Garden Island (Ontario) Shipwrecks

The other day my friend Katherine Taylor (AKA One Gal’s Toronto, author of the terrific Toronto: City of Commerce 1800-1960) showed me her stunning photos of shipwrecks around Garden Island, Ontario, one of the Thousand Islands in the St. Lawrence River, south of Kingston and northwest of Wolfe Island.

Now I’m feeling like I deserve the Not Paying Attention Award. I lived for years in a Kingston apartment facing Wolfe Island, taking the ferry over multiple times. Somehow I did not note the existence of Garden Island, so nearby, much less of any shipwrecks. To be fair, I was a student focused on other things, and not yet as interested in local history as I’ve become. Still, I’m shaking my head. So here’s an opportunity to learn what I missed.

Of Garden Island, Wikipedia says:

From the mid-1830s to around 1914, Delino Dexter Calvin and, later, his son, Hiram Augustus, operated a shipping and lumber operation based on the island. There was small industry consisting of timber transported to the island on ships and then assembled into large rafts that were floated down the Saint Lawrence River to Quebec City for transport to Britain. Now somewhat of a ghost town, few remnants of the original village exist.

The history of the former shipyard is the subject of an exhibit at the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes in Kingston.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_Island_(Ontario)

This is great news. Now I’ll have to visit the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes (which is literally across the street from my old apartment) next time I’m in Kingston.

Much to my delight, I find that the Marine Museum offered a Get Wrecked dragon boat tour of Garden Island in 2019, including shipwrecks. Perhaps they will do so again?

Ever wondered what lies beneath the waves in our backyard? How a community thrived on a local island?

Get Wrecked offers a guided tour of the shipwrecks in the Back Bay of Garden Island, telling the story of both the ships and the people who lived on the island.

Using a dragon boat, the group will paddle to Garden Island with a tour guide from the Marine Museum to discover the hidden mysteries of 20+ shipwrecks and the history of Garden Island.

Source: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/get-wrecked-2019-tickets-67285291117

So what’s up with the shipwrecks? Katherine had both flown over the island, spotting many eerie ship-shaped remains, and kayaked around it, encountering hull ribs sticking up out of the water, which amazed me.

The answer comes from Cataraqui Archaeological Research Foundation’s post on “Underwater Archaeology.”

Throughout much of the nineteenth century, Garden Island, five kilometres south of Kingston, was home to one of Kingston’s most important and diversified businesses: the Calvin & Co timber forwarding, shipbuilding, and towing/salvage enterprise existed between 1830 and 1914. The backbone of the company’s trade was timber forwarding; ‘sticks’ of timber from around the Great Lakes were brought to the Back Bay of Garden Island for assembly into large rafts, which were then towed down the St. Lawrence River to Quebec. Many of the company’s schooners (and, later, steamers) which brought this timber to Garden Island or towed the rafts were built on Garden Island, and, when they became unfit for service afloat, as many as twenty-three vessels were put to work as piers and breakwaters in a marine graveyard in the Back Bay of Garden Island.

…

Each of the aforementioned sites was positioned deliberately, and, strictly speaking, they are not “shipwrecks;”…https://www.carf.info/kingston-past/marine-archaeology.html

Phew. I’m relieved that the wrecks are not the result of catastrophic storms and that no bodies of the dead lie there (I presume). (I’d had the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior on the brain.)

This video, “The Story of Garden Island: Rafting and Life on the Island,” shows the sort of ships the wrecks used to be. The narrator, Bill Calvin, mentions that, “At the turn of the century, some of these vessels were sunk around the easterly end of Garden Island to form a breakwater, and their hulls are still there and visible from the surface… that is, when they ceased to be of serviceable value.”

And what is under the surface? Check out this 2013 video of a dive to a wreck lying in the shallows south of Garden Island.

I’m grateful to Katherine Taylor for this unexpected opportunity to become better informed about the wonders of Ontario.