Around a century ago, wildfire raged through resinous slash left by pine loggers in the northeast quarter of Croft Township – now a western outlier of the Municipality of Magnetawan – preparing a seedbed for blueberries, nature’s first-aid treatment in healing such scorched and rocky landscapes.
Soon, “Poverty Bay,” the name of a backwater of the Magnetawan River close to the blueberry rocks, became the rallying cry for berry pickers throughout central Parry Sound District. People converged on the area laden with baskets, milk pails and wash boilers to reap nature’s blue bounty. They came by horse and buggy, in wagons and in automobiles. Most pickers reached the blueberry rocks via East Poverty Bay Road, which branches north off Highway 124 – as it was then configured – three miles east of Ahmic Harbour. However, settlers in the upper reaches of the Chapman Valley, came in by the back door, an east-west wagon road partly traced today by the Chapman Dump Road.
It was by this route that, on Monday, August 16, 1932, Manley Johnson set off for the Poverty Bay blueberry rocks driving a team and wagon belonging to farmer William Harrison. Johnson, like many other young men during the Great Depression, “worked around” the community wherever he could find employment for a day or a month. With him in the wagon were his employer’s daughter, Ada Harrison, and 13-year-old Elva Hall, recently arrived for a visit with the Harrisons. Elva’s mother died when Elva was six, and now she lived with foster parents, Mr. and Mrs. Emil Culin, of Arnstein. The Harrisons had picked blueberries two days earlier, and on returning home inadvertently left a 10-quart milk pail full of berries behind. The primary purpose of the Monday trip was to retrieve the pail, but also to harvest more fruit to put down against the coming winter. Young Elva Hall eagerly accepted the invitation to join in a popular adventure of the day, an excursion to the blueberry rocks.
Today, the memory of that expedition remain indelibly stamped in the memory of Elva (Hall) Hicks, and she shared the details this summer, when I drove up to Chapman Valley to meet her.
It was bumpy wagon ride to the blueberry rocks, Elva recalls, and “quite a little jaunt,” of three miles, if not more.
The road home would be longer, and decidedly harder.
Soon after lunch, Elva became separated from the other pickers. When she went to dump her basket of berries into the centrally placed pails, they weren’t where she thought they should be. The little girl was lost. And she was a little girl, “slight and delicate,” as one newspaper reporter would later describe her.
“To tell you the truth,” Elva says, “I didn’t think I was lost. I thought if I just kept going I could get back to where I was.”
Certain that the pails must be somewhere just ahead, she walked all Monday afternoon, and at dusk plunged onward, the way lighted by a full moon rising at her back. Early the following morning, Elva saw a break in the forest ahead, a clearing in which, bathed in the light of the harvest moon, stood a schoolhouse.
This was the Maple Island School, at the junction of the Great North Road and Labrash’s Road. Not a place Elva had ever seen, and certainly nothing like where those all-important blueberry pails were left.
“I didn’t know that vicinity,” Elva says today. “So I turned around and went back, and the rest of the time I just circled around.”
The rest of the time amounted to two more days and nights of wandering.
Looking at the accompanying map, there is no disputing the places where Elva became lost and the Maple Island schoolhouse, where she eventually found her way out of the bush. Also indisputable is the fact that 10 miles of unbroken wilderness separated these two points. But did the child cover that distance in the first 16 or so hours, nearly half of it by night, as she told newspaper reporters in 1932, and told me again this summer?
If she did, she must have happened upon an abandoned east-west logging road soon after she left the blueberry rocks and entered the deep woods.
In the 1920s, loggers returned to southern Ferrie Township to extract yellow birch and hemlock trees passed up by pine lumbermen half a century earlier. Their sawmills were located to the west, at Maple Island and Ardbeg, so “cadge roads” servicing their logging camps would logically have run eastward from the Maple Island vicinity. Elva’s story offers three pieces of evidence suggesting that she found one of these soon after becoming lost, and stuck to it.
She remembers coming upon “some shacks” along the way, obviously an abandoned lumber camp. But with porcupines in residence and the odour of skunk hanging heavy in the air, she hurried on past. Then there were the brambles. Elva emerged from the bush with arms and legs badly scratched and her thin summer dress ripped to ribbons by blackberry bushes, plants that turn old logging roads into thorny obstacle courses.
Finally, even if Elva is mistaken and it really took three days to walk from the blueberry rocks to Maple Island she still needed some kind of path in order to negotiate the maze of swamps, windfalls, watercourses, gullies and precipices barring the way.
Word of the lost child flashed around the district as fast as rural party lines could deliver the alarming news. Community leaders organized search parties, and an army of searchers — as many as 500 according to news reports — descended on the woods. At Dunchurch, Carson Mateer, the United Church minister, raised a platoon of woodsmen and farmers that included my father and our hired man. Sometime later, Mateer told about it in a letter to a fellow clergyman, Rev. John Firmin.
“At 6:30 the next morning about 65 men were on hand around Billie Todd’s place on the North Road above the bridges at Maple Island,” the reverend wrote. “They spread out within calling range of each other until late afternoon, without any success. When we got back to the North Road again I got into my car, started the engine and fell asleep over the wheel. Someone [else] drove my car home….”
Perhaps it was true, as local gossip said, that when a whisky bottle was passed around among the weary men, “even the preacher took a swig.”
It was now Wednesday night, Elva’s third in the bush. As severe thunderstorms — the worst ever experienced, old-timers declared — swept the region, fear for the child’s welfare bordered on hopelessness. But Elva was, as she remains today at age 90, a survivor.
“We got heavy thunder and lightning through Wednesday night. I snuggled down by a log, just laid down, tired,” she remembers. The burning sensation in her lacerated limbs, she says, helped somewhat to keep her warm in the soaking rain. She dreamed of being offered chocolate cake.
“Before I could say whether I would have a piece, I woke up, and was cold and wet” she told a Toronto Daily Star reporter. “That’s when I felt most like crying, but I didn’t.”
Also that night, she lost the basket of blueberries that she carried for two days, not eating any because they were supposed to go into the waiting milk pails, if only she could find them. Instead, she ate raspberries, and drank from streams when thirsty – although in August, puddles remaining in dried-up streambeds would be more like it.
On Thursday morning, 21-year-old Howard Bosley of Maple Island, “one of the tireless men who deprived themselves of food and sleep in their efforts to find the young girl,” to quote the Toronto Globe, left home to scour the woods for a third day. As he entered the bush, he saw Elva approaching on the same logging road that, two mornings earlier, brought her within sight of the Maple Island schoolhouse.
“I was ashamed for him to see me with my dress all torn and dirty, and I ran away,” she told the Star reporter. “He called to me and asked if I was the little girl that was lost, and I said yes. He said he would take me home, for me to come with him.”
Bosley took the girl (“she skipped along even faster than I was walking”) to the nearby Arthur Labrash home, where she was given breakfast, her first meal in three days. Wearing clean, dry clothing provided by 15-year-old Ivy Labrash, the girl was then taken by car, around by Dunchurch and Ahmic Harbour, to the Harrison home in Chapman Valley. And the district at large heaved a huge, collective sigh of relief.
As I was leaving her home this summer, Elva Hicks stopped me at the door with an earnest request regarding the story I planned to write.
“I want you to say that it was the Lord brought me out.” Pointing to her scrapbook of news clippings, she declared: “It’s in those writings there that I said I thought the Lord would take me out, so I wasn’t scared. And that wasn’t just the reporter’s words.”
It wouldn’t happen today. With forest fires a thing of the past, blueberries worth picking are no longer to be found at this latitude. Furthermore, any modern-day lost youngster would likely be packing both a GPS and a cell phone and be home for supper.
Lost on the Blueberry Rocks
Elva (Hall) Hicks, now 90 years old, with a scrapbook containing newspaper clippings about her long-ago adventure on the blueberry rocks.
User Comments
