IDRA HISTORY

There are no sites along coastline equal to Inverhuron

By ANDREW ARMITAGE
Special to The Kincardine News

Inverhuron Bay once considered safest harbour in area.
Standing on the boardwalk overlooking Inverhuron Bay on an August day, it is hard to imagine that this shallow body of blue water dominated by breakers was ever called the safest harbour from the Detroit River to the Fishing Islands.
Still, hundreds of happy campers swim there while sailboats and motor launches bob about off shore.
Get out a map of Ontario and take a look at the Huron Shore, those several hundred kilometres from Point Edward to Chief’s Point at Sauble Beach. Run your finger north, pausing at Grand Bend, Bayfield, Goderich, Kincardine, Port Elgin, and Southampton. Can you imagine along that inhospitable shoreline a bay of sufficient size, protected from the wind, and free of reefs and shoals to allow a fully rigged schooner to ride out a storm?
In the early years of navigation on Lake Huron, the eastern shore was marked by rocks, shoals and shallow water. Navigation was difficult with many wrecks and lives lost, especially when the wind rose out of the southwest, pounding vessels to pieces, schooners and steamers that ventured too close to land. And yet, the waters of the lake were the main highways for the scattered settlements that began to dot the coast in the middle of the 19th century.
The lake and connecting waterways were the lifelines for settlements. Long before the first rough roads were carved out of the bush, vessels connected coastal villages and towns, hauling passengers, mail, dry goods, mill machinery and even livestock between ports. Beginning in the late 1850s, a series of lighthouses began to appear, lighting up the coast, warning of obstacles or offering a welcome to the questionable safety of a harbour.
Still, the light stations at Point Clark and on Chantry Island, the Goderich light standing high on a bluff, or the harbour lighthouses at Kincardine and Port Elgin did little to stem the loss of ships and shipping. What was needed was a Harbour of Refuge, a government sanctioned and funded, breakwater-protected and well engineered pool of safety that would allow even the largest ship to find peaceful waters on a stormy night.
We spent nearly a week early in August, camped at Inverhuron Provincial Park where daily I walked the beach or swam in the rockstudded bay, either from the sand beach or off limestone pavement. And while walking the wrack line where the winds of winter drive flotsam ashore, I found old timbers and planks, evidence that once long ago, ships came to distress along Inverhuron Bay.
When the sun grew too hot, I sat at our picnic table reading Bill Kearns’ Ghost Ports of South Bruce (1998), a lively account of life along Bruce County’s southern coast. And there I found that in 1858, a civil engineer named Charles Lee noted, “Within the last nine years there have been sixteen schooners and four steamers lost on this shore, in several instances with their crews, which might in all probability have been prevented had a Harbour of Refuge existed.”
The term “Harbour of Refuge” resounded with the citizens of any potential port on the Canadian Great Lakes. In the 19th century, that designation came from the federal government along with the funds needed to create such a basin of safety. Ports along unprotected shores such as Lake Huron competed with each other for money to build piers and breakwaters, expensive man-made shelters from storms.
And what better place for a Harbour of Refuge than Inverhuron Bay? The bay was described in 1856 as “of considerable width at the mouth, and either extremity has a reef running out into the lake — these reefs afford some shelter from the north and south winds, and we understand that one of the plans of the formation of a harbour was to lay down a breakwater across the mouth of the bay, leaving entrances at its northern and southern extremities.”
With railways and improved roads looming, port boosters such as those at Inverhuron launched a campaign to secure funds for a Harbour of Refuge. Inverhuron had already benefitted from government largesse, spending over $15,000 to build a dock over 500 feet into 20 feet of water. Its remains can still be found just south of the Little Sauble River in the form of old rock cribs and water-washed timbers.
In 1858, the Scottish engineer Sandford Fleming surveyed Inverhuron Bay for the Board of Public Works. His report was positive stating, “and in view of the importance of a safe refuge, easy access for vessels during adverse winds, I am strongly of the opinion that it would justify even a large expenditure as a Provincial undertaking.” The estimated cost would be 17,000 pounds sterling.

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revised 2010 Sept 1