More than twenty years before a train crossed Rice Lake, a Cobourg merchant named James Gray Bethune tried to solve the same problem with a steamboat and a stagecoach. It worked. For a while it worked every day, on a timetable. It also helped bankrupt him.
More than twenty years before a train crossed Rice Lake, a Cobourg merchant named James Gray Bethune tried to solve the same problem with a steamboat and a stagecoach.
It worked. For a while it worked every day, on a timetable. It also helped bankrupt him.
The Dictionary of Canadian Biography credits Bethune with starting the first steamboat service on Rice Lake and the Otonabee River in 1832. His story is the one that comes before the train that crossed Rice Lake, and it's the same question both times: how do you get the back country's goods to a harbour on Lake Ontario? (Dictionary of Canadian Biography)
A Merchant Who Wanted the Back Country
Bethune came to the hamlet that became Cobourg around 1812. By 1817 he had a store, a sawmill and a distillery, and he was the first postmaster, running the post office out of his store. In 1826 he opened a branch store in Peterborough to head off rival merchants from Port Hope. In 1827 he helped set up the Cobourg harbour committee and served as its treasurer. (Dictionary of Canadian Biography)
He was also the Cobourg agent, and later the branch cashier, for the Bank of Upper Canada. Keep that one in mind. (Dictionary of Canadian Biography)
The Cobourg and District Historical Society lays out his thinking. Water was still the cheapest way to move anything. Port Hope's harbour was tied up in politics, and the Trent River had too many falls and rapids to be useful. If Rice Lake could be linked to Cobourg by a short overland run, the produce of the whole back country would come through Cobourg's harbour. (CDHS, Opening Rice Lake)
The Pemedash and the 8 a.m. Stage
Bethune's answer was what the society calls a "tubby little, flat-bottomed, steamer," launched at Sully, the landing we now call Harwood. He named it the Pemedash, after a shortened form of the native word for Rice Lake, and soon renamed it the Otonabee. With some rocks cleared out of the Otonabee River, it could get close enough to Peterborough to run a regular route down to Sully. (CDHS)
A road already ran from Sully to Cobourg. Bethune advertised in the Cobourg Star that the boat left Peterborough every day at 8 a.m., and a stage left Cobourg at the same hour, so the two met at Sully. (CDHS)
Boat and coach, timed to the same clock, in the early 1830s. Anyone who's tried to line up a launch, a boat and a ride home on the same Saturday knows that's harder than it sounds.
A Steamer Sawed in Half
He didn't stop at Rice Lake. The society describes Bethune building a second steamer, taking it to Peterborough, sawing it in half and hauling the two halves overland to Chemong Lake at Bridgenorth, where he launched it for the upper lakes. His biography records that steamboat in 1833, along with new warehouses at Peterborough and Cobourg and a bridge over the Trent, probably at Hastings. (CDHS; Dictionary of Canadian Biography)
The way to the upper lakes ran through the rapids at Bobcaygeon, so he went after those next. According to the society, Bethune and a group of businessmen got the right to set up a company to improve navigation on the inland waters. Most of them had bought land along the route, which jumped in value. Bethune did the work. He hired the Cobourg engineer F. P. Rubidge to survey the falls and plan a lock. (CDHS)
It didn't go well. The society says Rubidge misjudged the low-water levels, so when the lock was drained, the bottom sill sat high and dry above the lake below it. The rock was porous enough that a full lock leaked away into the ground. The lock had to be redone, and by then the money was gone. (CDHS)
Parks Canada lists Lock 32 at Bobcaygeon as the first lock built on what became the Trent-Severn, with its first construction dated 1832-33. It was rebuilt in the 1850s with the support of lumber baron Mossom Boyd, and again between 1919 and 1929, just west of the original spot. The wider system went in between 1833 and 1920. So when you lock through Bobcaygeon today, you're using the third try at Bethune's idea. (Parks Canada, Lock 32; Parks Canada, Visit a lockstation)
A Different Steamer on Lake Ontario
Don't mix up the little inland boat with the Cobourg, a much bigger steamship. Bethune led the group of investors who built her in 1833 for Lake Ontario service. (Dictionary of Canadian Biography)
The Cobourg Museum Foundation's harbour exhibition has the launch story. A notice in the Cobourg Star in November 1832 called a meeting about a new steamboat, £7,500 was raised, and a shipyard went up on the Cobourg beach. The launch was set for noon on May 29, 1833. She slid a few feet, the ramp sank into the soft sand, and she stopped. It took four days, a south wind and the waves rolling in to float her free. (Cobourg Museum Foundation)
If you've ever watched a trailer wheel drop off the end of a ramp, you can feel for that crew.
The Cobourg went on to run her planned routes, and in 1838 she was hired by the government as a warship and saw action at the Battle of the Windmill near Prescott. The Pemedash belonged to the lake and the river. The Cobourg belonged to the big water beyond the road. (Cobourg Museum Foundation)
How It Ended
Here's where the bank comes back in. Bethune's biographer says he was overextended "as a result of his speculation in steamboats," and that he'd been lending freely to clients and to himself against the bank's policy. In June 1833 his branch was robbed of more than £3,000, and some people believed Bethune had taken the money himself. An investigation found nearly £8,000 in credit had gone bad, and he was forced to resign that November. He was declared bankrupt in 1834. (Dictionary of Canadian Biography)
The historical society tells the robbery a little differently, dating it to July 1834, suggesting it may have been a clumsy staged robbery to buy time before the bank inspectors arrived, and putting the loans at some 9,000 pounds. It also notes that nothing was ever proven. Both accounts end in the same place. (CDHS)
He ran for the legislature in 1834 and lost, spent time in debtor's prison in 1836, and moved to Rochester, New York, where he died in 1841. He's buried in Cobourg. Along the way he'd also been involved in the Cobourg Rail Road Company, chartered in 1834 to build a line from Cobourg to Rice Lake. That was the first try at the railway that finally crossed the lake twenty years later. (Dictionary of Canadian Biography)
What We See at HBW
We're on the south shore at Gores Landing, just along the shore from where the Pemedash tied up at Sully. The trip Bethune was selling, Peterborough down to the lake and on to Cobourg, is still the trip a lot of our customers make, only now it's a truck and a trailer instead of a stage on a dirt road. People come in from Cobourg and Port Hope, and from the GTA about 90 minutes west, and the day still depends on both ends: the ramp, the dock, the drive home.
If you're planning a day on the lake, our Rice Lake boating guide is the practical version of this story. And how a family marina ended up on the south shore picks up the history about a century after Bethune left it.
Sources
Phone: 905-342-2153
Address: 5369 Harris Boat Works Rd, Gores Landing, ON
Sites: harrisboatworks.ca | mercuryrepower.ca
