Travelling Through Time and the Ontario Highlands

The steps to the old Moran Inn and home, Calabogie, ON.

This past week my wife and I undertook a roadtrip across Ontario, a domestic honeymoon of sorts after our intimate July wedding, a responsible practice run for when we are able to travel internationally again. 

I will go more into this roadtrip in the coming little bit, but today I wanted to first zero-in on a key component of it that particularly excited me as we began planning the route; a journey both through what's known both as the Ontario Highlands and the Ottawa River Valley, and through the personal history of my family, centred in the small town of Calabogie, Ontario.

When I say small, there is a bit of a give and take for Calabogie. It's small in the sense that in terms of density, residents, and businesses, it's small. In terms of breadth of land, and variety of landscapes, and outdoor adventure opportunities, from ski-hills to lakes, rivers, bush and trails, it's vast.

In the latter sense, it mirrors the the broader region of the Ontario Highlands - inclusive of towns like Renfrew, Perth, Pembrooke, and more - the region is and feels vast. As we entered coming from the northeast and out of Algonquin, and driving through to the coast of Lake Ontario at Coburg, it felt gigantic and unending. Navigating our way on Google Maps, it was like watching an ant crawl across a parking lot. A perfect, wide, rustic and historical region to (re)discover - and the reason why the regional tourism bureau uses the apt tagline "Come Wander."

For me, personally, the history of the region was where I wanted to wander. Calabogie itself mirrors the history of the region, founded on rough farmland, logging, lumber, and wood mills, Calabogie and the Ontario Highlands are a far cry from the richness of Ontario's coasts, of the grandeur of big cities, or small towns boasting Victorian architecture and splendor in places like Port Hope to the Lake Ontario east, or Goderich to the Lake Huron west. Those places were where the money of Western Europe came to colonize and take advantage of the water driven commerce. The vast, hardscrabble landscape of the Ontario Highlands on the other hand, seems more like the place where those who were used to enduring came to survive, thrive, get things done, or otherwise keep to themselves.

And throughout much of the colonial history of the Ontario Highlands, the Morans were there.

It is a challenging thing to say "colonial history" given the truly harmful connotations associated with the term in the Canadian historical landscape. The "colonial history" of Canada was and remains harmful to the land's original, indigenous residents. 

The impact of the Colonial British conquest however, would have been far from the minds of the Moran family coming across the Atlantic from County Mayo, Ireland. Victimized by the British Empire themselves in their own country, their choice was either face poverty and starvation during the Potato Famine in the English dominated, mid-1800s, pre-revolution Ireland. Or face poverty and starvation in the back-country of an entirely new land, but at least on a plot that has been granted to them as their own by a colonial power. 

St. Gabriel's Catholic Church and Cemetery, Springtown, ON.

Essentially, risk dying at home on your rulers land, risk dying abroad on granted land, or risk dying on the journey between either. 

It was choices like these that drove brothers Patrick Moran Sr. and Owen Moran to leave Ireland and come to what would be Canada, settling on lands granted by a British Empire that was eager to populate areas that previously seemed undesirable to those with more money and influence. The roughshod, inland places that higher classes didn't want to bother with.

And the risks were indeed there. As I had been able to uncover with some of my early starts at researching the family journey and genealogy, after departing Ireland with their families sometime around or in the aftermath of the Irish Potato Famine of the mid-19th century, sadly Owen Moran died and was buried at sea during the trip over. 

  

The markers of Patrick Sr. & Mary O'Toole (with son Anthony) and Patrick Jr. & Catherine Guiney (with Patrick's sister Margaret)

Upon arrival, both families - Patrick Sr. and family, and the family of his departed brother Owen - settled in and around the area of Springtown and Calabogie. Patrick Sr., and his wife Mary O'Toole, my Great-Great Grandparents who were married in Ireland and brought their children over, not long after had their final of 10 children there, Patrick Moran Jr., my Great-Grandfather, and like his father, with whom I share a name. 

I'm still learning more about the family, both before the voyage over, and upon starting their new life in Calabogie, Ontario, so I will be revisiting this thread soon. 

However, what I do know is that the Morans became prominent members of the small community, and surrounding townships. Becoming farmers, politicians, and business owners. Patrick Jr. himself, my Great-Grandfather, started the Moran Inn in Calabogie with his wife Catherine Guiney and their children, including my Grandfather Bernard (1913-1989). Providing hospitality for workers, loggers, and "river-men," making their way through the province and finding work where they could across the early 20th century, sadly this Inn, and "ancestral Moran home," burned down sometime in the late-1970s or early-1980s. All that remains is an empty lot framed by a stone-wall and concrete steps to nothing.

Being such a young country, it may not occur to many, but outside of the developing larger urban centres like Toronto, Kingston or Ottawa, Ontario and the Ontario Highlands often had as much in common with the old-west as it did with modern Canadian history.  

Patrick Jr., for example, who passed in 1934, seems to be tied to a number of "old-yarn" type stories that I have yet to truly verify. These include boot-legging during prohibition, a potential murder in the town tied to "river-men," his fleeing the area for a period of time in connection to said murder, and the rumour that his nickname was Whistlin' Paddy, for which both the Calabogie Peaks Resort ski-hill is rumoured to-be named, and as a result, a former beer brewed at the great Calabogie Brewery. 

Last week, I was able to visit this region again, having been only once before as a young child. We excitedly explored the Catholic cemetary where multiple generations of my Moran family are buried, including both my Great and Great-Great Grandparents. We stood on the site of the old Moran Inn, and we had a beer at the Calabogie Brewery.

I look forward to revisiting, both in person to the community, and to this thread as I try to dig a bit more into my family history.