Cobourg
Cobourg is a town in the Canadian province of Ontario, located in Southern Ontario east of Toronto and east of Oshawa. It is the largest town in and seat of Northumberland County. Its nearest neighbour is Port Hope, to the west. It is located along Highway 401 and the former Highway 2. To the south, Cobourg borders Lake Ontario. To the north, east and west, it is surrounded by Hamilton Township.
History
The land which present-day Cobourg occupies was previously inhabited by Mississauga peoples. The settlements that make up today's Cobourg were founded by United Empire Loyalists in 1798 within Northumberland County, Home District, Province of Upper Canada. Some of the founding fathers and early settlers were Eliud Nickerson, Joseph Ash, Zacheus Burnham and Asa Allworth Burnham. The Town was originally a group of smaller villages such as Amherst and Hardscrabble, which were later named Hamilton. In 1808 it became the district town for the Newcastle District. It was renamed Cobourg in 1819, in recognition of the marriage of Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld.By the 1830s, Cobourg had become a regional centre, mostly due to its fine harbour on Lake Ontario. In 1835 the Upper Canada Academy was established in Cobourg by Egerton Ryerson and the Wesleyan Conference of Bishops. On 1 July 1837, Cobourg was officially incorporated as a town. In 1841 the Upper Canada Academy's name was changed to Victoria College. In 1842 Victoria College was granted powers to confer degrees. Victoria College remained in Cobourg until 1892, when it was moved to Toronto and federated with the University of Toronto. In 1842, John Strachan founded the Diocesan Theological Institute in Cobourg, an Anglican seminary that became integrated into the University of Trinity College in Toronto in 1852.
Railway to Rice Lake
The timber and other resources of Cobourg's large hinterland were identified as the key to its prosperity, and if they could be brought to the harbour, Lake Ontario opened up a large and prosperous market. Peterborough to the north, founded in 1825 by Peter Robinson, had become the principal source area, and in the 1830s the waterways were still the prime method of bulk transport. Rice Lake and the Otonabee River were brought into use when James Gray Bethune established a steamer running across the lake and up the Otonabee which was navigable through to Peterborough. This meant goods and passengers could be brought at least to the south shore of Rice Lake. The remaining 8 miles of rough tracks was viable for passengers and light goods, but no use for the valuable timber and mine products. By 1835, only 10 years after the first steam railway in the world, there was active discussion about building a railway up to what later became Harwood. However, the townspeople invested instead in a plank road, using 300,000 feet of 3-inch wooden planks, allowing horse-drawn vehicles to haul heavy goods. By 1850 the plank road was breaking up, and was impassible in wet conditions, so the railway scheme was revived.By 1852, there was considerable enthusiasm for the railway project within the town. River traffic had become seen as yesterday's solution by this time, so the plans were expanded to include a long bridge across Rice Lake, to take the railway right up to Peterborough. By 1854 the rails reached the shore of the lake, and it found good work transporting passengers and nearly 2 million feet of lumber from the Rice Lake down to Cobourg that summer. However, revenue from the project had to be diverted into building an ill-fated bridge, using hundreds of wooden trestles, 31 Burr Truss spans, and a centre-pivot swing bridge to allow boats to pass. The prime mover locally for getting the Railway company off the ground was D'Arcy E. Boulton, a lawyer based in Cobourg, who enthused the town with the plan. They agreed to begin funding the scheme that was initially expected to cost £150,000, but ended leaving many people with worthless railway bonds and the town council with a debt that was only finally repaid in the 1930s. The man appointed to manage the project was Samuel Zimmerman, who had previously been instrumental in building the Great Western Railway. The bridge was constructed over the summer of 1854 and was officially opened on 29 December that year. Three days later, it collapsed when ice movements shifted the trestles out of line, splintering the Burr Truss sections. The proposed solution was to stabilise the trestles by an infill of soil, which did happen on the southern side, still visible as a strip of land still remaining running into the lake near Harwood. But funds were not forthcoming for the northern side, and winter ice and shifting lake mud meant that it was frequently unusable.
A further problem emerged when Port Hope, not far along the coast, pursued its own plans for a railway to Peterborough. In 1857, the Port Hope and Lindsay line was constructed, and the following year opened a branch to Peterborough, going round the western end of the lake, in direct competition with the struggling Cobourg route. The response of the Cobourg directors was to oust D.E. Boulton, who then invested in the Port Hope line. Conflicts of interest among various personnel resulted in the deliberate removal of the bolts on sections of the bridge in early 1861, ensuring that when the ice moved again the bridge was destroyed, and this time it was left unrepaired. The railway reverted to linking Cobourg harbour with Harwood and the Rice Lake water traffic.
In 1865, the railway was bought by a consortium of Pittsburgh steel manufacturers, who had already bought the Marmora Iron quarries north-east of Rice Lake. They established an iron-ore supply route using barges up the Trent River and across Rice Lake to the railway at Harwood. From there it was brought along the Railway to Cobourg Harbour for shipment across Lake Ontario to feed the steel mills of America. This provided a steady income for the railway and the town until the ore ran out in 1878. It also had two longer term spin-offs in the form of a rail car company and the beginnings of a tourist industry.