Beatrice Scovell's 1980's "The Muskoka Story," is a regional jewel of history
By Ted and Suzanne Currie
If you missed yesterday's part one, of this multi-part series, being a retrospective of Beatrice Scovell's 1980's book, "The Muskoka Story," you can archive back a tad to catch-up.
The reason I enjoy books like "The Muskoka Story," is the reality the text is composed of folk tales moreso than hard historical fact. This probably reads strange from folks who call themselves historians. It doesn't mean to suggest historical fact isn't important, but you will find that in many of our cornerstone local histories, there isn't much room for folk stories. Folk stories are a mix of fact and opinion, usually based on more intimate recollections, particularly of family, friends and neighborhoods from their past. I have been a folk historian for most of my professional years, and have cherished the local books that provide those curious stories that may or may not be factually correct, but paint in the colours of community history, that are often dismissed as frivolous and page-eaters by subject authors. I want to have a balanced mix of histories, fact and potential fictions in my archives; hard facts and folkish interpretations.
My favorite local historians are Bert Shea, of the Three Mile Lake area of the present Township of Muskoka Lakes, (my wife's uncle), Redmond Thomas, Q.C., of Bracebridge, who put a terrific book together in the late 1960's, entitled "Reminiscences," and well, this wonderful under-recognized book by Beatrice (Casselman) Scovell, published in the early 1980's, through The Herald-Gazette and Muskoka Graphics. I have to apologize for missing this book for so long, but at the time it was being produced, I was up to my proverbial eyeballs in my own editorial challenges, to fill the pages of our weekly newspapers produced by Muskoka Publications. I don't know why it has escaped my scrutiny for so long, other than the fact it was printed in very small numbers, largely for family and friends of the Scovells and local libraries. Specifically to be included in Muskoka archive collections for the benefit of those researching local history. It wouldn't past muster as a serious history because it includes so many personal recollections, and handed down stories, that may or may not be factually accurate. Just the same, I love these folkish family and community histories just as I adore folk art, created out of tradition and passion for a particular lifestyle. Beatrice Casselman grew up with a sincere interest in community heritage and her own family chronology, and paid special interest to the stories told by elder members of the community, and of course, her own family. Precious infilling that we need in this region, to colour in the human character of our founders, that can't simply be addressed by their precise role in local history.
In a section entitled simply, "My Childhood," Beatrice Scovell writes the following: "One day, when I was a young girl, I was invited to go, with other young people from the town, to a corn roast. One of Art Blackburn's launches was filled with us, and off we all went to a cottage near the Portage on Peninsula Lake. It was still light when we arrived, and gathered driftwood for a fire to boil the corn cobs. But when we left for the return trip, it was after midnight, and there were no stars or moon showing, for a fog had come. It is hard to believe, but we spent hours going round and round Peninsula Lake, trying to find the canal entrance to go through to Fairy Lake.
"When the fog lifted a little, and the sun started to come up, the boat made its way through the canal and to Fairy Lake. We stopped at the Ecclestone's tourist resort and made a phone call to the Blackburn home, for no one knew what had happened to us, and we expected a lot of parents would be waiting at the town wharf when we arrived.
"My father had taken a patient to a hospital in Toronto, and would not be home for a couple of days. I had got a sliver of the driftwood, which we had got for the fire, into my hand, and it was quite painful. So I went up to Dr. Hart's office (Huntsville). When he saw me, he said he would not let me die of blood poisoning. Then he said, 'I have something to tell you.' Then he told me about the very beginning of my life. Dr. Hart said my father had saved my life at other times, including the time I had fallen off a wharf into Fairy Lake, and I would have drowned if my father had not been there to give me artificial respiration. I also had scarlet fever. It was while I was recovering from the scarlet fever that I watched from my bedroom window the building of the Baptist Church. It was built next door to our house."
She adds to her story, noting, "When the hunting season came in, every fall, Dr. Hart took two week's holiday. It was a busy time for my father. One year, Dr. Hart had a student doctor come to take his place in the town. There was a patient of my father's who had retired, giving his farm over to his son to run. He came into the office to say that since he had stopped working, he had terrible pains. My father told him that the pains in his stomach were due to indigestion. He was still eating fried potatoes, and bacon, and eggs for every breakfast, but was not going out to work on the farm like he had done before. The man did not believe this, and he went to Dr. Hart's office. There, the young doctor advised him to have his fall bladder out. So he went to the hospital in Toronto, and when he came back he still had the pains in his stomach. When he went to Dr. Hart's office, the young doctor was no longer there. So he told Dr. Hart his troubles, and told him how the young doctor had said, 'These old doctors get through college and do no more study. They get behind the times.' Dr. Hart told him, You are wrong about Casselman. He never stops studying and learning. He will go to Toronto and watch in the hospital operating rooms, and come back with material to study.'
"We had a new housekeeper, and once, after a guest speaker at the church had spoken about Hell in his sermon, she asked my father what did he think about Hell? My father answered that he did not think anything about it, for it was a place he never intended to see. He had been working all his life, he said, to pay for one of those mansions in Heaven."
Beatrice Scovell recalls, "At one of the school board meetings, my father urged them not to have a metal cup hanging beside the drinking water taps in the halls. Everyone used it, and there was an epidemic of tonsillitis going around. A lot of the pupils were getting it from using the same drinking cup. My father told them there should be some kind of water fountain. But for years there was nothing done about it; and a lot of people laughed at the suggestion. 'You know, of course,' he (Dr. Hart) said, 'that you would not have been here today if your father had not been a doctor. The first time he saved your life was when you were born. It happened this way. Your mother was in Toronto, but she insisted that no Toronto doctor was going to bring her baby into the world. I had delivered all of her eight children of her sister-in-law, the wife of her brother, Louis; and she had been there to help. So she came to her brother's home in Huntsville. She was given the bedroom on the ground floor where all the eight children had been born, before 1901. And this was to be your birthplace, in June 1901. After two days and two nights, you were born, on June 28th. But you were stillborn. I could not make you breathe. You were such a little bit of a baby, not weighing five pounds. It is what I had expected, so I rolled you in a blanket and called your father, who had gone out of the room, to take his stillborn baby away before your mother came out of the chloroform. Your father came in and picked up the bundle, and said, 'After all the years I have spent studying, if I can't save my own baby I will never practice medicine again.'
"When, some time later I heard the cry of a baby and you came back into the room in your father's arms, the first thing I thought was, 'There will be something wrong with that baby's brain.' You had been without oxygen for so long. The first two months of your life were a very trying time for all of us. It took that long for us to come to the conclusion that you could not digest milk. Your mother could never digest milk either. There were not so many foods made for babies in those days as there are now. The first thing your father tried was arrowroot biscuits, powdered, and with hot water and a little corn syrup added. He fed you with a spoon as if it were porridge. You stopped crying and put on weight. At about three months, you were fed oatmeal porridge run through a sieve to make a jelly, with corn syrup added. From then on, you improved, and you were given orange juice with water and syrup added.
You were a little baby but by the time you were nine months old, you were walking, and before you were a year old, you were talking. There was nothing wrong with your brain. A good many doctors have looked at you as you were growing up, for you should have had some brain damage."
Beatrice remembers another story, about her father, noting that, "As we came home from school one day, we saw a gypsy caravan, standing in front of our house. There was a gypsy woman lying on the grass, and a gypsy and his little boy were talking to my father. One of the boys on the sidewalk said, 'Look, the doctor is making the man pay for the medicine before he will give it to him. Isn't that mean?' I knew that could not be the reason. I went into the house, and as soon as I could, I said what the boy had told the other children. I was told that the boy was quite sick, and needed the medicine. If the man had to pay for it, he would see to it that the child took it all. Also, the woman lying on the grass was likely to need my father's help before the night was over. if the man came for him, my father would not take money for his help. I guess that night was the first time a gypsy midwife and a doctor worked together."
For more on "The Muskoka Story," by Beatrice Scovell, please join us tomorrow, where we will publish part three of this interesting regional history.
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