Vol. 8, No. 16
Thursday, August 26,1993
Muskoka's Summer Newspaper
Mora's cow: memories of Port Cockburn summers
BY SUSAN PRYKE
Brendan O'Brien's mother had no confidence in Muskoka cows, so she brought her own Jersey with her each year when she travelled from Dixie to Port Cockburn, at the head of Lake Joseph.
The cow came on the steamboat, with the rest of the luggage. It was the deckhand's job to keep the animal watered during the trip, which he did by dipping a bucket into the water as the steamboat slipped along.
"Mother thought Muskoka cows produced blue, thin milk," Brendan says (probably from eating maple leaves instead of grass).
In his '80s and still practising law, Brendan is perhaps the only person living who remembers stepping foot inside the late, great Summit House in a village that is no more.
There was a time when you couldn't get there from here, without going through Port Cockburn. It had the potential to outdo Parry Sound, had the railway never arrived and bypassed it. Hamilton Fraser, a friend of navigation company owner A.P. Cockburn (for whom the place is named), bought four and a half miles of shoreline here.
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THE O'BRIENS. Brendan and Beverley O'Brien summer at an island not far from the now non-existent community of Port Cockburn. Right, this modern day calf would have been right at home at the Port Cockburn daily farm.	Photo by Susan Pryke