| Author |
Message |
rallupae
Member
Post Number: 17
Registered: 08-2007
| | Posted on Sunday, September 23, 2007 - 2:13 pm: | 
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Hi,
Please redirect this to another forum if I have placed this here incorrectly. I posted over on MyCCR, but was suggested that I ask here as well. Well here goes. It's a two parter:
1. The Maple Mountain tower history. While I was up there a couple of weeks back, I noticed 2 or 4 (can't remember) bolt-like fixtures on the ground near the tower. After doing some research, I suspect that these are old tie-downs for old guy-wires. Is this correct? These fixtures are a little South-East of the tower if I recall correctly. I
f these were for guy-wires, were they attached to the current tower there or was there a previous tower erected. My research also indicates that it seemed normal practice to erect 80-foot towers with octagonal cupolas, the whole lot secured with guy-wires. Then, these towers would be replaced with the 100-foot steel ones with square cupolas. Can you shed some light on the history of the tower in this regard? I'd be interested in dates, any photos at all, people, etc. I would also be interested in reading any documented writings pertaining to the First Nation's view of this tower going up.
Pouring through old copies of the Temeskaming Speaker, since 1906, I found the first reference of the Maple Mountain tower around the mid-30's, indicating that it was built in the late 20's but used as a communications tower. Hmmmm.
2. Along the hiking trail to the summit of Maple Mountain, and about 50 feet behind our campsite on the East short of Hobart Lake, I found this strange wire running, for the most part, along the forest floor. Looking at it more closely, it appeared to be of the same wire that would be used on old farm fencing. It was well rusted, but just a single wire. In each location, I followed it for a bit and found some interesting things.
At times, the wire would stop at a tree that resembled a pole. It was attached right to the tree, but the tree was downed. On the hiking trail this wire showed up at several places, including one of the "clearings" (I call them) as though this wire ran parallel to the mountain at one point. The wire in Hobart traveled along the ground to wards the creek to Sucker Gut (I presume) and going North, the wire shot up into the trees. In either place, I found the odd ceramic insulator typical of old electrical wiring.
I am puzzled. Are you able to shed any light on this? I doubt that this was for full-on electricity carrying as the voltages would be too large for unshielded wiring such as this. Could this have been Morse Code transmission wires? Is there any documentation of this that I could read up on? Grid map of the wiring system of the time, etc? I suspect that it was the wires for the "coded message system" that I read about in the Speaker archives around the time that 2-way radio was going in.
Whew! These ARE a lot of questions. I am a history nut when it comes to obscure stuff like this. Any help or direction that you can provide in dates, recounting that era, names, places, MNR archives that I should look at, etc. would be greatly appreciated.
Certainly get back to me at your own leisure, please. I hope that I am not being a bother in this regard. Just trying to satisfy my curiosities. I certainly do no mind probing a huge archive for this knowledge either, if that is a better way of going about this. Maybe some Autumn road trips for me are in order to poke around the area's town archives a bit, might be in order...
Thank you so much in advance.
Sincerely,
Paul |
brian
Moderator
Post Number: 763
Registered: 02-2004
| | Posted on Sunday, September 23, 2007 - 3:38 pm: |
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Paul
You are a good explorer. How often have people walked passed all those artifacts and missed them.
I am working on a history of Temagami so one part is easy, the other less so. My efforts to pin down the fire tower history have been frustrated by the lack of documentation within the government. They no longer even keep track of standing towers! And I don't mean just Temagami. And, of course, no one is alive from those days to tell about it.
Maple Mountain was standing in 1929. I am not entirely sure if it was built that year, but I believe it went up no more than two years earlier. In 1929 it was a light-steel structure supported by guy wires, probably 80 feet. The current 100-foot tower went in some time in the 1960s. The names of at least one builder were put on the copper roofing on the cupola.
In the late 20s, and early 30s, there was a quick expansion in the tower network, including the remote towers at Maple Mt, Ishpatina, Roadhouse, Parkin, Beaver Mt, and Dewdney Lake.
Maple Mt was built as a fire tower. After decommissioning around 1969, it was at some point used as a communications tower with repeating equipment inside.
The wires through the forest are the remnants of the old telephone system -- hand crank -- between the tower (or maybe just the towerman's cabin at the base of the tower) and the deputy chief ranger station on Lady Evelyn Lake. It was the only remote deputy ranger station in the region (I don't consider the Bear Island deputy chief ranger station to be remote). The ranger station island is still an MNR base, often used by the park wardens on patrol. The wire passed over the water at the base of Hobart Lake and across the narrows on Sucker Gut.
It struck me as redundant, this telephone. As you pointed out, they had a radio, unless they were trying to preserve the batteries on the radio, as they had to lug them or generator gas up the hill. I don't think there was another remote towerman's cabin in the area that was on the hilltop (even the Ishpatina cabin was on Scarecrow Lake), so logistics were more challenging.
It was also not the only tower connected by telephone through forest and over lakes. McConnell Tower (aka Dewdney Tower, near Wolf Lake) was connected over a great distance to a phone on Chiniguchi Lake and another, possibly at Parkin Tower. The oldtimers (trappers, etc) I have interviewed were young when they saw the telephone or abandoned wiring and never knew where the phone terminated.
Back in the 1920s when the Maple Mountain tower was built, not surprisingly, Temagami First Nation elders were very disturbed. But then, typically, their concerns were ignored.
I've posted some Maple Mountain history elsewhere on Ottertooth:
http://www.ottertooth.com/Temagami/Sites/maple-mountain.htm
More can be found by following the links on that page and putting Maple Mountain into the search function on the home page. There is lots more coming as this is all a work in progress.
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rallupae
Member
Post Number: 18
Registered: 08-2007
| | Posted on Sunday, September 23, 2007 - 6:25 pm: |
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Hi Brian,
This is great! Are you thinking of publishing when you are done? Perhaps a collaboration of efforts on our part if you are?
I found an interesting resource when looking up all things Maple Mountain, especially the tower.
http://www.paperofrecord.com/search_paper_advanced .asp?PaperId=609
You must setup your free account, but this particular link gets you to all of the archived papers of the Temiskaming Speaker.
In this I have found little bits here and there to put it all together. Things like:
- MM tower was built in the late 20's
- It was used as a radio tower of sorts first before men went up in the early 30's
- no mention of an original tower, it location, etc, and the building of the new one there now
- however, there is mention of the MM tower being a central tower for the code-based system that was being used prior to the 2-way radios being installed.
All of this I found by scouring these papers. Have fun in here as there is a lot more - mining, forestry, fire fighting, plane crashes, the resort fiasco of the 70's. I am currently in 1976 scouring, but you will find the whole archive from 1906 onward.
Let's keep comparing notes and see what comes of it, shall we?
Cheers!
Paul |
brian
Moderator
Post Number: 764
Registered: 02-2004
| | Posted on Sunday, September 23, 2007 - 6:53 pm: |
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Yes, it will be a book, modeled after The Keewaydin Way that came out in 2004. There is a photo in there taken of a group of canoeists at the top of the mountain in 1911, pre-tower.
I use the Speaker, and it is a great resource, though time consuming. Note there are a number of issues missing, the search engine is anything but perfect, and not everything was considered newsworthy enough to be reported.
Keep me posted. |
rallupae
Member
Post Number: 19
Registered: 08-2007
| | Posted on Sunday, September 23, 2007 - 7:27 pm: |
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Hey Brian,
Did not know that your book was re-released in 2004? I only read about the 1983 publication that is, unfortunately, out of print. Alas, a little more probing and I came to learn of the new book. Maybe this is OOP too? maybe I should poke around some more tp find the answers?
Paul |
brian
Moderator
Post Number: 765
Registered: 02-2004
| | Posted on Sunday, September 23, 2007 - 10:23 pm: |
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Ha. It is not a re-release. It's virtually all new. :-) |
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