11460 Sugar Island

Gull Lake is located on the southern Shield, about 10 km north of the point of contact between the Canadian Shield and the overlying limestone tablelands to the south. The southern Shield is a country of very shallow soils over Precambrian bedrock, stretching in a broad east-west band from Georgian Bay to the Thousand Islands. It was formed during the melting period of the last ice age 12,000 years ago when post-glacial Lake Algonquin breached at the Kirkfield outlet and rushed down across the lower Trent watershed, sweeping away much of the soil with it. The present-day St. Lawrence River was blocked by a still-intact glacier at the time, forcing the meltwater to make its way to the Atlantic Ocean via the Hudson River valley.

Geologically, Sugar Island is on the central medisedimentary belt boundary zone, which runs from Norland to Pembroke and separates the banded gneissic bedrocks to the west from the marble belt to the east. These rocks were formed deep in the earth where the combination of enormous heat and pressure metamorphosed them into their present form. Since then, a billion years of erosion and crustal uplift has brought these rocks to the surface and exposed them to the eye. The soils in the area were formed by the crushing weight and grinding action of the last ice age on these rocks 20,000 years ago. Known as a ground moraine landform, the soils surrounding Gull Lake are the residue of this process although much of the resulting soil in the area was later washed away by the outflow of post-glacial Lake Algonquin.

After it emptied, the lake left behind lacustrine deposits of calcareous silty clay that had originated farther up the Gull River watershed. It is this silty-clay deposit that causes the roads in Minden to heave so badly, and that gives parts of Gull Lake’s bottom a squishy feel between your toes. Still later, as meltwaters continued to drain off the Algonquin Dome, a post-glacial river occupied what is now the Gull River valley. This massive river eroded away some of Lake Algonquin’s silt and clay deposits and left behind a riverbed of deep sand and gravel. Some of the old riverbed can be seen at Moore Falls and up the Deep Bay Road for a kilometre or so. Historically, Haliburton County was opened up to settlement in the 1860s with a series of colonization roads and land sales. During the early years the timber was cut in wintertime,

hauled by horse and sleigh to the lakes and log-driven down the Gull River to sawmills in Fenelon Falls and Bobcaygeon. But the combination of unregulated logging and uncontrolled slash fires soon depleted the pine. By 1900 the pine was mostly gone and the soils had proven themselves too poor for agriculture. The last log drive on the Gull River took place in 1921. Many settlers migrated north to the Clay Belt or west to the prairies, leaving behind settlements like Moore Falls as only a name on a map. In their survey of the Trent watershed in 1913, Howe and White described the poverty and social degeneracy that prevailed for those who remained behind. The population and the local economy collapsed, not to recover again until the cottage country boom at the end of World War II.

Sugar Island is a product of three major events. The first of these is the Precambrian Era, which gave the area its impervious bedrock, and hence its system of lakes and rivers. The second is the post-glacial melting period that left behind no agricultural soils, which is the reason the area remains forested today. And the third is the settlement era, which depleted its timber but gave the area its infrastructure and lead eventually to its evolution into cottage country. Today, there are 34 cottage properties on the perimeter of the island. The bedrock on the island consists of several NE-SW ridges of gneiss, which are banded and veined, pink and grey, and which give the island its classic northern look. The island’s soils are a mix of lake-bottom clay in places, water-scoured bald rock in others and water-worked sandy till in others yet. Most of the soil was taken off lookout

point and the other ridges by wave action, as post-glacial Lake Algonquin receded to the present-day Georgian Bay shoreline. The tree cover is made up mostly of fire species that colonized the logged-over, burned-over island at the end of the 19th century. The only part of the story that is missing is the settlement era. Sugar Island was never cleared for farming, and agriculture was never attempted here. The island was first patented to Henry Becher on December 23, 1872. Mr. Becher mortgaged the property soon after but the land registry records contain no mention of a timber sale or the fire. (They rarely do.) The first severance occurred in 1928 when Arthur Hatch bought the “north part” of the island. Mr.Hatch subdivided his part of the island into cottage lots in 1941 but most of the lots weren’t sold until sometime after 1957.