The very term “ghost town” holds out the promise of something almost haunting. There is a tragic implication, a sense of ruin and decay, the hint of a secluded locale where the past lives on in perpetuity.
This moody, melancholic imagery comes alive at Seguin Falls, a ghostly community where a tangible sense of loss clings to the rotting buildings like mould and you can almost hear the mournful wails of promises left unfilled in the wind.
In the rocky uplands east of the town of Parry Sound and far away from any center of cottage life, Seguin Falls huddles in an ideal ghost town setting. To reach it, you drive down a winding dirt road, weaving past overgrown farmers’ fields that were once golden seas of grain. At the end of the road is the village site, entirely cut off from the 21st century and eerily silent, it’s battered ruins testament to the hardships and disillusionment faced by the hardy settlers who founded this frontier community.
In the beginning, Seguin Falls was a crossroads hamlet at the intersection of Nipissing Colonization Road and the Christie Colonization Road. One of twenty-five colonization roads in the government’s failed effort to open the rocky Canadian Shield to farming, the Nipissing Road was built from Lake Rosseau to Lake Nipissing. Although much of the land was rock and swamp, little villages developed at roughly ten kilometre intervals and existed solely to provide rest and comfort for weary stage travelers.
Seguin Falls began as one such stopping place and its hotel gained a wide reputation for its hospitality.
“The traveler will find an excellent temperance hotel at Seguin Falls, the proprietor of which, Mr. D.F. Burk, is a most genial and hospitable host”, wrote the Guide and Atlas of Muskoka and Parry Sound District for 1879, “nor should we forget to praise the excellent cuisine of his good lady.”
But of course, Seguin Falls was more than just a hotel. As it was with all strategic crossroads, a lively little village emerged which included a church, Adam Fitzer’s store and blacksmith shop, and numerous farmsteads strung out either road. Burk, who owned all four corners of the crossroads, donated land for a school; and the Guelph Lumber Company, which owned several hundred acres of land in the vicinity, operated a small sawmill that catered to local needs. The population rose well above 100.
The village itself faced a crossroads when, in 1897, lumber baron John Adolphus Booth pushed his Ottawa, Arnprior and Parry Sound Railway across the highlands of Ontario and it crossed the Nipissing Road four kilometres south of Seguin Falls. Not unexpectedly, travelers switched from road to rail, and as the stages stopped driving through town, Seguin Falls lost its once source of prosperity. In that instance, the Seguin Falls that had been so painstakingly built over the preceding three decades became no longer viable; its fate had been sealed.
But instead of allowing disillusionment to drive them away from their community, the residents simply moved the four-mile distance and built a new Seguin Falls at the crossing. In the end, the railway was a blessing, bringing renewed prosperity to a village that was already stagnating as farmers recognized the futility of raising crops in the threadbare soil.
Whereas the first Seguin Falls was a cross-roads hamlet and farming community, the new one was a lumbering center, pure and simple. The great forests produced a rich yield of timber which, until the arrival of the railway, could not be fully exploited. Logs by the hundred were shipped out aboard labouring trains, while every spring, a tidal wave of timber was shepherded down the Seguin River to the massive mills and steamer docks at Parry Sound. In addition, many logs were cut locally at a large sawmill belonging to the Spence Lumber Company that stood alongside the tracks.
The King George Hotel served primarily as a bunkhouse for loggers, and according to veteran lumberman Guy Smith, it was “a pretty rough place…the river drivers would go in there and have quite a howdy-do.” In addition to serving up drinks to rugged bush-men and providing a place to sleep off their hang-overs when the revelry had run its course, the hotel also housed a well-stocked general store.
At Seguin Falls’ peak, there were other stores in town as well, and the village soon added a church and school. A row of simple cabins occupied by mill workers perched on the rocky outcrops north of the railway tracks, while larger, more stately homes lay along the town’s only street south of the tracks.
Until the late 1920s, these tracks rumbled and vibrated day and night as a constant stream of trains, as many as twenty a day, chugged through the village. Then, in 1933, an ice flow destroyed a bridge on the line in Algonquin Park and through-service stopped. The number of trains dwindled to a mere handful per day, and Seguin Falls lost its importance as a whistle-stop.
Other factors were already at work undermining the community. By then, with the forests already harvested of useful timber, lumbering as a large industry had ended in the area. This struck a serious blow to farmers, who derived their main source of income from winter logging. Their farms could provide what was required to feed their families and little more. With no recourse, farmers began fleeing their rocky land, abandoning farms that in many cases had taken two generations to establish.
In 1955, when the railway completely ceased operation forever and the final general store shut its doors, the population of the area stood at less than fifty. Within a few years, all the buildings stood vacant, except perhaps as seasonal residences.
The first buildings backroad travelers will see are the former school, now a cottage, and beside it, a neglected and forlorn cabin. Further on is the former railway bed, now called the Seguin Trail and used by hikers and snowmobilers. As you travel further on, the road becomes a narrow trail lined by tall grass, weeds, and regrown forest, rapidly becoming passable only by all-terrain vehicles. Lurking among the foliage here are several of the village’s former homes, all of them abandoned and in varying stages of decay.
The only sound to cut through the funeral-like hush is the howl of the wind through the pines. Here, at the village of Seguin Falls, where the shrill whistle of steam engines once cut through the air, and where the roar of the sawmill seldom stopped, deathly silence reigns supreme.
Ghost Town Seguin Falls
The moody, melancholic imagery conjured by the words 'ghost town' come to life in Seguin Falls.
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