Letters to the Editor
Port Cockburn Editor, Herald-Gazette:
Dear Sir: The story of "Old Port Cockburn" by Richard Tatley, brought back many happy memories of beautiful Parry Sound-Muskoka summers of the past to those of us who still remember how it used to be. Mrs. Marian (Wilson) Kosowan, Mrs. Laura (Wilson) Hunziger, the Kingshotts of Humphrey and I are a few and I'm sure Dr. Bill Bradey, who was born there during the glamorous times, must really have reminisced.
As children in the twenties, we used to wander around what remained of the Summit
House ruins, picking up pieces of dishes and sitting in the little "summer houses" imagining what it must have been like in the old days. In our teens in the thirties we used to have wonderful corn roasts on the rocks beside Lake Joe on the old site. It was there we went on picnics and hikes.
We used to sit around the fireplace at my Uncle George Scroggie's log cabin on Whitefish Lake in Humphrey (he was one of the three original summer settlers on Whitefish Lake over sixty years ago. The others were the Rampes, of Ohio, and the Berkleys, of Toronto) and listen to the tales of the folks coming up from Toronto,
Detroit, etc. on the steamers which landed at the Summit House (before the railroads) and of Bill Wilson meeting them in the democrat and taking them to Humphrey, about five miles up the road, which even in my childhood was a "one-way-trail." They call it the "Clear Lake Road" now but some of us will always call it the "Port Cockburn Road."
Since I now live here and drive down the old road, sometimes I stop my car at the turn at Lake Joseph and sit a minute and imagine I can hear the many voices of those gone long ago who loved this spot and of course Bill Kingshott's big happy laugh.
I thought you might like to know what wonderful times the kids of the past had on the old Port Cockburn site-the Kingshotts, the Wilsons and others who lived nearby and all of the "summer kids" who came from other places, as I did from Detroit, who will always remember the place as we have known it for half a century and wish we could remember even before, the Summit House as Miss Edna Fraser describes it.
MRS: ALLAN FRASER.
(Betty Dunn)
Rosseau.