Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [114]
During the early years of the 1850s, travelling in winter meant that Catharine had to wait until packed snow made country roads passable, then cadge a ride to Belleville on the horse-drawn sleigh of one of the Rice Lake merchants. In the summer, she endured bumpy, dusty rides in the stagecoaches that travelled from Rice Lake south to Cobourg, then east to Belleville. Thomas would be left in the care of Katie and Annie, his oldest daughters. But soon travel got a whole lot easier. In 1854,a perky little railroad called the C&P—the Cobourg and Peterborough Railway—made its inaugural run. It was one of a tangle of small railroads, badly financed but enthusiastically welcomed, that suddenly sprouted throughout the more settled regions of British North America. From then on, if Catharine wanted to visit Susanna, she could take the train south from Harwood, on the south shore of Rice Lake, to Cobourg, and then travel on to Belleville by either the Grand Trunk Line or by stagecoach. This cut down her travelling time by at least a day. To visit Frances Stewart and her daughter Ellen Dunlop in Peterborough, she had the excitement of crossing the C&P’s ambitious causeway and trestle bridge over the three-mile width of Rice Lake to the Indian reserve of Hiawatha on the north shore. When the bridge was opened in December 1854, one thousand Cobourg citizens enjoyed a free fifteen-mile-an-hour trip over the thirty miles of track to Peterborough. Unfortunately, its builders had underestimated the impact of winter weather on the flimsy structure: by 1860, the trestle would become too rickety for use.
The three-mile trestle bridge over Rice Lake, an over-ambitious project of the Cobourg and Peterborough Railway, opened in 1854.
The railroads made a huge difference to everybody’s lives. Travel became relatively comfortable. The coaches—with their padded seats, stoves and kerosene lamps—were a vast improvement over stagecoaches jolting over muddy roads, or steamers tossed about by lake storms. The poignant wail of the train’s whistle and the clickety-click of steel wheels on rails knitted together the scattered settlements and isolated farms of Upper Canada. Catharine knew the C&P would benefit the backwoods townships and was glad to reach Belleville more easily. However, she resented the clamour, dirt and destruction of the wilderness that they created. “As a lover of the picturesque,” she admitted, “I must confess that I have a great dislike of railroads.”
Susanna had none of Catharine’s reservations; she embraced progress. Canada’s first railway artery was the Grand Trunk, reaching from Montreal to Sarnia. When it opened its loop line through Belleville in 1856, connecting the wharves with the main Toronto line, she was thrilled. “I never saw a Locomotive engine at work before,” she reported to Richard Bentley. “The sight filled me with awe.” From Belleville, Susanna could now reach either Toronto or Montreal within a few hours. One of the greatest excitements in her life was the train trip she took with John to Portland, Maine, the following year. “My first visit to the sea, after an absence of five and twenty years,” she recorded. “The dear, old familiar sea, by whose side I had been bred and born, with whose every tone and phase I was familiar in my English days. How my heart sprang to meet it.” The “iron horse,” as she called the GTR locomotive, had enabled her to unlace her shabby black leather boots and dip her toes in the ocean that lay between her and “home.”
Before the arrival of the railroad, Belleville’s wharves were a centre of thriving commerce. Three-masted schooners criss-crossed Lake Ontario.
Catharine’s visits to Belleville during this period allowed her to forget the stress of life in Oaklands and enjoy diversions she could only dream of when she was stuck there. In winter, she could walk down Front Street, peering into hardware stores, boot stores and dry goods stores. She might finger the new novels from London and New York in Harrison