Writing history of Singhampton was a labour of love
Though his career took him to various places in Simcoe, Grey and Dufferin Counties, Frank Hammill never found a place that suited him better than Singhampton, the village where he was born. So when the chance arose in the early 1970s to purchase the old mill property, where the still young Mad River begins its descent of the Niagara Escarpment and where a man named Richard Richmond first harnessed the river’s power 130 years earlier and founded the settlement that would become his beloved town, Hammill jumped at it.
For 20 years, Hammill puttered around the property, gradually adding rooms to the bungalow that sat on the precipice above the river just downstream from the dam and the remains of the mill. His wife Anne (Buie), a Singhampton girl, passed away in 1975. His second wife, Sylvia (Schwandt Royal), was also of local stock.
A lover of nature, Hammill fed about 1,000 birds a day on the property. He kept an elaborate schedule, filling his various feeders at 5 am, 10 am, 1 pm and 5 pm, and making frequent trips into Glen Huron to pick up massive bags of bird feed from Hamilton Brothers. While he dearly loved his avian dependents, Hammill’s family also suspected the feeding routine was an excuse to keep him from having to stray very far from the property. Leave the birds for even a day, he said, and they might not come back.
Hammill had another great passion during his years at the mill, one he kept fairly quiet about but which undoubtedly took up many a long winter’s night as the river shrugged off the ice of the mill pond and tumbled over the chasm outside his window. Over several years, Hammill compiled a history of the Singhampton area, writing his chapters out by hand and later giving the manuscript to Sylvia’s daughter Lynn Toris to type out.
Entitled Blue Mountain Country, for that’s what the area surrounding Singhampton, stretching from Dunedin and Duntroon in the east to Maxwell and Rob Roy in the west, had always been known as while he was growing up, Hammill’s book was finished in the late 1980s but never published – possibly because the first-time author thought that doing so would be financially prohibitive, but more likely because he and Sylvia started to succumb to the illnesses of old age at that point and life got in the way.
By the time Hammill passed away in 1996, the book, in the form of a binder full of loose-leaf pages, had found its way onto a bookshelf in the Orangeville home of his daughter Joanne Lott. It remained there until late last year, when she came across it and decided it might be time to deal with it properly.
Printed by Page Graphics in Creemore, Blue Mountain Country: A History of Singhampton and Surrounds from 1850 to 1950 is now available for purchase for $20 at the Creemore Echo and Curiosity House Books. Its 256 pages begin with the area’s first settlers, at a time when Dunedin was known as Bowerman’s Hollow, Duntroon as Scotch Corners and Singhampton as two separate settlements – Mad River Mills around the mill site and Kelvin near where the Mad River crosses the present-day County Road 124.
Whether Irish, Scottish or United Empire Loyalist, the pioneers who settled these hills and dales were a hardy bunch, and their descendents over the years retained that trait. That makes for some great stories of the privations and sufferings required to make a new start in a strange land. The original mill equipment that C.R. Sing installed after buying the Mad River Mills property from the Richmond family, for instance, had to be teamed by horse and wagon from Toronto, where the machines were purchased, to Holland Landing on Lake Simcoe. From there they were shipped up the lake to Barrie. From that point they were teamed to Willow Creek on the Nottawasaga River, on which they were then rafted to Georgian Bay and up to Collingwood (then “Hen and Chickens”) harbour. Once ashore, they were again loaded onto wagons and teamed up the hill to present-day Singhampton.
Hammill also tells the story of his mother and grandparents, relocating to the area from the Eastern Townships of Quebec in 1872. By that time the railroad had been servicing Collingwood for some time, but getting to Singhampton was still a challenge. The young family arrived in Stayner on the “night train,” disembarking at 9 pm and rendezvousing with Moses Taylor, a local farmer who had been dispatched to pick them up. “The horses walked every step of the twelve miles to the Taylor farm and even though the passengers had heavy robes to cover them, they nearly perished from the cold,” writes Hammill.
Detailed and extensively researched (with the help of Helen Ferguson, Howard Hammill, Don and Jean Carmichael, Iola Cottrell and Sylvia Hammill, according to the book’s acknowledgements), Blue Mountain Country spends time in every decade from the 1850s to the 1940s, opening with an account of the local politics of the day and then devoting chapters to miscellaneous things like the lime kilns, the Irish wakes, cemeteries, Orange parades, health care through the years and the development of area roads. It’s a treasure trove of information for anyone interested in local history.
“It’s a shame Dad didn’t get it published when he was still alive,” said his daughter Joanne, who has been distributing the book to Hammill’s many relatives and has been pleased with the response. “He would have loved the conversations that it would have brought about.”
That was part of what he loved about living on the mill property, which always attracted people interested in the history of the site. Whether the visitors were artists, hikers, snowmobilers or paddlers on the Mill Pond, Hammill always had time to chat about the old stories of the area.
“His heart was in the Blue Mountain Country,” said Joanne. “He always said there was no place better.”
