Up the Gatineau! Article
This article was first published in Up the Gatineau! Volume 25.
Chelsea Cottage Memories of the Thirties and Forties
Barbara Teuvlin
My mother, Germaine Fillan, loved the Gatineau. She would challenge anyone who said that there were places more beautiful. She had often come up here as a young girl to visit friends across the river from Tenaga, in the years before the 1926 “flood” when dams were built on the Gatineau River and the water level rose. In those days there were rapids at that point in the river, and one was able to get to Tenaga by train from Ottawa. Once they arrived in Tenaga. my mother and her friends would scramble down to the river's edge, hoist their skirts and hop across the rapids to visit their friends on the other side. My mother told me that my grandfather claimed when they flooded the river it would be the end of the beautiful Gatineau — fortunately he lived to see that he was mistaken, and he enjoyed day excursions from Ottawa to fish and camp, and in the winter to ski across the open fields.
In the late 1930s my mother became a single parent with three daughters and a son to raise, and also became a working woman for the first time in her life. It was decided that my brother would live in western Canada with his father and visit us from time to time, while the three girls would stay with our mother. The first summer arrived and she had to figure out what to do about me and my two sisters. She didn’t want us to spend the summers in the city, and she found the solution up the Gatineau. She had heard of an inn run by Mr. and Mrs. Carson Cross, at a resort called Summerlea (now Gleneagle). It was located at the top of the (now) Gleneagle road (895, Route 105), the original Cross family home. The Inn opened in 1936, the year Carson and Carocline Cross were married, and Caroline operated the Inn. Next to it, going north, was a small dance hall called Bert's Place; I recall that Mr, Cross consulted my two older sisters as to what popular tunes to put on the nickelodeon. I remember that one of them was “Red Sails in the Sunset.” Bert's Place later moved to Tenaga, across Route 105 from the Station Road, on the site where Les Fougéres restaurant is today. Carson Cross also operated a 9-hole golf course on the Gleneagle Road, and one of the tees can still be seen off that road on the south side, about 150 feet west of Drum Road.
So the four of us spent that lovely summer of 1937 at Summerlea; my sisters and I joined the Tenaga Tennis Club and learned how to play tennis, and we swam at the end of the Yacht Club road at a nice little beach (which is still there today.) My mother commuted to Ottawa every day by train.
There were a few cottages around then, and a very few year-round homes (belonging to farmers and local businesspeople). In the summer of 1938 we rented a cottage at Larrimac, and played tennis at the Larrimac Golf Club, on courts located off the Larrimac Road where the fourth green is today.
We were Gatineau nomads for a few years until the early 1940s found us renting one of Charlie Reid's little cottages on the west side of the highway at Kirk's Ferry. My mother fell in love with the area and eventually bought one of his outbuildings that had been used either for grain storage or as a carriage house. She spent every summer there until her death at the age of 93 in 1984.
Kirk's Ferry was quite a different place in the 1940s. Ernie Reid, son of Charlie, and his wife Sara operated the store there. Sara was Post Mistress as well as telephone operator, and Ernie kept things going out front, happy to sit and have a nice long chat with his customers. There was a baseball diamond located directly across the highway from the store, and a tennis court just off the highway immediately south of Reid Road. The loveliest thing of all was a marvellous old stage built years ago right at the edge of the woods near the tennis court. Although deteriorating, it was sturdy enough to hold an old piano left over from the days when Kirk's Ferry was the centre for local entertainment. We used to see many ghosts on that stage — and left a few ourselves! In the meadow between the highway and the river was a natural theatre bowl where, in the summer, local thespians put on Shakespeare plays. Everyone was welcome and admission was free.
One of our entertainments was to take the train from Gleneagle to Kirk's Ferry or Larrimac for a nickel, and sometimes we would try to get on and off without paying the fare. Now, that was exciting! We all looked forward to Saturday nights. The Barn Dance at Wakefield was a weekly event, with a caller and great live country music. How did we get there? We hitchhiked, of course: how else?
After I grew up, married and began my own family, I wanted my children to experience the Gatineau as I did. My husband and I started by renting a cottage, as my mother had done. It was even a Reid cottage in Kirk's Ferry. Eventually, we bought a summer place in Gleneagle, not far from Summerlea Road. Gleneagle and Kirk's Ferry have continued to be the scene of many happy family reunions for me.