News Flashes about our Lake and our Community:
Our cottage has been in our family name since 1916
by Shirley Grant
I have been spending time at my cottage on Lower Lake Mazinaw every single summer since I was 4 months old – and that’s a long long time, as I’m now in my 80’s. It was my mother, an unmarried business girl, who bought our land in 1916. I have the original deed which grants the land from Catherine Meeks, Widow, to Maud Miller, Spinster.
My mother heard about Lake Mazinaw from her Toronto Unitarian minister who hailed from Kingston and already had a cottage there. So in 1914 my mother and three of her friends took the train from Toronto to Kaladar. There a farmer’s wagon drove them to the foot of the lake, where Smart’s Marina is now located. From there they had made arrangements with Bon Echo Inn to pick them up in the Inn’s launch along with the Inn’s other guests who had also come by train. The four girls were dropped off on our present property. This property abuts the land that used to be Camp Mazinaw for Boys. The four women had to bring all their linens, dishes and food, for the abandoned hunter’s cabin which they used, had none of these amenities.
After doing this for 2 years, my mother determined that she would buy some property there. I have her postcard declaring her intentions to her own mother.
When Camp Mazinaw started up in the 1940’s, in the midst of the Second World War, there was no electricity on the lake. My father ingeniously produced electricity for our cottage by means of a Delco Lite system. I and my two sisters managed to lure some of the Camp’s counsellors over to our cottage in the evenings. I can remember their making a great fuss over the fact that we had electricity and the Camp didn’t. And we sisters would attend the Camp’s Sunday chapel services. Sad to say, it had nothing to do with our devoutness, or lack thereof. Hobnobbing with the counsellors after the service provided the incentive.
Oh, the fun we had with the camp counsellors – evening canoe rides, attending the Camp’s skit nights, and one memorable, and unplanned incident. I and one of my sisters had taken our canoe way out in the lake in order to sun bathe – with our bathing suit tops down, - and we lay down on the bottom of the canoe. Remember, the lake was almost devoid of boats in the 1940’s, especially mid-week. From Camp Mazinaw’s perspective, there was an empty canoe adrift in the middle of the lake. Two counsellors in canoes were despatched to "rescue” it. Well, you know, a canoe approaching can be almost silent. Suddenly it came so close, that we saw it. It engendered a shriek from the "empty” canoe, and wild scramblings to get our bathing suit tops up.I have to end with a funny story about my mother and the Boys’ Camp. My parents heard that there was a rumour in circulation that they had bought the property right next to the Boys’ Camp because they had 3 eligible daughters! Can’t you just imagine how that infuriated my mother, remembering the trials and tribulations she’d experienced, getting there in 1914!
