Fieldale Lodge

 

Fieldale Lodge from the water, with one of the lodge’s rowboats in foreground (Karen Ross)

The lakeside cabins, and later the boathouse, of Fieldale Lodge were landmarks on Rebecca Lake beginning in the 1930s into the early 1970s. Established on the site of an old lumber camp by Robert Adam Field, youngest son of settler Henry Field, and his wife Caroline in 1933, Fieldale catered to guests as well as being a setting-out and supply point at the end of a very rough road for early cottagers.

Field Family

Henry and Ann Field were among those emigrants from England who were looking for a more hopeful future and were attracted to Muskoka by the promise of free land grants. Henry chose lots in Sinclair near Pell Lake, building his shanty and clearing a road to his lots by 1877, when he sent for his wife and two sons to join him. Three more boys were born in Sinclair. The location came to be called “Field’s Corners,” as the intersection – slightly off the surveyed line to circumvent some challenging terrain – of the Sinclair and the future Sinclair-Finlayson Roads. By the 1900s, the Field family had extensive farming and lumbering interests, including lots used for lumbering around Bella and Rebecca Lakes. In 1914, however, an explosion at the lumber mill Henry had recently set up on Pell Lake killed two of his sons, William and George, and Ann died several months later. Henry remarried and moved to Grassmere in 1918.

Henry Field (Barbara Paterson Collection)	Robert Field (Karen Ross)	Caroline (Adams) Field (Karen Ross)

Fieldale on Rebecca Lake

Henry’s son Robert, a lumberman and millwright, had married Caroline Adams in 1910 and lived first in Huntsville, then at Field’s Corners until 1923, when the family moved to Bracebridge. They returned to Sinclair at the end of the decade and had moved to Rebecca Lake by 1933. The story of Caroline and her piano, arriving by raft from Kells Landing, with husband Robert rowing, was told by David Burgess, whose family stayed at Fieldale in the 1950s. David’s mother Kay remembered the piano as a central feature of Fieldale Lodge, where guests would join Carrie after dinner for songs and hymns.

The “Homestead,” April 1, 1939 (Karen Ross)	Lakeside cabins, April 1, 1939 (Karen Ross)

Road access was an early priority. Robert and his son cleared, and Edgar Brook graded, an extension of the road from Brook’s Mill between the lakes to reach the site of the lumber camp that was to become Fieldale Lodge. The main lodge, the “Homestead,” which had been the camp’s stable, sat partway up the hill; the Fields built small cabins on the shore and by 1942 a boathouse. Robert sold some of his property on Rebecca and Bella Lakes, including Buck Island Point, as cottage lots in the 1950s, and in 1958 he registered a plan for 24 cottage lots on the two lakes, naming the two access roads “Robert” and “Caroline” Streets.

Cutting ice on Rebecca Lake (Karen Ross)	Caroline Field at the “Homestead” (Karen Ross)

Into the 1970s

The Fieldale Lodge property, however, was purchased in 1967 by Jack and Bobbie Welsh (a daughter of Limberlost owners Gordon and Marion Hill) from Robert’s and Caroline’s daughter Linda McKinnon, who had inherited the property along with her sister Carrie after the deaths of their parents in the early 1960s. A devastating fire in February 1969 destroyed the main Homestead, which had just been renovated the previous year.

Fieldale boathouse in the early 1960s (Township of Lake of Bays, Barbara Paterson Collection Box 4, Selkirk binder photo album)	Main lodge renovation, February 1968 (Bobbie Welsh)	Fire destroys the Homestead in February 1969, less than a year after a major renovation (Bobbie Welsh)

The Welshes had registered a subdivision plan for cottage lots on Rebecca Lake between the lodge and the narrows, but they sold the boathouse and the “house up the hill” to Morris Woloshyn, a previous Fieldale employee. Fieldale Lodge and Marina operated into the 1970s under the co-ownership of John Grafton and Neville Garrard, until another fire consumed the boathouse. Cottagers along the shoreline now fondly recall their link with the Fieldale property.

Fieldale and its shoreline from the lake, 1968 (Billie Bear Archive, Gertrude Davis Slide Collection)

Sources:

Burgess, David, “Fieldale Road” (presentation at Lake of Bays Library, Dwight, October 2013).

 

Huntsville Forester, October 25, 1923, “Grassmere,” p. 3, and “Society,” p. 8.

 

Mansell, W. Dan, and Carolyn Paterson, eds., Pioneer Glimpses from Sinclair Township, Muskoka (Peterborough: asiOtus Natural Heritage Consultants, Barbara Paterson Papers, 2015).