be brought by the townships, not the county. Though built in part by a county subsidy, the bridge was in fact jointly the property of the two townships.

As for the lawsuit, it drops from the historical record late in 1864. County council minutes for the June 1864 session note that the suit had not been decided, and would be heard in the fall of 1864. But there is no record of it at that session.

The obvious conclusion is that Wilson, the other timber men and the townships worked out some sort of compromise over the summer and fall of 1864. Legal bills were piling up for everyone, and the settlers in the area were growing impatient after more than a year with no bridge.

At the county council meeting of January 1865, councillors approved the granting of $300 “for the purpose of rebuilding the bridge between Garafraxa and Amaranth, destroyed by lumbermen in 1863, and that the Reeve of Amaranth and the Deputy Reeve of Garafraxa are authorized to proceed with contracts and construction of said bridge, and report the expenditure of the money to this council.”

The design of the replacement bridge took into account the fact that timber would be floated down the Grand each spring for the foreseeable future.

The case is also important in that it caused the county to be more involved in the construction of bridges it subsidized on municipal boundary roads. That would eventually lead to a full committee to deal exclusively with boundary line bridges.

It is regrettable that so little documentation has survived on this most interesting case from the days when portions of Wellington were still a wilderness, and prominent businessmen felt comfortable taking the law into their own hands to defend what they saw as their rights.

*This column was originally published in the Wellington Advertiser on Nov. 10, 2006.