"Return tickets to Gourock can now be had all along the line": The big railway comes to a hamlet near Guelph

The "Gourock correspondence" column—of which there were very few—in the Daily Mercury (16 June 1881) relates the big event happening in the little hamlet of Gourock, just four miles west of Guelph:

The flag station here is in successful operation and return tickets to Gourock can now be had all along the line and it is probable that after July 1^st two more trains per day will be stopped at Gourock when required, and a ticket office opened, which will add very much to the convenience of those who travel.

A flag station is a place where trains stop only if a special flag is displayed.  Of course, flag stops were designed for places where stopping was expected only infrequently.  Yet, it was a big deal for a little village to appear in the timetables of the Grand Trunk Railway (Wellington, Grey & Bruce division, in this case). The ability to get on or off the train, or to ship and receive on the spot, showed that things were looking up for Gourock, as indeed they were.

To my knowledge, "Gourock" first appears in the form of a post office, with one James Mewhort designated as Postmaster.  Mr. Mewhort immigrated to Canada in 1851 and, after a "tour of observation," settled on the Waterloo Road (now Highway 124) a few miles west of Guelph (Mercury, 16 March 1882). Having been a merchant in Glasgow and Edinburgh, it was natural for Mr. Mewhort to set up a general goods store there.  Perhaps to add to his income, he also instituted the hamlet's first post office, with himself in charge.  In those days, postmasters were given much latitude in naming their locales, so it may be that Mewhort chose "Gourock" to honor the seaside Scottish town near his former abode.  

The Gourock Post Office ("P.O.") duly appears in subsequent county maps, such as the 1877 Historical Atlas, where it is marked with an "X" on the Cunningham property just below the label "Gourock P.O.":

Cunningham was Mewhort's successor as Postmaster, from 1872 to 1876.  The road next to the P.O. is today's highway 124, on the stretch between today's Whitelaw Road on the right and Wellington Road 32 on the left.  

The map also shows that the Grand Trunk Railway (GTR) track between Hespeler and Guelph nearly touches the road at Gourock.  Imagine how often residents of Gourock saw the train passing and thought of how nice it would be if they did not have to travel all the way to Guelph to access it!  In 1881, the railway granted their wish.

In the 1880s, Gourock was a thriving locale in Guelph Township and neighboring Puslinch.  It had all the basic amenities of a promising rural village, as described in a Provincial Gazetteer of 1882:

GOUROCK— A small village in the township of Guelph, county of Wellington. Distant from Guelph 4 miles. Mail daily. Population about 100.

Campbell, Donald, boots and shoes
Coleman, James, gen store
Goulding, Thos., carpenter
Howitt, Alf., provincial land surveyor
Keough, James, hotel
Steele, John, blacksmith
Thomas, D. Thomas, postmaster and general store

Another "Gourock Correspondence" column in the Mercury (17 July 1884) remarks on the building boom that had struck the village, in the form of several new and larger barns on farms in the vicinity.  One barn of note was the new barn for Mr. James Keough on the Snelling farm, 63' x 80', a property that can be found on the map above.

Perhaps the most noted enterprise of Gourock was Alton Hall, a farm run by Harold Sorby and William McCrae.  The Sorby family were prosperous local farmers led by Harold's parents Walter and Mary.  (Some of the Sorby's property in Gourock later became Vimy Ridge Farm, first a home for convalescent soldiers home from the Great War, then for orphans of veterans, and finally for British Home Children.)  William McCrae was a local farmer (and no close relation of John McCrae, so far as I can tell).

Alton Hall Stock Farm specialized in Berkshire pigs, Plymouth Rock fowls but, most of all, Galloway and Hereford Cattle.  The "Farmer's Advocate" (June 1886, p. 169) described Sorby & McCrae's Galloway cattle as some of the choicest in Canada and published a drawing of four of the best from the herd at the Alton Hall farm in Gourock:

The pedigree and quality of each animal is lovingly described in the text.

The building in the background matches the appearance of Alton Hall in the real-photo postcard below, confirming that the drawing is accurate, perhaps derived from a photograph.  Gourock had some fine homes as well as fine cattle!

Happily, this building still stands on the south side of Highway 124, near the southern end of Wellington Road 32 north.  

Although the railway brought opportunity to Gourock it also occasionally brought trouble.  In particular, Gourock was the site of two notable train wrecks.  The first wreck occurred on 22 September 1906 and is related in detail by Thorning (2006), so I will only summarize the events here.

At about 6 a.m. that morning, the "fruit special" steamed through Hespeler on its way to Guelph.  As its name suggests, the train had the particular job of hauling fruit from St. Catherines to points across southwestern Ontario.  For uncertain reasons, it had difficulty maintaining speed and was quite late by the time it went through Hespeler on its way to the Guelph Junction station, in the Royal City's west end.  

In fact, the fruit special should have diverted to a siding at Hespeler to make way for the Number 44, a train of passengers and goods that regularly left Guelph in the direction of Galt shortly after 6 a.m.   Hearing that the fruit special had passed Hespeler, dispatcher Thomas Ryan in St. Thomas realized that a collision was imminent.  It was not possible to communicate with either train, so he wired to Guelph to send doctors to the site and to Stratford to arrange for a clean-up crew to be dispatched.

The morning was foggy, so neither engineer saw the other train until they were only two car-lengths apart at the bend at Gourock.  Engineer Thomas Farley on the No. 44 from Guelph slammed on his emergency brakes.  The crews leapt for their lives as the two trains collided at speed.  One can only imagine the sound of twisting metal and screaming jets of steam that followed.  

Engineer Farley was crushed to death in his engine.  Engineer Mark Reid and brakeman Harry Andrews of the fruit special were both badly scalded by steam, while fireman Cecil Bright soon died from extensive internal injuries.  As much of the energy of collision was absorbed by the locomotives, passengers on the No. 44 were not severely injured.

Such a horrific crash naturally brought out the shutterbugs.  One picture records the scene below on a real-photo postcard.

The photo shows people observing the removal of the locomotive 455 of the fruit special and its trailing coal tender.  Efforts to clear and re-open the track are visibly underway.

The photo below shows the tender for locomotive 299 of the No. 44 train from Guelph lying on top of its locomotive, on the far side of the prostrate locomotive 455.

(Courtesy of Wellington County Museum and Archives, A2015.106.5, ph44605.)

Here is another photo of the same scene from across the tracks.

(Courtesy of the Wellington County Museum and Archives, A.2015.106.5, ph44604.)

About this collision, Coulman (1977) relates that, "Old timers in the area can vividly remember oranges from the fruit train being strewn everywhere.  Even today, local farmers plowing their crop fields occasionally dig up remnants of this wreck."

The subsequent Coroner's inquiry laid blame on Engineer Reid and Conductor Joseph Thompson of the fruit special for not diverting to the siding at Hespeler as mandated by the Grand Trunk rules.  However, the jury also placed blame on the railway itself on two counts.  First, the GTR allowed Conductor Thompson to work for several days on end with only a few hours rest, which the company clearly expected of him.  As a result, Thompson was asleep when the fruit special passed through Hespeler.  Second, the GTR should have had a night operator at Hespeler (and elsewhere) to ensure that all trains followed safety procedures even, or especially, at night.

Gourock made the national news again when a second incident occurred on the GTR line there.  Shortly before 11 a.m. on 14 January 1909, a passenger train from Guelph Junction experienced an unusual derailment.  The rear car, containing 57 passengers, suddenly lurched from the rails, bumped along the ties, then flipped onto its side and was dragged for about a hundred yards before its coupling broke and it ground to a stop.  

The engineer stopped the rest of the train immediately, decoupled the locomotive and ran down to Hespeler to retrieve physicians to help the victims.  Happily, 19 people were injured but no one was killed.  The smoker car was turned into a rolling hospital and removed the injured to Guelph, where they received further medical attention.

Passengers recounted the experience of being hurled around the cabin amid a flurry of luggage, broken glass, and fellow passengers.  One account, in particular stands out (Hamilton Evening Times, 15 January 1909):

"That old lady there," said H.G. Moxley, of New Liskeard, and pointing to an old Scotch woman, the oldest passenger on board, "was sitting just across the aisle from me.  She was thrown on her face just at the doorway of the car.  There were two or three broken seats piled over her, so that all I could see was her foot.  When we cleared away the broken furniture that was piled over her she got up quite unhurt."  The old lady would not give her name even to the conductor.  Her ticket was for Hamilton.  She was more anxious about an old black satchel than anything else.

"What train do you want to complete your journey on?" the conductor asked her when she arrived here with a carload of injured ones.

"I want no train at all; from now on I will travel by stage," was her answer.

Clearly, they make old ladies both tough and sensible in Scotland, though her chances of finding a stage coach in 1909 were slim.  Perhaps that was the point.

As fate would have it, one of the passengers who was "shaken up" in the derailment was G.B. Ryan, owner of an expansive dry goods business and active member of many organizations for the development of Guelph.  He had been a member of the coroner's jury for the inquest on the 1906 wreck, and was a member of the Royal City's Board of Trade (Chamber of Commerce) Railways committee.  

(Mr. G.B. Ryan, Evening Mercury, 13 March 1909.)

After Ryan died 11 years later, his obituary noted that the derailment marked a turn for the worse in his state of health (Mercury, 12 June 1920):

Mr. Ryan, up to several years ago, enjoyed good health.  The first break came when a passenger train on the G.T.R. on which he was travelling, was wrecked at Gourock, and Mr. Ryan suffered a shock from which he never entirely recovered.

Gourock itself was in decline by that time.  In reminiscences of the Guelph of earlier days, Mr. Alex McKenzie, who had  been a telegraph operator in the city, recalled that (Mercury, 4 April 1922):

Gourock Post Office was a meeting place for the farmers for miles around. They called at the Post Office for their mail after their day’s work was done, and stopped late to smoke and talk.

Those good old days are gone.  Rural mail delivery and automobiles have closed up many a country post office and store.

McKenzie accurately notes what led to Gourock's demise.  Rural mail delivery meant that mail for rural addresses was delivered door-to-door from a central location.  Thus, the Guelph post office delivered mail directly to residents of Gourock.  Made redundant, the Gourock post office was closed in 1913.

Adoption of automobiles also decreased reliance on railway flag stops.  Rural residents with cars could drive at their convenience to Guelph, Hespeler, and points beyond instead of taking trains.  Instead of shopping at the local general store, they could easily drive into town to patronize the many and varied businesses there.

Like rural Canadians elsewhere, residents of Gourock initially resisted the presence of automobiles as an unwelcome intrusion of urban elites, noisy contraptions that offended the ears and frightened the horses (Mercury, 14 November 1904):

That Automobile nuisance.

To: Editor of the Mercury
Gourock, P.O.
November 14, 1904

Dear Sir—As I was driving home from church to-day, Sunday, the 12th inst., I very near had a serious runaway accident by an automobile driven by some citizen of Guelph.  In all justice and Christianity they should have waited until people attending church could get home.  There should be a law prohibiting the horrid and dangerous nuisance from the public highways.  An elderly lady in Guelph had her arm broken by the same nuisance causing her horse to run away.

Yours respectfully,
FARMER.

Antipathy towards cars in Gourock persisted for some time.  In June, 1912, Mr. B.G. Gummer reported to the Mercury that he had run over a bunch of tacks on the Waterloo Road at Gourock, placed there by some country vandal in a deliberate attempt to sabotage autoists.  Happily, Gummer experienced only a puncture and nothing worse.

In any event, as automobiles became cheaper and the government paved more roads, residents of Gourock reconsidered their attitude towards cars.  By 1920, the GTR flag stop had been discontinued and Gourock itself began to fade into the rearview mirror.  

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Train wrecks occurred with alarming frequency in the Edwardian era.  They were a favorite subject of local photographers and feature on real-photo postcards regularly.  Here are accounts of further wrecks in the Guelph area:

• Fatal derailment at Trainor's Cut, Guelph, 1907
• The wreck of the Royal City hay train

Guelph's first automobiles

Marjorie Armour sent this postcard to her brother J.C. in Allan's Mills, Ontario on Easter Sunday of 1913. In it, she assigns her sibling a bit of holiday work:

Suppose you are having great time in your holidays. Would you get a flat box with earth in it ready for us to plant our slips in when we go home as we intent to take our little plants home.

The postcard is a promotional, generic type known as a "banner card" for the obvious reason that it has a banner in which the name of the promoted town is printed—Guelph, in this case.

The card was printed by the Samson Brothers, prolific printers of generic postcards from New York City.

The card is interesting here because it depicts an automobile and because it was sent in 1913. By all accounts, that year was the one in which car ownership took off in the Royal City. Up until that point, automobiles were regarded primarily as amusements for the well-to-do, good only for larks in the countryside during the summer months when roads were dry and (mostly) passable. Afterwards, cars came to be regarded as a reasonable means for personal mobility, perferable to streetcars and horses.

The parade of automobiles during the Old Home Week of 1913 perhaps helped to push this transition in Guelphites' thinking. Indeed, automobiles can be seen lurking in postcard views of the occasion, such as the three below.

There is a nice photo of Russell Daly, a newsseller and tobaccanist in St. George's Square, with his new Studebaker in 1913.

(Courtesy of Guelph Public Library; F38-0-10-0-0-5.)

Daly later operated the Pioneer Bus Line with routes as far as Mount Forest.

Earlier photos of automobiles in Guelph are more difficult to come by. A picture of Carden street during the Old Home Week of 1908 shows a car involved in the proceedings in front of the old City Hall.

(Courtesy of Guelph Public Library; F38-0-15-0-0-459.)

Going further back, there are a few contenders for the earliest car owned by a Royal City resident. Provincial automobile registration records for 1903 (when registration was first required) identify the following Guelphites as car owners:

Name	Make	License No.	Address	Occupation
Geo. Williams	Cadillac runabout	121	107 Wyndham	Baker
John McHardy	Autocar (4 seats)	144	96 Glasgow	Butcher
L.C. Wideman	Conrad (4 seats)	177	16 Arthur	Architect

George Williams's claim is supported by the photograph below of a woman in what may be a driving cap seated behind the wheel of a car.

(Courtesy of the J.W. Kelleher collection.)

The back of the photo has the following annotation:

Cadillac, Ada Walker at the wheel; first car in Guelph. // 1902 Cadillac Ada Walker at the wheel of the first car in Guelph. // From E. Hart

The car does appear to be a Cadillac Model A, sporting head- and side-lamps, although it is clearly a four-seater and not a runabout and was first available in 1903. The Evening Mercury (28 Apr 1923) says that George Williams and George Walker got a car between them, so it may well be that Mrs. Walker drove the car too. Mrs. Walker's given name was Ida, so the name on the annotation may represent a slight confusion. (The Walkers had a 10-year-old daughter named Agnes, often known as Ada, which may explain this issue.)

John McHardy's claim to the distinction of first car-owner of Guelph is backed up in the Evening Mercury (20 Jun 1921). It says that, in 1901, Mr. McHardy, a former alderman and co-owner of a pork-packing business, had a garage built especially to house his new toy. The Autocar was the first shaft-driven automobile, had a two-cylinder motor, and was steered by a crank handle on the left-hand side of the car.

(Courtesy of the American Museum of National History.)

However, the Evening Mercury (28 Apr 1923) identifies Major Louis Wideman as the first car owner of Guelph. Wideman was a prolific builder responsible for many structures still standing in the Royal City, as well as an officer in the local militia. The car was described as a "one cylinder affair, of the crude touring body type then in vogue" while the registration records describe it as a Conrad four-seater. Altogether, it sounds as though the car may have been a Conrad Touring Car. The Conrad Motor Carriage Company, of Buffalo, originally produced steam-powered cars but began producing gas-powered ones in 1903, including the Touring Car.

(Courtesy of Grace's Guide to British Industrial History.)

Of John McHardy, the 1923 articles describes him as, "another early motorist, and from the first an enthusiast." The paper goes on to repeat an interesting story about his early experiences, with the proviso that it may be apocryphal:

Whether true or not, it is said that on one occasion, while driving along the Brock Road (Gordon street), he was about to overtake a wagon, in which there were a man and his wife. The team stopped and the woman climbed down from the high seat and ran to the side of the road. Mr. McHardy pulled up his car and one of the party got out and went ahead to hold the horses. The farmer was not at all alarmed about them though, and jocularly remarked, “I think I can hold the horses if you will hold my wife.”

The 1921 article relates another story about the attitude of local farmers to McHardy's vehicle, though of a different tenor:

Mr. McHardy informed the Mercury today that at the time he purchased his first car, the farmers in the vicinity of Guelph were so anxious to see the wonderful invention, that they often ‘phoned to him from miles around wanting to know in which direction he was traveling with his bus on the following Sunday.

Perhaps McHardy was exaggerating or did not fully comprehend why local farmers were concerned about his travel plans. In any event, it is unclear how literally we should take his claim to be absolutely the first car owner of Guelph.

Clearly, though, early automobile ownership was not easy or straightforward. For example, the 1923 article relates a tale about J.W. Lyon, another early car enthusiast, and his encounter with a farmer who did not look kindly upon his contraption:

On one occasion when he was on his way home with a party late at night they got lost. The country roads were not then known so well to drivers as they are now. They stopped at a farmer’s house to ask directions, but the farmer obstinately refused to give these, and they had to get the necessary information elsewhere.

As this anecdote suggests, many Ontarians, rural or urban, viewed automobiles as playthings of a wealthy elite, whose only effect on them was to run them down or frighten horses unnecessarily during heedless jaunts down country lanes.

Early news about horseless carriages could be unpleasant. On 8 Aug 1902, the Mercury carried the news that Mrs. Annie Merlihan, a long-time Guelphite who had relocated to Chicago, had been killed rescuing her daughter Genevieve from being run down by an automobile (Globe, 9 Aug 1902). After pulling her daughter out of the vehicle's path, she was herself run down and her skull crushed under the hooves of a horse that the car had just frightened. The occupants of the car did not stop, perhaps unaware of the carnage in their wake.

Complaints about dangers from automobile use became a regular feature in the Mercury, such as the following letter to the Editor (14 Nov 1904):

Dear Sir—As I was driving home from church to-day, Sunday, the 12th inst., I very near had a serious runaway accident by an automobile driven by some citizen of Guelph. In all justice and Christianity they should have waited until people attending church could get home. There should be a law prohibiting the horrid and dangerous nuisance from the public highways. An elderly lady in Guelph had her arm broken by the same nuisance causing her horse to run away.

There were occasional attempts to sabotage automobile travel in the township, as when a log was thrown across the road at night in Eramosa, apparently with the intention of causing a wreck (Evening Mercury, 13 Sep 1912).

Of course, the situation changed as more people drove cars and government efforts to pave the roadways made travel by automobile easier and more reliable. As noted above, registration of automobiles surged around 1913. In 1922, the Guelph Motor Club was formed, which lobbied for road signage, paving, and construction of intercity highways. As the automotive age began, Guelphites took a last look back at the time when horseless carriages were an oddity whose future was far from certain.

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For more information on the early history of automobiles in Guelph and Ontario, see:

• Bloomfield, G. (2009). "Introducing the automobile to Wellington County: 1901–1923." Wellington County History, v. 22, pp. 13–45.
  
• Los, C. (2014). "A danger and a nuisance: Regulating the automobile in Ontario, 1903–1912." Ontario History, v. 107, n. 2, pp. 143–164.