Port Credit’s History Is Six Feet Under

I made a mistake a few weeks ago when I was speaking at a gathering to plan the upcoming celebration of Port Credit’s 175th anniversary in 2010. I inadvertently claimed that the village’s historic stonehooking trade came to an end when all the shale was gone.

No one questioned me at the time but, as it turns out I was way off. There are still tonnes of shale left, literally, in Port Credit.

I found that out for myself as I passed the site of the former Briarwood car dealership. New retailers are moving in, and in the process, the construction workers have dug two floors deep into the ground to set secure footings for the new buildings. And there, below a metre of soil the bulldozers have exposed layer upon prehistoric layer of gray shale. This is the hard, smooth stone that schooners raked up from the bottom of Lake Ontario 100 year ago. That is until they depleted the supply of shale within reach of their rakes – about five metres deep.

The stonehooking trade would be alive and well in Port Credit were the shale not metres below our feet.

Stonehooking started in Port Credit as soon as the harbour opened at the mouth of the Credit River in 1837. There wasn’t much demand for shale in Port Credit, but Toronto seemed to be forever booming and buyers there were happy to take any sturdy construction materials they could get their hands on. Port Credit’s stonehooking families – the Blocks, Blowers, Hares and Naishes among them – could get top dollar for shale.

Stonehooking traffic peaked in the 1880s, with 23 schooners vying for space on the lake. There was little need for storage and customs facilities in Port Credit. The shale normally went from lake bottom directly to Toronto, or to Hamilton where Port Credit shale was used to build their 1887 city hall. (It’s not there anymore.) The schooners returned empty to Port Credit just to put in for the night. Still, the traffic was a welcome site for villagers who had witnessed their harbour decline over the past years after the Great Western Railway arrived in 1855, diverting the lumber and grain traffic that once kept Port Credit’s wharves and warehouses humming.

In response to the blip in the otherwise downward traffic slide at Port Credit, the scant few investors that the village’s harbour had left requested the government build a lighthouse in 1881, but they made their appeal after parliament ended session for the year and the request was not tabled until 1882. Moving slowly, as the wheels of government usually do, Ottawa agreed to build a lighthouse but it was another year before tenders were invited. And when they finally did, the lowest bid was higher than the government had allocated, so it was back to parliament in 1883 for more money.

Roderick Cameron finally completed the lighthouse ($446.36 over budget) later that year, but by then Lake Ontario was frozen and the navigation season had ended. The beacon was finally lighted with the opening of the 1884 season.

The lighthouse was four years in coming and it was 30 years too late.

Signs of the coming demise of the stonehooking era in Port Credit arrived with the new century. Knowing that the shale closer to the shore helped ‘shore up’ the shoreline from erosion, the stonehooking families had always observed a gentleman’s agreement not to quarry stones three ‘rods’ (about 20 metres) from the shore or closer.

But as resources further out became ever more scarce, the stonehookers crept tantalizingly close to the shoreline looking for reserves. The federal government finally stepped in, in 1913. They had just purchased Port Credit harbour and to protect their investment they enforced the “three rod limit,” preventing all stone trawling near the shoreline.

Ottawa had high hopes for Port Credit. They planned to get the harbour ‘ship shape’ to handle the ocean-bound vessels that were sure to show up in years to come once they finished upgrading the St. Lawrence locks further downstream and widen and deepen the Welland Canal upstream. But World War I put a quick end to the Welland Canal project, and expansion downstream of Lake Ontario was delayed until the U.S. agreed to foot half the bill in the mid 1950s.

That was too long to wait. Port Credit’s mariners abandoned their stonehooking schooners and set out in smaller boats to engage in commercial fishing. In 1927, the village council blasted away Olympia, Coral and Reindeer – the once sleek schooners that had been left to rot by the Lakeshore Road bridge. It was an explosive end to a Port Credit business that had been dying in a slow burn.

Back at Lakeshore Road West and Pine Avenue, construction continues on Port Credit’s latest development. Until the construction workers finish putting in the concrete walls of the new building’s basement-to-be, Port Credit will have an ancient monument to its later glory.