Victoria Mill Slide- Almonte.com
At Appleton a log slide guided the loose logs or booms over the log slide and into a log pond. Log booms were barriers formed by logs chained together with chains and log dogs that guided the rest of the logs down the river. The logs didn’t always stay in the booms and sometimes floated dangerously over the rapids instead of down the log slide.
The Mississippi River supported many lumbermen including Abner Nichols who operated a lumber camp at Wilson Bay on the Mississippi Lake and owned two mills in Carleton Place. From Wilson Bay logs were gathered in large booms and attached with log chains and then floated down the Mississippi River to his mills in Carleton Place.
Timber Slide- Ottawa
Mills located near the Chaudiere Falls cut millions of board feet every, beginning around 1854, but most years from 1806 to 1908, timber also came down the river in the form of huge rafts whose destination was Montreal, or more often Quebec City. Alas, most of the sawmills burned down in the Great Hull-Ottawa fire of 1900. Eddy, Booth and Bronson all stopped cutting timber and went into the pulp and paper business, and the mills at Rideau Falls were removed. The result is that there’s not much evidence of Ottawa’s lumbering past to see anymore — except the timber slide between Amelia and Chaudiere Islands.
You can see the gate at top of the slide from Booth Street just before you get to Middle Street on Victoria Island. If you go into the parking lot across from the climbing gym on Victoria Island, you can seem the top of the timber slide itself, which now has an iron trough running through it. You can get another view of the slide from the bridge to Ottawa Hydro Station #2, when the gate is open, and you can see the end of the slide where it come out from the Mill Brewery, or from the Portage Bridge.You’ll see that the slide is now overgrown and V-shaped, much like a normal creek bed. But for most of its life the channel was square, and kept square by wooden walls. These walls were essential to its operation. You can see the rest here CLICK Lost Ottawa
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Your Mississippi River, Ontario Fact of the Day
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The Continuing Saga of Christena McEwen Muirhead—The McLaren Mill
The Day Carleton Place was Nearly Wiped Out!
Clippings Of the McLaren Case The Scandal That Rocked Lanark County
McLaren Left it All to the McLeod Sisters–His Maids!
History of McLaren’s Depot — by Evelyn Gemmill and Elaine DeLisle
David Armitage Gillies –Last of the Old “Camboose” Lumber Men
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