Victoria Road History Series
In 1858 Victoria County decided to open up Digby Township for settlement. By 1860 Victoria Road had reached Uphill and northward. Those early settlers are all gone and most of their homes and farms have disappeared with them. The only remnants are their gravestones in various cemeteries in the area and the rare relative who may still live in the area
The caches in this series will take you along this wonderful road and will provide some history of the lives that were spent here. I hope you can appreciate this environment for its wonderfully eclectic nature. This series is comprised of 6 caches which will provide the necessary information needed to find the 7th cache.
The series consists of the following caches:
Settler despair
Reflections on the past
Stampede
Be prepared to brake
The old drinking hole
4 corners on the North Star
Buzz saw
Record the code found in each of the 6 caches to find the coordinates for the Buzz Saw cache:
Stampede
With the shallow soil in Carden, most of the farming methods brought over with the settlers did not work. The clever settler realized that raising beef cattle on the land was the way to go. Initially, cattle were not fenced in, they were fenced out - out of the crops and gardens. Now the cattle are behind the fences but here in Carden they usually have a few hundred acres to explore. The cattle are put out onto the land in the spring either as young steers that are allowed to fatten up before being sent to the packers in the fall or as cows and calves. The cow/calf operation is my favourite - calves are sometimes born out on the range and it is a great joy to see them running and chasing each other. Life on the range is not an easy life though. In the summer of 2014 at least one steer was hit and killed by lightning. The limestone bedrock tends to form cracks called grykes and these can be wide enough for a cow to break a leg. And coyotes tend to know exactly when a cow is calving.
When the Longford Lumber Co closed its operation in Uphill in 1897, the property became the headquarters for the Digby Ranching Co. which raised beef cattle and shipped them mainly to the U.S. The operation was managed by a man named McGrimmon. Some time around 1904 or 1905, McGrimmon drove 150 head of cattle in to Orillia and loaded them and himself on a train for St. Paul. After collecting the money for the cattle, he was never seen again. "To do things up right he also took along another man's wife and she was never seen again either! This was the end of the Digby Ranching Co."
You may get lucky enough to see the cattle in the corral as the rancher feeds them there on occasion to train them to come in when it's time to take them off the range.