page_title: Gilmour Lumber Company
section_title: The Gilmour Tramway
hierarchical_section_title: Gilmour Lumber Company / The Gilmour Tramway
caption_attribution_description: English: Gilmour tramway trough
context_page_description: The Gilmour Lumber Company was one of the giants of the Canadian timber industry. Their involvement in lumbering began modestly in the 1790s in the area of Glasgow, Scotland where Allan Gilmour Sr. started a small timber merchandising business. In 1804 he entered into a partnership with his cousins John and Arthur and formed Pollock, Gilmour and Company. Pollock, Gilmour and Company became ship owners and imported products in Europe and the Baltic region.
  The Gilmour Lumber Company established its first Canadian branch at Douglastown, New Brunswick, near the mouth of the Miramichi River in 1812. Subsequently, Gilmour opened a sawmill in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. By the 1840s the company was split; with brothers Allan Jr., John and David operating the Quebec City branch, and a younger Allan Gilmour running the Montreal branch under the name Gilmour and Company. They established shipbuilding yards at Quebec City, and Saint John and the Miramichi region of New Brunswick. By the 1840s they commanded a fleet of 130 vessels, one of the largest shipping operations in the world.
  In 1852 Gilmour and Company constructed a sawmill at the Trent Port location along the Bay of Quinte.
context_section_description: Shortly after the auction, winning bidders aggressively began to set up lumber camps in the Algonquin highland forest. Gilmour established a main depot at Tea Lake, several shanty camps along the company's limits and eventually a mill on Canoe Lake in the village of Mowat. But a major obstacle quickly became apparent. Gilmour needed to get their logs to Trenton. Canoe and Tea Lakes did flow into the Oxtongue River, but Oxtongue flowed in the wrong direction, southwesterly into the Lake of Bays and ultimately Georgian Bay. Gilmour needed water transport that flowed southeasterly into the Trent River system. Gilmour's solution was an ingenious piece of environmental engineering. Gilmour would drive his logs down the Oxtongue to Lake of Bays, but once there near the village of Dorset, the logs would be lifted up 36 metres (118 ft) from the Lake of Bays and carried overland 1,800 metres (5,900 ft) to Raven Lake. From Raven Lake the logs could float southeasterly to the Trenton mill.
  The system Gilmour employed was the construction of a "tramway". At the base of Lake of Bays Gilmour would construct a jackladder, a conveyor mechanism that carried the logs up the hillside. At the top Gilmour then would construct a log slide. Filled with flowing water, the log slide would float the timber to a damn. Once at the damn a second jackladder would carry the logs to the mouth of Lake Raven. Jackladders and log slides were not new ideas, the lumber industry had been using them for decades. David Gilmour's feat of engineering genius was putting the existing technologies together.
  The tramway was expensive to construct and maintain. Although mechanized, the operation required over 100 men to operate the engines and monitor the transport the logs along the 1,800 metre journey. A major obstacle was the sheer distance of the journey. Navigating the Ontario waterways, it would take a log drive 445 kilometres (277 mi) to travel from the Algonquin highlands to Trenton. Routinely it could take logs two years to travel from the interior to the Trenton mill, but adding the challenges of the tramway could add an additional 2 years to that journey. A log felled at Canoe Lake in 1894 might not reach Trenton until 1898. Many of the logs rotted or sunk. Because the Algonquin Highland was so far north, the spring thaw occurred much later in the season, shortening the time available for summer log drives before waterways began to freeze up again in the fall. To make matters worse, much of the pine cut from the auctioned tracks was of poor quality. The tramway operated for two seasons before Gilmour abandoned the project in 1896.
caption: Gilmour tramway trough
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