Fort William in Early Days (Papers, 1924)
"Fort William in Early Days" is a group of extracts from the Prince Arthur's Landing Sentinel of 1876 to 1889, reprinted in the 1924 annual of the Thunder Bay Historical Society. They describe the Town Plot and the early waterfront, and trace how the Lakehead towns got their names.[1]
What it covers
Two August and September 1876 visits to the Town Plot (later West Fort William) record the building of the Canadian Pacific roundhouse by the contractor Isbester, with ten stalls and a circumference of 600 feet in stone from local quarries, and the laying of track on the Prince Arthur and Kaministiquia railway. The reporters note the government dock, where the propeller Lake Erie and the Asia unloaded rails, the contractors Purcell and Ryan with more than eleven miles of track laid, the Orillia House hotel, a new two-storey building of Marks Brothers, docks built by Ingalls and Knappen, by Oliver, Davidson & Co. and by the McKellar brothers for the Beatty line, and the house of S. Hazelwood, chief engineer of the Port Arthur division.[1]
A column of 18 February 1888 explains how the Town Plot post office was renamed from Fort William to Neebing to Fort William West and finally West Fort William, and a church history records an Anglican church at Oliver and another at West Fort William. Later extracts, from an 1876 dinner speech and the late 1880s, tell of the Rescue Company's 1858 mail route and choice of Prince Arthur's Landing for its base, the transfer of the mail subsidy in 1862, Simon James Dawson's 1868 work, and how Wolseley, on landing in 1870, asked Thomas Marks the name of the place and declared it Prince Arthur's Landing; the name stood until the CPR renamed it Port Arthur in 1883, with the town incorporated in May 1884.[2]
Key Thunder Bay facts
- Robert McVicar is credited as the first white settler of Port Arthur, building a house about 1856 near what became Arthur and Cumberland streets; the town was surveyed in 1872 with 534 acres.[2]
- By 1871 the population was about 1,000, doubling in 1872, with ninety business houses.[2]
- In 1883 the port recorded 858 vessels inward, and local exports in 1886 were over $317,000.[2]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Fort William in Early Days, as Recorded in the Prince Arthur's Landing Sentinel", Papers of the Thunder Bay Historical Society, 1924 (Thunder Bay Historical Society, Fifteenth Annual Report), pp. 5–8 (scan pp. 71–74). archive.org.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 "Fort William in Early Days (further Sentinel extracts)", Papers of the Thunder Bay Historical Society, 1924 (Thunder Bay Historical Society, Fifteenth Annual Report), pp. 11–12 (scan pp. 77–78). archive.org.