In the settlement era, incomers of the Scottish breed were quick to tap into the economic life of newborn communities by opening general stores. In my youth, two such establishments competed for business in the nearby village of Dunchurch, and they were founded by men named Robertson and Buchanan.
In the little community of Whitestone, a dozen miles beyond Dunchurch, the pioneer storekeeper was Walter Leitch, who arrived in the country from Glasgow in 1879.
A master joiner and carpenter by training, he, and two other young countrymen, John Burns and James MacAlister, arrived in the district intent on becoming farmers.
They found unclaimed land along the Whitestone River, and, after tramping the snow-covered ground, each staked out a hundred-acre homestead. This done, they threw up a log shanty and began chopping down the forest, wintering mainly on game killed in the woods.
When the snow melted, Burns and MacAlister discovered their claims to be rocky and relatively worthless for farming, and they soon moved on to other pursuits. But Walter Leitch lucked out in his choice of property, and by the dint of hard labour turned his claim into a modest farm, the nucleus of the future community of Whitestone.
Most homesteaders moonlighted by finding winter employment in the lumber woods, and Leitch was no different. But instead of having to wade snow and wield an axe, like most of his kind, he parlayed his education into a clerk’s position with the Holland & Graves Company, which operated logging camps along the Magnetawan River and a sawmill at Byng Inlet, 40 miles downstream.
When a citizens’ body was formed, in April1884, to lobby for a school, Leitch was appointed secretary-treasurer. Then, as a master carpenter with papers to prove it, he built the schoolhouse. Most schoolhouses of the time were log structures, but his was frame, built as he had learned while apprenticing in Scotland.
The lumber had to be hauled some 40 miles from Parry Sound.
At first, Whitestone flourished as a provider of farm produce for an active lumbering industry. Recognizing an opportunity to enter into merchandising, Leitch opened a general store on a corner of his property, near where present day Highway 520 crosses the Whitestone River. Then, just after the turn of the century, a railway snaked its way north, passing about seven miles west of Whitestone. In those days, a railway was seen as a sure ticket to success, so Leitch shifted his merchandising base to railside. When he secured an appointment as postmaster for the CNR’s Deer Lake Station, his establishment became the undisputed hub of the newborn community. But there were other Deer Lake post offices elsewhere, and the name needed changing. Probably it was Leitch who proposed Ardbeg, borrowing from a whisky-distilling village on the Isle of Islay, off Scotland’s west coast. Provided you can afford it, you can still purchase a bottle of single malt labelled Ardbeg.
Usually, when I devote a column to an individual, I have at least a photograph and an ample supply of facts to flesh out the story. But what I know about Walter Leitch amounts only to stray bits and pieces — such as the yellowed old counter slip shown here, and given to me recently by Charlie Stiles, of Whitestone.
Having never seen a photograph of Walter Leitch, I must fall back on a sketchy word picture retrieved from an interview I taped, years ago, with Jim MacArthur, who once lived up the CNR track beyond Ardbeg.
“He started that store,” MacArthur remembered, “and only two or three people around Ardbeg then. He hadn’t an awful lot of money, him and his wife, but they were Scotch, they came up the hard way….”
Leitch, MacArthur added, “was the most rampant Liberal you ever met, and his store was a great place for politics.” When a candidate arrived on the campaign trail, “they always met at Walter Leitch’s store…. Col. Arthurs [Conservative MP for Parry Sound] and all that bunch used to come up there and make speeches, and they always met in Walter Leitch’s store. He’d pack them all in, move his [merchandise] around….”
Leitch’s political leanings probably helped him to land the postmaster’s job, for when he opened his store in Ardbeg, Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government was in power in Ottawa. One additional morsel dredged from Jim MacArthur’s reminiscences: Walter Leitch, although by no means a boozer, was occasionally to be found in the bar of the nearest watering place, the bar of the Whitestone Hotel. Taking a dram of Sam Wainwright’s best Scotch, no doubt.
Walter Leitch guessed correctly, and Ardbeg did prosper for a while. For a number of years, it functioned as the shipping point for two sawmills producing lumber on nearby Gooseneck Lake. At some point, Leitch left Ardbeg to retire in Toronto, following in the footsteps of his merchandising compatriot, William Robertson of Dunchurch.
There this sketch of an enterprising pioneer must end, at least for now. Sometimes, when I compose a column composed largely from thin air, it’s like shaking a tree laden with ripe fruit. So here I sit, waiting for the missing pieces of Walter Leitch’s life story to come cascading down.