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It’s that time of year again – when Leslie and sister Lindsay get together and share a two-week cottage rental on Kennebec Lake – the same place they’ve rented for the past 12 years.
Getting to Kennebec Lake is a straight-line run from Ottawa along #7 Highway through Carleton Place, Perth, Maberly, Sharbot Lake to the Henderson Road / Arden junction – not quite as far along as Kaladar.
Over a period of many years, I have driven (or been driven as a kid) along this very scenic stretch of Eastern Ontario highway literally hundreds of times, beginning as far back as 1959 when Mom’s sister and her family lived on Wallbridge Road in Belleville and our family made regular roadtrips to visit them. (Those trips are the source of the Epilogue at the end of this long piece.)
What follows has some factual research behind it. I hunted down a few essential facts where they were findable, but most of the “What happened?”, “What is going to happen?” rambling about these random spots is just me – unless it’s sourced to a person or website.
In 1971, when I started at Ottawa’s Carleton University, #7 Highway (just #7 from this point forward in this entry) was my route home to Perth. But from Perth west, there are sites that have been either constant, or constantly changing (in the same way as the edge of Niagara Falls is changing – by being slowly but inexorably eroded by the thundering flow of the river) for all that time.
In the case of these sites along #7, what’s known is obvious – you can see it. What’s unknown is the subject of my rambling. Do they represent Quixotic dreaming on the part of the owners? Or do they represent the victimization that can happen when “circumstances beyond our control” take hold?
One such circumstance, for example, was the opening of Highway 417. Turning south from Bayshore in Ottawa’s west end, it instantly took a ton of vehicles out of #7’s westbound (to Peterborough and Toronto) traffic stream by providing a fast, direct route to the Trans-Canada Highway (401 where it crosses southeastern Ontario).
That new high-speed route swiftly crushed many #7 businesses whose survival depended on the occasional pull-off by a carload of hungry travellers, especially those with noisy kids, or tired truckers looking for a rest and maybe a cup of coffee served in a porcelain mug with the strength – and heat-conducting ability – of stainless steel.
So while perhaps “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” is a tad too much hyperbole, you can’t help but feel that more than just a little steady business and more than just a few hopes vanished when 417 lifted its construction barriers. The few places mentioned here – all visibly disappearing (don’t think too much about “visibly disappearing”) – surely have stories to tell. Or maybe not. Maybe the full story is being told exactly as you see it: “We were in business; business stopped coming; we went out of business.”
They’re here because their existence has pretty much always been part of my life – even if in just the very simple way that they have always been there as I drove by them, hundreds of times.
Minute Man Restaurant / Perth
For a time, it seemed to me like The Minute Man was going to be on #7 at Perth forever. Their sign – a graphic showing a “chef-y” looking guy with a pizza box for a body – made it pretty clear what their principal product was meant to be. But it wasn’t just pizza.
It was one of those places in which you knew exactly what you were going to get. Fast food from the grill, or out of the hot oil. If you expected a fresh vegetable, it would come as a slice of tomato and a couple leaves of lettuce on your cheeseburger. Period.
There’s not a whole lot of virtual information about it. I did find one review that characterized it as a “reliable”... “greasy spoon” whose fries in particular were infinitely preferable to the offerings from the McDonald’s right across the road. One online reviewer even added helpfully, “the chick at the counter [is] friendly and hot”.
The Minute Man today appears well on the way to becoming either a vacant lot, or the foundation of some new cookie-cutter roadside franchise, but my gut feeling is that it is unlikely to be revived after its long and honourable service as one of Perth’s early all-purpose greasy spoons on #7.
However, when I described my visit to this site to my brother recently, he said he’d read that it is being renovated. While that might be its future, it certainly is not in evidence at the moment. In fact, judging by the exterior building damage at the back, where it looks like a truck might have bashed into the corner at the roofline, any renovation is going to have to be a significant undertaking.
However, it will live at least so long as music lives, courtesy of a country-and-western flavoured song written a couple of decades back – probably even longer.
Before she was one half of the Ottawa local duet, Ball and Chain, Jodie Benjamin was a vocalist with a local folk band called The Toasted Westerns. As I understand the story, Jodie was returning to Ottawa with the band after playing the annual Open Skies festival just down the highway in Oompah (perhaps even as far back as its incarnation as the “Oompah Stomp”) when she inadvertently left her purse behind after the band stopped briefly at The Minute Man.
Her tune, “Purse in Perth”, laments her forgetfulness as only a country-and-western tune can, but is (so far – by me anyway) unfindable in any virtual form. My internet hunt for it has turned up so far only one brief note, that it was played on the CBC Ottawa radio show, “All in a Day”, between 4 and 5 pm on Thursday, July 28, 2011.
Jodie, incidentally, is the ex-sister-in-law of my present brother-in-law, so the preceding is not the result of a remarkable piece of detective work. It’s one of our extended family’s stories. (And if anyone has an e-copy, I’d love to add it to my iPod!)
I won’t be surprised to hear or see one day that The Minute Man has been levelled to make way for something else – even if only a larger space for extra cars to visit the bustling Dairy Queen right beside it. (Hmm... and that sounds like a good storyline to be framed by the lyrics of a country-and-western tune.)
Patterson’s / Paros Island Restaurant
Just a little farther along at the western end of the Perth portion of #7 are the remains of a restaurant I always knew as Patterson’s. So I was more than a little surprised to see evidence of its having gone through another incarnation before being shuttered – a sign beside the highway that identified it as the Paros Island Restaurant.
At least I knew that it had been closed – that much has been evident for a couple years as the lot on which it stands has become progressively more overgrown and its parking surface succumbs to more and more aggressive weeds.
But I didn’t for how long and didn’t know that there appears to be considerably more of a backstory than is obvious from the exterior.
When I went looking for a little more information, I found a photoblog called “Abandonment Issues” that is part of a larger blog called “Jermalism”, written by a bit of an urban adventurer who seems to find great fun from breaking into closed buildings and photographing their decaying interiors. What he photographed in this one was evidence of a severely damaging fire that appears to be the last major event before its final shutdown.
I had no idea there had even been a fire. Jermalism also notes (below) that the restaurant was forcibly closed for almost a year in 2006 – 2007. That would really have put a severe strain on the owner’s ability to continue to make payments on the renovations he apparently made in converting it from Patterson’s to Paros, and one might be tempted to speculate about the timing of a fire that Jermalism sources to the buffet. (A little too much hot sauce on the fire beef, maybe?)
But here’s what he has to say:
“From outside, there are no obvious signs that fire and smoke damage have ravaged The Paros Island Restaurant in Perth, Ontario. According to an AGCO document, the restaurant had its license revoked and was shut down between November 1, 2006 and July 31, 2007. The infraction stated in the document was ‘Not financially responsible in conducting its business due to Retail Sales Tax Act – did not contest.’ I have not been able to ascertain when exactly the fire happened.”
And here is the Jermalism site with a number of fascinating and sad interior damage shots.
I am not as adventurous as Jermalism and contented myself to wandering around the outside of the crumbling business. Sadly, its rear appears to have become a bit of a dumping ground as someone plainly has been dropping garbage and litter in an obvious effort to get around Perth’s collection rules. (They are surprisingly stringent, and require a homeowner to buy tags and attach one to every single bag he or she tosses out on garbage collection day).
Adding the shoddy state of the exterior with Jermalism’s shots of the interior, and I think demolition is pretty much the only option for this once distinguished fine dining establishment.
McGowan’s Lake campground
McGowan’s Lake is here as the sole exception to the “broken dreams” theme, because it’s not decaying – in fact it seems to be thriving. But this spot at the entrance to the site, specifically the rise in land under the clump of trees to the immediate left of the white building, used to be the campsite’s registration office.
It was a red trailer and one memorable night it was completely destroyed by a fire that burned it down to a trailer skeleton sitting on a pile of black ash. That was its condition for at least a year and, even after the skeleton was removed, the blackened patch where the trailer had stood was a local #7 milestone for a few more years afterward.
Ben Barbary’s / Silver Lake
The demise of Ben Barbary’s Restaurant at Silver Lake clearly did not happen all that long ago. Searching it online yields references as recently as 2005 that cite it as a great place to have a breakfast if you’re touring on one of the many Lanark County by-way road trips.
My memories go back considerably farther than that, back to the days when a weekly news magazine called the Star Weekly was as much a part of a family home’s coffee table as the daily newspaper. The SW – a weekly magazine supplement to the Toronto Star first published in 1903 – gave way in 1968 to its cheaper, shallower bastard offspring, The Canadian. (In fact, one of my first summer jobs was as a Star Weekly delivery boy.)
It was a slick gloss-paper-printed publication, issued in tabloid form before Sun Media made the format routine in Canada. The gloss paper allowed for the printing of colour photos with a surprisingly good quality resolution in an era when newspaper photos were pretty much printed exclusively in black-and-white.
Eventually the SW, no doubt because of cost factors, vanished to be replaced by The Canadian. The readers’ enthusiasm that greeted that last-ditch effort is reflected in the fact that The Canadian died with its final edition just five years later in December 1973, a mere temporal blip in contrast to the SW’s 65 years of life.
I threw that little bit of Canadiana in there simply as background for the fact that Ben Barbary’s one year was named by the widely-read SW as one of the ten best truck stop restaurants in Canada. Special reference was made to its apple pie, always served with a slab of Canadian cheddar (unless you were so gauche as to order it with ice cream instead). And of course, having it warmed before serving was a must.
Today, the stop is nothing but a vast space that was once – other than the restaurant – mostly parking lot, in which typically you would find at least a dozen 18-wheelers and frequently more. A rather hastily thrown together wreck of a store now sits on a piece of that huge parking lot.
Once upon a time, it was a convenience store called The Silver Seven, and its biggest customer base would have come from directly across #7 at the Silver Lake campsite in the form of campers looking for firewood or their Lay’s BBQ potato chip fix.
(There’s a little more regional history in that Silver Seven name, incidentally, than simply the fact that the store existed beside Silver Lake on #7 Highway. Before there was a hockey team called the Ottawa Senators, there was an Ottawa hockey team called the Silver Seven. For four consecutive years from 1903 to 1906 they held the Stanley Cup, something the current franchise can only point wistfully to as part of their legacy. But I digress.)
The store now is one of the least inviting stops on that entire stretch of highway. It’s called the Two Eagles Native Trading Post.
Each of the three gas pumps is decorated with a hand-lettered sign that cautions “NO GAS”. The window has a crudely lettered notice advertising “$15.00 a bag”. For what, I have no idea but speculated that perhaps firewood was at one time available in bundles on the ground under the sign. On another window is a further bit of hand lettering: “CASH ONLY”.
I don’t know about anyone else, but to me, in an era that offers multiple ways to pay electronically, “CASH ONLY” is just as likely to mean “We actually record just a fraction of our sales – it helps keep our business taxes really low.”
So what do they sell, one wonders? The biggest letters of all on the painted highway-side sign – which has been erected beside the now decrepit empty frame where the illuminated “Silver Seven” sign once existed – say “Smoke Shop”, while a smaller sign slapped on it advertises “Worms 4 Sale” and a separate sign staked much lower to the ground advertises “Coffee and Crafts”.
But their real money maker is pretty clear in what the main sign highlights most: cheap cigarettes free of the punishing taxes that everyone pays when they buy them anywhere but a First Nations sales point.
Any remnants of the Ben Barbary restaurant have already vanished utterly; not even a trace of its foundation can be seen anywhere on the badly paved-over patch where it once stood – not even a bent stainless steel pie fork.
The most readily-available product on the blistering hot day that I stopped by was dust.
The [Nameless] Inn Motel
#7 has been through – and is still going through – a pile of improvements over the decades. If you look closely, you can actually see several traces of “Old Highway 7”, short random sections that have been isolated by various construction projects that rounded its corners, widened its lanes and just made it generally faster and more efficient.
But in #7’s earlier days, places like this motel – now just a swift 80 – 90 minute drive from Ottawa – would have been some two-and-a-half to three hours out of the city because cars were slower and #7 was far more “twisty”. And Lord help you if you found yourself trailing a semi-transport. Passing opportunities on #7 were a long time coming as it wound its narrow serpentining course across the lower Canadian Shield.
After being on the road for two – three hours on a darkening Friday evening, I can well imagine the warm neon glow of a “Vacancy” sign might have a certain appeal, with its promised opportunity to start the next day early and refreshed.
Now it’s like the stuff of cheap horror movies. In fact, while I was taking these few shots and standing right beside a screen door at one end of the main building, it was nudged open by a breeze, suddenly throwing one of those trade-marked long ominous creaks into the leaden air hanging over the otherwise silent site. Scared the bejeezuz out of me!
1962 Lincoln Continental yard
For heaven only knows what reason, the owner of this property has had three 1962 Lincoln Continental wrecks sitting on his lot for years. (Don’t carve 1962 in stone. Lincoln ran with subtle variations on this design for several years in a row from 1961 - 69, but wherever websites offer photos, 1962 models seem to resemble the ones on this lot most closely.)
Their common trademark is the front and rear side door hinge arrangement dubbed “suicide doors”. They open like barn doors and in the pre-mandatory seat belt era, it supposedly was a lot easier to tumble out the rear seat if the rear door were accidentally unlatched while the car was in motion, when the airflow would obligingly hold the rear-hinged door open for you.
In fact, it would create such a strong force that it was damned near impossible to close a rear door until the car was brought to a complete stop.
Another source of the “suicide doors” name attributes it to gangster slang, supposedly because it was far easier to dump a body from the gaping opening created when both halves of the door set were opened.
The 1962 Lincoln Continental was pretty much a limousine in its day, and no further confirmation is needed than to know that it was a Lincoln Continental convertible in which, on November 22, 1963, President John F Kennedy was seated when his driver turned under the rifle sights of Lee Harvey Oswald as he sat at a 6th floor window of the Book Depository in Dallas, Texas.
(Photo: carphotos.cardomain.com)
So far as I have been able to tell, these three cars haven’t been moved – nor has even the slightest effort been made to shelter them from the elements – in any season – for the better part of at least a decade, perhaps longer.
Baker’s Valley
Along with the decaying Lincoln Continentals, I think Baker’s Valley probably best represents a “broken dream”. Most times I’ve driven by, there has been a modern car parked outside this house, and most recently I’ve noticed a mailbox with the name “Courneyea” on it. So someone, it seems, has made it a home.
But over the years, it has undergone several efforts to sell itself as, apparently, a cross-country ski resort. They would be comical if they weren’t so sadly pathetic. Until recently, those three little huts to the left of the main building had signs over their doors, labelling each in turn “Chalet 1”, “Chalet 2” and “Chalet 3”.
On the other side of the hill to their left, a second structure existed for years until it either fell or was knocked down. It may have been intended as the owner’s home and the larger structure in this picture seemed to have been styled for a time as a multi-unit accommodation, like a motel. The entrance to the “valley”, about a hundred metres farther along, actually seems to be the gateway to quite a picturesque little setting, but this is all that Baker’s Valley has ever been.
Even on winter drives, I have never seen any sign that anyone ever made any path to cross-country skiing trails. For a time, another slowly deteriorating sign (now gone) identified this gate as the entrance to the Valley. Now, its only signs are a considerably less welcoming pair: “Private Property” and “No Trespassing”.
Astonishingly, I discovered that Baker’s Valley comes with its own airfield, a most surprising find when I Googled the name and came up with this photo on the COPA (Canadian Owners and Pilots Association) website.
Epilogue
On our family drives along this road in the mid 1960s, we always exited at Actinolite, because that was the road that took us south into Belleville. And at the Actinolite corner, there used to be an attraction that today would be classed as unspeakably cruel. But at that time, especially to a wide-eyed young kid, it was always a much-anticipated road stop.
Atop a concrete block was a powerful steel cage whose barred perimeter couldn’t have been more than 12 – 15 feet square. Inside the cage was a small shelter that provided a little shade for its resident – an adult black bear. That was it. Cage, large doghouse, concrete floor and bear.
Beside the cage was a vending machine that sold ice-cold bottles of Coca Cola and someone had discovered that the bear absolutely loved the beverage. So on every trip when we stopped there, we’d get ourselves four bottles of “the pause that refreshes”, and a fifth for the bear.
One of us would hold the bottle up to the cage; the bear would lumber over and place a clawed paw on each side of its neck and the entire bottle would gurgle away in about two seconds flat.
Even as I write that now, I’m shaking my head. I have to marvel at just how far we’ve come in such a relatively short time. The bear lived in conditions that were exceedingly cruel to the poor fellow. His teeth were probably hopelessly ruined by the countless bottles of Coke. Not to mention his likely caffeine addiction. And where were the lawyers in a situation that let kids hold up a bottle of Coke so it could be grabbed by the huge claws of a fully grown black bear by simply reaching between the bars of his cage?!
The cage and its pedestal are both long gone. So not every change along #7, it seems, has been for the bad; and not even steel and concrete can resist the tide of common sense (accompanied with not a little compassion).
Ironically, Coke now routinely features polar bears in its advertising, often clutching a bottle in precisely the same way as their Ontario forest-born cousin would in the long-ago times. One can only wonder where the idea of pairing a bear with the beverage came from – an Actinolite-bulb of inspiration maybe?
Until la prochaine.
