Forgotten and abandoned Ontario ghost town was once a bustling port
Ontario is a province rife with ghost towns — once-thriving communities that met untimely ends.
One such town is Depot Harbour near Parry Sound, which was once a thriving trade port in Georgian Bay that was left abandoned after a devastating fire.
Despite its location near a still-thriving community, the ghost town remains one of the most inaccessible in the province.
There are many mysteries to this now desolate town, its history deeply rooted in and ultimately scarred by colonialism.
Here's a closer look inside this forgotten trade port town and what's going on with it today.
The town's foundation
In the late 1890s, one of the largest lumber exporters in North America, John Rudolphus Booth, acquired railways in the area to eventually form the Canadian Atlantic Railway (CAR).
At first, the people of Parry Sound were thrilled to finally be getting a railway that connected them with Ottawa. But the price tag on the dock fees was too high, so Booth opted to create his railroad haven on the island of Parry Island.
Parry Island was (and still is) home to the Wausauksing First Nations. Because of legislation at the time stating that you could expropriate native-owned land for railway purposes, Booth used his influence to expropriate 314 acres of land.
It's unclear how much he paid for this land exactly, but the deal clearly changed and disrupted the Indigenous peoples who lived on Parry Island at the time.
A grainy history
With his railroad established and Depot Harbour constructed, Booth established one of the most renowned ports on the Great Lakes.
Because of its close proximity to the Atlantic Ocean, it was the fastest way to ship anything from the Great Lakes — making it the ideal hub for the grain trade.
Toronto Public Library Digital Archive
At its peak, the town was servicing trains coming in every 20 minutes, both from Canada and the U.S., building two grain elevators, a hotel, boarding houses, homes, stores, and three churches. The town had just under 2,000 permanent residents, with the population bumping up to around 3,000 during the summer.
Booth expanded his empire and worked to gain a controlling interest in nearly every part of the town — from the railway to the boats that dock in its harbour — to the point that he essentially wielded total control over it.
Going up in smoke
Unfortunately, this dominance only lasted until the early 1900s when Booth was hit with devastating financial blows due to a lack of government funding for improving the town and a fire that took out many of his Ottawa lumber mills and 100 million ft. of finished timber.
To maintain his profits, Booth sold off his stock in CAR to the Grand Trunk Railway, where it would later go to the Canadian National Railway.
This transfer and the 1926 closure of a rail yard and roundhouse ultimately kicked off a sequence of events that would transform Depot Harbour into ruins.
The Welland Canal reshaped the balance of Great Lakes shipping just a few years later. Soon, the grain stopped coming, leaving the town to deteriorate over the decades.
What happened to the town?
The last ship to dock in Depot Harbour was in 1941 at the height of the Second World War. In 1945, by the war's close, the grain elevators that were once the port's lifeblood were in the process of being torn down.
This town served as an explosives manufacturer during World War 2 and contained a warehouse full of cordite — a low-grade explosive that replaced gunpowder for munitions. Sadly, the war industry that helped sustain the port would help bring about its downfall.
During the demolition, one of the grain elevators caught fire, which blew ash and flame to the nearby town of Nobel.
Photo by jrtwynam/Shutterstock
The ensuing explosion caused by this conflagration was so bright that it was said you could read a newspaper by its light from seven kilometres away from the blast.
A coal distribution operation would take over the harbour in 1946, but the town's resurgence was short-lived.
In the 1950s, with the war years in the past and industry declining, the town began to shut down — first with the closure of the coal dock, then the rail bridge, and then, with few jobs sustaining the town, homes were finally sold off for $25.
By the mid-1960s, only three buildings remained
The final death knell for what was already a long-dead town came when the railroad was finally ripped up in the late 1980s.
It was around this time that the land was returned to the Wausauksing First Nations, who had inhabited it in the first place. While it served as some justice, they inherited land contaminated with cordite and waters containing sunken ships believed to hold live munitions from its years of war-industry shipping.
jrtwynam via Shutterstock
The history of Depot Harbour is preserved in the Parry Sound District Museum to this day, and the town is said to be the largest to ever become a ghost town in Ontario.
