HOW CHANTRY BECAME A SANCTUARY

London, Ontario Baconian Club Paper: Nov. 25, 2002

“No carbon copy for the Hudsonian Curlew”

By Dick Newman

 

The Chantry Island lighthouse is one of six John Brown-built Imperial lighthouses. It took four years between 1855 and 1859 to build. Its light -- a beacon shining for more than 15 miles has braved Lake Huron storms year-round a mile offshore from Southampton, Ontario. Its light for many years was fed by whale oil to light the imported French Fresnel lens. It warned shipping of the treacherous Lambert Shoal, which is like a rocky skirt around the island. The dangerous shoal received its name from Duncan McGregor Lambert, who, with his descendents, was the first lighthouse keepers. They have been credited with heroic efforts on behalf of foundering vessels over the decades when the lighthouse was personally monitored.

(It’s fascinating to me that Jill, the wife of Justin Smallbridge, son of Baconian Smallbridge, can claim Duncan Lambert as her great great grandfather. )

(My wife, Jean, who has summered in Southampton since she was a child recalls the lighthouse keeper rowing the mile from Southampton to the island nightly. She also remembers canoeing to the island with her summer friends.)

In 1953, technology overtook the island, and the last lighthouse keeper retired. After he left with his family, the carefully kept keeper’s cottage and zealously tended gardens were abandoned to poison ivy, water snakes, bird carcasses, as well as to intruders whose antics hastened the deterioration of the cottage. Landing on the island revealed a dismal, unwelcoming sight: the doors of the cottage and the lighthouse smashed. The cottage’s roof, floors and ceilings had collapsed and debris filled the basements of both sturdy lighthouse and abandoned cottage. In the video entitled, We Were Here, the descendants of the lighthouse keepers and historians tell a compelling story which I feel will one day become a classic of what I would call a new genre that might well be labeled “classic folk film”.

In London, Ontario, 130 miles inland, Chantry’s fate was subject for close study more than 50 years ago. London’s Calder family - the late Baconian Cam Calder included - had come to know and enjoy Southampton with its picturesque lighthouse, the busy bird life around the island and the colorful sunsets cited by National Geographic as among the best in the world.

Chantry Island’s story can be told on several levels: on one, the saga of the lighthouse and its functions, and on the other, actions, which led to the creation of a wild bird sanctuary on the island. The step-by-step very beginnings as a sanctuary to Chantry’s “after life” - its lighthouse still blinking bravely -- are documented in the Dr. W.W. Judd deposit of 16 letters and clippings in the London Central Library’s London Room. Dr. Judd, a noted naturalist, was at the time president of London’s McIlwraith Ornithological Club. (As an aside: The London Room also holds the collection of Richard Ivey family papers. The Iveys , with connections to the town. have made substantial gifts to Southampton causes.)

On June 13,1957, Dr. Judd reminded a Mr. Booth, assistant to the deputy minister, Department of Transport, Ottawa, there had been a letter June 5 from the London law firm of Little, Calder and Morrissey concerning Chantry Island to the effect that 125 members of the “club” were interested in “the conservation of bird life and preservation of natural areas as sanctuaries”. The letter continues: “ We are much in favor of Chantry Island as a bird sanctuary . . . .We urge that all steps necessary be taken to leave the island in its natural condition, unmolested by commercial development in order to keep more intact its colonies of breeding birds.”

The same day, Dr. Judd wrote Marshall Bartman of the Federation of Naturalists on behalf of Dr. Gordon Calder asking the Federation to support the Londoners’ campaign. There was a suggestion of urgency, a suspicion that there was fear of a “commercial” development on the island.

The reply from Mr. Booth on July 27 advised appealing to Canadian Wildlife Service of the National Parks branch of Northern Affairs and National Resources: “If they find that there is need of a bird sanctuary (on Chantry Island) and are prepared to sponsor it, this department would be very pleased to consider transfer of management and control of that part of Chantry which is not required for lighthouse purposes to Northern Affairs and National Resources.”

To Dr. Gordon Calder on July 5, a letter from Ottawa defined the route to take the application for Wildlife and Northern Affairs. To Cam Calder on July 10, wildlife biologist George M. Stirrett wrote (copies to Dr. Judd and Howard Krug of Chesley, Ontario who’d joined the campaign) asking if the club and Federation of Ontario Naturalists would be interested in taking a lease on the island - the money required “very small”.

On July 26, Parks Committee secretary Barbara Caldwell wrote Dr. Calder (carbon copies sent to C. Calder, Dr. J.R. Dymond, Stirrett, Judd and Krug). She wrote that neither the London nor the Ontario groups could hold such a property, but revealed that the “island is being held by the Department of Transport for lease to an organization as a sanctuary”.

Summer holidays over, Stirrett wrote Dr.Calder in August that he suspects the island lease would be “one of those ‘dollar a year’ affairs. . .So far as I know the lease would have very few obligations about improvements . . . to encourage birds or in regard to policing of the island. If the island becomes a migratory bird sanctuary under federal laws the RCMP would police the area. The Ontario Department of Lands and Forests Conservation officers are ex officio officers under the Migratory Birds Convention Act and they could also protect the sanctuary.”

“At present, the Canadian Wildlife Service has no funds to purchase the land or make improvements in sanctuaries. The one thing we do is establish the sanctuary, supply sanctuary signs and see that the RCMP are alert.”

At one stage, there was a report in a publication of the Federation of Field Naturalists that the London club had taken up the lease. Dr. Judd was quick to scotch that report but Dr. Calder asked key questions of Dr. Stirrett in Kingston:

Noting that he was also mailing eight carbon copies of this letter to parties interested in the project, Dr. Calder must have chuckled as he typed the following PS:

Dr. Judd was able to report at the January 20, 1958, meeting of the McIlwraith Ornithological Club that Chantry Island, “ a nesting colony of gulls and terns was made into a bird sanctuary - “all due to the efforts of club member Dr. Gordon Calder.” The Free Press in London on January 22 quoted Southampton Town Clerk Laird MacAulay that he had been notified that the crescent shaped island was now an official national bird sanctuary. The boundary of the sanctuary extending 600 feet offshore on all sides and the presence of guns, decoys, cats and dogs was prohibited.

Flip now to June 18, 1960. The London Free Press. There, Jean Elford reported under the heading Chantry Island Mecca for Artists; Island Bird Sanctuary in Lake Huron named in Honor of famous Sculptor. Sir Francis Bayfield of the Royal Navy when making a hydrographic survey named it in 1822 in honor of his friend, Sir Francis Chantry, an English sculptor, famed for his “Sleeping Children” sculpture in Lichfield cathedral in Derbyshire. He is remembered for his busts of Sirs William Wordsworth, James Watt and Walter Scott.

Jean Elford wrote that few, aside from the Ojibway Indians who’d called the Bruce Peninsula home for centuries even knew about the island with the classy name.

She concluded that supporters of the sanctuary would be happy that there were also possibilities of its becoming an outlet for the Southampton School of Art program.

When John Weichel, the retired managing editor of the Stratford Beacon Herald moved to Southampton and launched his fo’c’sle publications based on researches in the treasured archives of the Bruce County Museum in Southampton, there was a sudden teasing interest in the Southampton past as the first and busiest harbor between Goderich and Owen Sound. At the same time, four former London Chapman brothers - of the well-known Chapman and Hewitt music store in London--- proved to be excellent model builders able to recreate to-scale miniatures in wood of ships as well as maritime installations linked to Lake Huron and the island. A number of specimens of their work is touring across the country in a Royal Ontario Museum exhibit.

“The itch” reinforced the already growing popularity of the informal Propeller Club, its members meeting like Pickwickians in the barroom of the Walker House on Wednesday afternoons. Mostly retired, its members were either sailors or merely thrived on talks of “ships and sailormen”. An experienced diver and maritime historian, Ron Beaupre, recounted personal experiences diving among the wrecks in the Great Lakes and particularly along the Bruce Coast. Propeller Club members who had treasured memorabilia of Southampton’s link with Huron’s history and the work of the Chapmans were instrumental in supplying materials for the Marine Gallery in the museum, providing insights into the heroic efforts that went into fighting the fury of Lake Huron in its rages.

If you come once you are a life member

If you don’t come again we make you president.

Talk about anything as loud as possible.

Be sure to talk while somebody else is talking.

Be fanatical about something.

When you come, start talking immediately

and begin in the middle of some muddled thought.

Avoid listening to others’ tall tales.

Bring something for “show and yell”

Try to sell something to the fellow members more than once a year.

e.g. last year’s plum cake, some obscure journal, tickets to some event which probably won’t happen. . .or already has

Bring relatives and friends. Try to infect them.

Sons especially welcome.

Even this informal membership makes you a member of the busy Marine Heritage Committee.

For years, each Propellerian attending dropped a looney in an ashtray for the treasury. The club has been described as the “drinking arm” of the Marine Heritage Committee, which has recently received national recognition for its program.

Robert Telford, secretary treasurer of the Propeller Club and the Marine Heritage Project received the Town of Saugeen Shores’ (the recent amalgamation of Southampton and neighboring Port Elgin) first Heritage Award this year in recognition of his and the Marine Heritage Committee’s service. In the video, We Were Here, he described the steps leading to the project so that now there is indeed no place in Southampton without some reminder of the Chantry lighthouse.

About 1995, he says, it was felt the town, having lost its industries, needed something to give it identity and a telling profile. “A number of us were thinking of something for the future of Southampton.” Chantry Island and its lighthouse was a ready-made monument of the town’s colorful past in the days of shipping on Lake Huron and development of Bruce county. The lighthouse keeper’s cottage, which had become a derelict ruin with only three walls standing, was an obvious priority along with the first ever cleanup of the island. Much of the work was by hard hand labor. For instance tons of debris associated with the lighthouse and the cottage.

Nearly four years of hard labor were required to complete the cottage as a first step. The basement of the cottage was filled with an estimated fifty tons of detritus, which included the remains of the roof, and the two floors of the cottage. Since no machinery could negotiate the narrow stairway to the basement area, those fifty tons of garbage had to be carried out in five gallon buckets and dumped out of a window. It was a backbreaking chore. Since the original beams had been constructed of hemlock in sizes no longer standard, hemlocks on the Robert Trelford farm were cut down and milled to the exact measurements of the original beams in the cottage.

Two hundred and fifty (250) men and women volunteer workers put in 20,000 hours of work, and 300 donors contributed to the island projects in the past three years. This was a daunting task. Even the keepers’ gardens have been revived; rich soil sifted and fortified, and planted with the same varieties of herbs and plants that were known to have been in earlier keepers’ gardens.

When the lake behaved, the sturdy Peerless (named for keeper Duncan Lambert’s own boat) provided to the Marine Heritage Committee by the town was available to shuttle loads of volunteers for work on the island. It shoved off every day at eight thirty every weather-worthy weekday morning for almost four years. Occasionally, the temperamental lake could make the day-end return trip rough.

Our cottage on the mainland was an ideal location for watching through a telescope mounted on a tripod. It was a spectacle of labor often from another era, dealing with tools of the past as well as heavy modern equipment of today barged the one mile to the island. Members of the club, who thought they’d “retired” to Southampton and hoped their pushing and heaving days were behind them, built new muscle and made new friends among the platoons of volunteers, which included many women. The enthusiasm was contagious. At the same time that the heavy heaving and carrying involved the keepers’ cottage, the interior of the lighthouse received a freshening with painting and trash removal. Period furnishings were donated for the cottage and put in place. This year, the Canadian Coast Guard on a weekend painted the exterior of the lighthouse.

In preparing this paper, I visited Mike Sterling, who has had a hand in almost every project. He could easily have been enjoying the last reasonably comfortable of autumn weather but was prepared to recount some of the successes of the season. He climbed down from the Peerless mounted on a scaffold for the winter in a boathouse lent to Marine Heritage by the Town of Southampton. The Peerless had undergone considerable refitting to assume the role of transporting visitors to the island, the cottage and the lighthouse. At $20 per person, more than 1,800 visitors cruised on the Peerless to the island in its first year full season as a tour boat. With Heritage and Propeller Club members as hosts, the visitors have given top honors to the tour and a chance to see the restored keeper’s cottage and to climb the easily negotiated stairs to the top of the 94-foot high lighthouse.

The Peerless’ season is from early spring until after Thanksgiving but because of the needs of the thousands of nesting birds on the island, only 25 persons a day can legally visit the sanctuary until August 1.

The Marine Heritage Committee is held responsible for preserving the island as a bird sanctuary. People who have for decades enjoyed the hour ride to and visit on the island often confront members of the committee and those charged with fulfilling the controls placed on them. It is hoped that the next major project will be the placing of nesting boxes on the island to accommodate the needs of the bird population.

A Michigander who shares the tireless perpetual-motion resourceful leadership and vision of the Propeller Club-Heritage committee projects, Mike Sterling lives in Southampton. He gets satisfaction knowing that the Chantry web site gives Chantry Island a worldwide voice. He says the Heritage Ccommittee foresees broader programs, too. He has written about the need to establish a $50,000 endowment for other developments such as the Chantry Island Institute and its elaborate far-sighted curriculum related to the multiple practically all facets of life with the “Inland Seas”. The Committee has already begun school events to acquaint the young with an awareness of the meaning of living beside the lake.

It took a high tech firm based in Southern Ontario to define the unique character of Chantry, and lighthouses in general. An executive of the firm had known Southampton and the island from his boyhood holidays and the firm had just received a huge grant to develop a wireless network in southern Ontario. The wireless character of lighthouse communication prompted the company to adopt the Chantry name, and the lighthouse as its insignia.

A final victory came as the season ended with the completion of a brick outhouse equipped with the most up-to-date waste processor.