Owindia Story

 The Little Red-Roofed Snuggery on the Rocks, Kahshe Lake, Muskoka

The rainy summer of 1914 couldn’t dampen the sunny spirits of the Winter family and their friends at cosy Owindia cottage on Kahshe Lake. A daily diary kept by Owindia’s residents is a chatty, witty and revealing snapshot of early 20th century cottaging.

COMMUNITY Jun 11, 2018 by Patti Vipond Huntsville Forester

More pics to come.

Picking up mail using X.T.C., the Winter’s boat, when logs were not clogging the river and lake.

 

The tent used by the Winters before the cottage was built on the same site.

 

Painting the original ‘Owindia’ sign on the rock cliff in Useful Bay where the family kept their boats.

 

View down Kahshe Lake in 1910.

 

Winters and Hills in Owindia’s living room in front of the stone fireplace.

 

Guy and his friends on the paddlewheel of one of the alligator boats used for logging on Kahshe Lake.

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“A beautiful, sunshiny morning – all away early in X.T.C. with the hamper well packed for breakfast. With the lake like glass, the worms and fishing tackle carefully stowed away, and a happy party in a delightfully satisfactory little motor launch, there was all a picnic party could desire,” wrote Lewis Alfred Winter on July 5, 1914 at Owindia, his family’s cottage.

The small square cabin, anchored on posts above rocky terrain, was the first cottage built at the far end of Kahshe Lake, near the town of Houseys Rapids. To reach Owindia in 1914, guests travelled from Toronto by train to the Kilworthy station. From there, they took a buggy or horse-drawn vehicle to Kahshe’s shore where the Winters were waiting with the boat, X.T.C., to ferry everyone down the lake.

Winter’s record of the sunny picnic breakfast, partaken on an island dubbed ‘Isle of Pines,’ is just one entry in a fascinating daily diary written at Owindia during the summer of 1914 by a rota of family and friends. Except for Winters, who ended entries with his initials, and his son Guy, the diary writers preferred pseudonyms. Bitter-Sweet may have been Edna Winter, Lewis’s wife. However, the true identities of Gritty Britty, C-Dear (Cedar), Blueberry and the Scarlet Runner have faded into obscurity.

One thing is apparent from this subterfuge. These people knew how to have fun at the cottage. Even a journal entry about having to walk all the way to Houseys Rapids general store instead of going by boat when the lake was full of logs is amusing and good-humoured. X.T.C., as a boat name, seems calculated to raise a smile. X.T.C. sported an Evinrude motor that usually worked. When it didn’t, it made a very good story.

The name of the child was Owindia which means ‘oh weeping one.’ My grandfather liked the name. His wife said it was quite appropriate when the roof started to leak.

When asked about the names behind the aliases, Brian Winter, Lewis’s grandson, who spent many summers at Owindia with his father Guy and mother Ethel, is stumped. When told the diary entries sounded like the folks at Owindia had fun, he totally agreed.

“They did!” says Brian, who gave Owindia’s vintage diaries and huge photo collection to neighbours on Kahshe after the 95-year-old cottage was sold out of the family in 2007. “They spent about two weeks every summer up there, all their holidays. My grandfather and grandmother brought up family members and friends and met them with their boat. One of my grandfather’s friends was a well-known Toronto artist named Fred Brigden. At my home in Whitby, we have a watercolour painting of the cottage done by Mr. Brigden in 1945. Stewart Thomson came up regularly. He was related to Ernest Thompson Seaton, the famous naturalist. In the 1940s, Stewart built little cottages out of flat stones and put them on prominent sites on the cottage property. Those cottages were still there when I was a youngster.”

Owindia’s origin began in 1907 when the Toronto Star held a fishing contest. At the time, Lewis was treasurer of Manufacturers Life Insurance in Toronto and an avid fisherman. The contest’s winner caught his fish in Kahshe Lake, so Lewis went up north to check it out. In 1908, he brought the family up to camp on an island half way down Kahshe. Rowing back and forth to pick up supplies was not popular, so in 1909 they set up a tent on the mainland. That property was where modest Owindia would later be built.

“The view was fantastic,” says Brian, whose grandfather chose the site for its vista and would sit on the outside stairs with his binoculars. “You could see all the way down the lake. My grandfather arranged to buy about an acre of property from the original owner Charles Fletcher, a veteran of the American Civil War. In May 1910, local builders constructed the cottage. It was designed to look like a tent. There was an inner room enclosed on three sides by a veranda whose shutters opened to the outside. There was no electricity or running water. Lighting back then was by coal oil lamp.”

Picnic breakfasts and lunches were popular with early 20th century cottagers.

 

After reading books by Bishop William Bompas about his experiences in the Arctic in the early 1900s, Lewis named the new cottage Owindia.

“In one of the books, he wrote about a little aboriginal child that cried a lot,” explains Brian. “The name of the child was Owindia which means ‘oh weeping one.’ My grandfather liked the name. His wife said it was quite appropriate when the roof started to leak.”

A guest, using the pseudonym Blueberry, described arriving at Owindia after a long train and boat journey.

“At last ‘twas sighted – the little red-roofed snuggery on the rocks with its broad, welcoming, white doorway. A moment later, we spied the ‘Queen’ waving a royal welcome. Then, the landing and the entering in, and the introduction to the front door view – the transepts, the inner court and the rocky ascent beyond. We were really there. That old, old desire to explore took possession of us and soon we were scaling the heights at the rear, the new arrival and her hostess.”

With no indoor plumbing installed until 1960, an outhouse was a necessary part of life at the cottage. The Owindia outhouse was named ‘St. Anne.’

“St. Anne was a saint in Belgium, where my grandparents toured one time,” recalls Brian. “Apparently, if you visited the shrine of St. Anne you always felt very satisfied afterwards. That’s why they called the outhouse St. Anne. We had trouble with porcupines nesting under the cottage. They ate the wood around the edge of the single hole in St. Anne. It got too big to sit on! We had to put a proper toilet seat on it.”

Kahshe was still a logging lake when Owindia was built. Photos from 1915 show boats called alligators winching and pulling booms of logs along the lake and the river between Bass Lake and Kahshe Lake. On June 30, Guy – future father of Brian – wrote one of many complaints made that summer about logs clogging up the waterways.

“Up between eight and nine o’clock to find it a fine day. It is also the first fine day we have had. As usual, we went for the supplies and had to walk as the logs are still in the river. We had ‘Cow-hogs’ in the porridge with sugar and cream.”

Brian’s grandfather Lewis was more vexed when he made his diary entry.

“The logs still fill the river and we are all greatly annoyed thereby, as it prevents our daily excursions by water for supplies. The road seems long and the basket and water pails heavy (and they did not know the song It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary). Tonight, we are all tired out, as usual.”

The Houseys Rapids General Store, owned by P.H. Brace, was the community’s social and commercial hub.

Minerals in the lake made the water non-potable, so drinking water was hauled and carried from the well at the Houseys Rapids general store. Owindia’s solid rock lot didn’t allow for a well. In order to wash dishes, a family member was deputized to carry a pail down a perilously steep rock and retrieve water from the lake. A shoreline indentation just south of the cottage was named ‘Useful Bay’ when it proved a useful place to dock boats. In 1913, Lewis and his son painted ‘Owindia’ on the rock above Useful Bay and repainted it every few years. The bay was also useful for whiling away summer afternoons.

“For a while Vi and I sat under the shadow of the pines on the little point over-topping Useful Bay, Vi classifying flowers and me writing, and in the evening by the moonlight we aired our souls in that Heart’s Desire X.T.C ... Later we followed the lure of the lonely moon down the long soft-lapping lane of Deep Bay, round Hill’s Island and home to Owindia.”

Brian’s grandfather contributed some of Owindia’s more eclectic décor. As a young man, he stayed in a Yukon hotel room where a sign read “If you find any vermin in your room, please notify the caretaker immediately.” That sign found a home in a cottage bedroom. He mounted pictures of birds and plants from Manufacturers Life calendars along the tops of the walls. He also erected two flagpoles – one to fly the Union Jack and the other for the Scottish national flag. A diary entry on Dominion Day (July 1) records both flags waving.

“Our grand Dominion first opened its eye as a real person this day – but what is that to us? We are at Owindia and on our holidays. As the red-faced, florid flag of England flung its flaming wings to the western breeze, a grand salute of one gun was fired ... A moment later the stately flag of old Scotland unfurled itself with true Scottish dignity on the other flagstaff, displaying the insignia – the King of Beasts – right in the het-up face of John Bull.”

For guests enroute to “Camp Owindia,” the sight of the Winter family and their boat was a great occasion.

“The pleasurable excitement of journeying into an unknown country, and best of all the friends waiting at the journey’s end. Even the word ‘Kilworthy’ on the ticket had an alluring sound and seemed to call up visions of wooded hills and running water, blue sky and bracing air all fragrant with pine – all of the out-of-doorness so dear to our hearts. And to Kilworthy at last we came. Mr. Boyd’s team, belting up the hill and dashing down, soon brought us to the foot of Lake Koshee (sic) where X.T.C., all trig and trim, with C-dear and Commodore Guy were waiting to take us up the lake to ‘Camp Owindia.’ That initiation trip was a real joy, a long series of fascinating winds and turns, each one suggestive of delights to be discovered.”

Homemade food, and lots of it, was a large part of life at the lake during the summer of 1914. Picnic hampers seemed to be filled daily and meals were recorded in sumptuous detail.

June 28

“The men bedecked in rainproofs tramped down the road to Mr. Hill’s for the first consignment of these delicious supplies that are the joy of our hearts – and the satisfaction of our stomachs. We struggled back with two quarts of milk, one quart of cream, one pound of butter, 2 loaves of bread, two pails of water, three thermos bottles of water and made breakfast in the fireplace…the room all cozy and bright in the firelight.”

July 4

“Steaming, creamy macaroni, Mrs. Hill’s homemade bread about which we had so often heard and luscious stewed rhubarb and cream, and such cream!”

July 6

“We were soon seated around a great flat rock, strewn with pine needles. First was shredded wheat with cream and brown sugar, scrambled eggs with no salt (forgotten), bread and butter and George Washington coffee, and blueberries picked near the breakfast table.”

After Lewis died in 1957, Guy and Ethel decided it was time to make the cottage more inhabitable. In 1960, a septic tank and electricity modernized the cabin. The veranda was divided into two bedrooms, a kitchen and a washroom. A local carpenter from Cooper’s Falls was employed to make the renovations.

“There had been one bedroom in the centre and people used to sleep on the veranda on the sides,” says Brian. “The cooking was probably done on the north side. I know there was a small kerosene refrigerator in the 1940s. It had a very pernickety door handle that would pull off if not treated carefully. The refrigerator was electrified in 1960.”

One thing about Owindia that couldn’t be changed was the occasional invasion of mice through holes in the old structure. One day, a new creature found entry.

“My father heard a loud scream from mother in the bathroom and ran in,” Brian remembers. “There was a big snake that had came up through a hole in the floor. My father swished it out. My mother went back in. My father heard another scream. The snake was back. Eventually, they plugged the hole.”

Though Brian went to camp in Minden for many years, the last two weeks of summer were always spent at Owindia before the family returned to the city, cherishing their cottage memories. A guest’s diary entry on July 4, 1914 seems modern in its sentiments, suggesting that yearning for the life at the cottage is timeless.

“After supper came the walk along the woodsey road past the Post Office to the Hill Farm. The evening was cool with such freshness about everything. How often on dusty, noise-filled city streets we shall take that walk again, feel the softness of the sandy loam beneath our feet, smell the cedar and the bracken, and hear the evensong of the birds.”