I would have never guessed this is where I'd end up. I hated history class in high school. Research - no thanks! English class was a slog, just barely passing with a 55%. Yet here I am at 42, knee deep into another local history story, pulling back the pages of time and piercing a beam of light through the fog of forgotten memories. I'm crafting a story, scribbling down thoughts that hopefully invoke an emotional response. New (to me) cinema camera in hand, I'm tracking down the history and untold story of the last large scale commercial water powered sawmill in Ontario.
This is a story about the Balaclava Sawmill
For the past few years, my video interests have shifted away from motorsports and towards short films that showcase local history, with a specific interest in abandoned places. I find great satisfaction in hunting through old books and archives, looking for documentation and photographs, and putting the pieces together that tell the story of a place that is no more, from a time that has been forgotten. It's a modern day treasure hunt!
Of all the ghost structures in Renfrew County, the Balaclava Sawmill is undoubtedly the prized crown jewel. This instantly recognizable mill stands tall in the small ghost town of Balaclava Ontario, just a few kilometers outside of Dacre. Somewhat miraculously, it has dodged the bullet of the wrecking ball, thumbed it's nose at mother nature, and yawned at the cutting blade of progress. It's an enigma from a time that no longer exists, and a way of life that has moved on.
Of all the ghost structures in Renfrew County, the Balaclava Sawmill is undoubtedly the prized crown jewel
My last two short films feel like a practice exercise, one that was ultimately preparing me for this video. The Balaclava mill is an icon in Renfrew County, and the Ottawa Valley. It represents a key industry in the area - logging. Foundational to the development of nearly every small town in the Valley, logging and the mills that transformed raw materials into the necessities of life, can be best described as the backbone for which everything else was built upon. To give one of the last standing structures it's proper due, this video needed to reach higher in quality, and dig deeper in substance. It's a challenge that I took very serious. It both invigorated and terrified me. However, given the current state of the mill, and fading memories in the minds of those closest to the mill, the urgency of documenting this structure has captured my attention. So in the late fall of 2023, I set out with my video camera and drone and made the slow winding drive down the old Opeongo Line, pushing further into the past with each passing minute, to the sleepy ghost town of Balaclava.
The burning question I tried to answer in this video was "why has the mill not been saved?"
The burning question I tried to answer in this video was "why has the mill not been saved?" My research lead me to two very interesting discoveries, one of which has a tie to the failed Timbertown theme park that never materialized.
The first discovery was found in The Opeongo by the late S. Bernard Shaw. This book documents the history and stopping places of the Opeongo colonization road built in the 1850's. Along with all the villages on the road, he also writes about a few of the noteworthy villages along some of the offshoot roads, Balaclava being one of them. One sentence jumped off the pages - "Fortunately all the machinery has been rescued and is stored by the National Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa."
I was as excited as a kid on Christmas day! I emailed the museum and was eventually connected with an employee by the name of William Knight. After a few more emails had been exchanged, I was given a private tour of the surviving machinery in the newly built Ingenium storage warehouse. With my video camera in hand, I was able to video document the surviving equipment of the Balaclava Mill.
The second discovery was found in Life Along the Opeongo Line by the late Joan Finnigan. Joan interviewed numerous individuals tied to the history of the Ottawa Valley over the years, one of them being Dave Lemkay, the marketing manager for Timbertown in the 1980's. Timbertown was an ambitious plan to create a theme park based on the history of logging. It was to include a timber slide, logging shanty, and a functioning water powered sawmill. The project failed to secure enough investment. Dave Lemkay claims that in the dying days of the project, "... the Dicks [family] of Balaclava offered the whole site there, 500 acres with waterfront, as a lumbering village in the place of Timbertown. Can you believe they turned it down? It was an 'instant site' - log buildings, ice house, old mill, storehouses, shed, old general store with all the furnishings, classic houses - all on Constant Creek, which had been used to run logs in the old days. The mill was the only one of its kind in Canada."
The village of Balaclava, along with the old mill, was within inches of being saved and turned into a theme park, much like Upper Canada Village. Why was the offer turned down? I guess we'll never know now.
The village of Balaclava, along with the old mill, was within inches of being saved and turned into a theme park
While Joan Finnigan and the Museum of Science and Technology have done an excellent job preserving the history of the old mill, one author stands above the crowd. Brenda Lee-Whiting wrote two excellent articles of the mill while it was still operational back in the 1960's. One chapter of her book The Way it was in the Ottawa Valley is dedicated to the mill. This is an extremely rare book and expensive to purchase, so I suggest checking with your local library to see if they carry a copy. The second article is found in the February 1967 edition of the Canadian Geographic Journal, which is again a very difficult journal to track down. I was fortunate that the Museum of Science and Technology had a copy of this article in their collection of documents relating to the mill. You can download the PDF here for your reading pleasure.
Brenda Lee-Whiting was also a terrific photographer. Her photographs of the Balaclava mill are the only ones I know of in existence to showcase the mill in it's final years of operation, including photos from inside the mill. Before her passing, the black & white negatives of the Balaclava mill were donated to the Museum of Science and Technology. During my visit to view the machinery, William Knight also allowed me to view the negatives along with some aerial photos and floor plans. The team at the museum were kind enough to scan the negatives for me, and with permission from Brenda's niece Susan Wilson, I was able to include theses rare and historic photos in my video.
My vision for this documentary video was to have a former employee of the mill revisit the sawmill and then interview them with the mill in the background. While I was able to make contact with one of the former workers, because of his age and health, an interview was out of the question. However, I was able to arrange the next best thing - an interview with the current owner of the mill! Ken Verch purchased what remained of the sawmill business in 2016. This included land that is still being logged, the old general store, and the mill building. Ken had a personal connection to the Balaclava mill. His father worked at the mill in the final years, and the previous owner, Dave Dick, was his uncle. This video would not have been possible had it not been for Ken allowing me access to the property (so long as I didn't enter the mill!) and for the great interview where he reminisced about the past and speculated about the future of the old mill. Thanks Ken!
A basic history of the mill is as follows:
Built in 1855 by Duncan Ferguson & Donald Cameron
Sold to Henry Ferguson in 1859
Sold to the Richards Family in 1868
Embroiled in the first environment lawsuit in 1911
Burnt in 1936
Was rebuilt using boards and beams salvaged from the dismantling of Hunters mill just downstream
Sold to David Dick in 1957
Ceased operations in 1967
Sold to Ken Verch in 2016
I hope I have done this old structure justice.
This video turned out exactly as I had hoped. The Canon C200 cinema camera has exceeded my expectation in video quality, color rendition, and the RAW video format allows for greater control in the color grading process. There was one equipment causality that really stung though. My DJI Mini 2 drone decided to fly away on me! With 22% battery still remaining, connection to the drone was lost. Normally this would trigger the return-to-home feature, however, after waiting a few minutes, it was clear this drone was not coming home! Losing the drone was bad, but I also lost all the video as well! In it's place, I purchased the new DJI Mini 3 Pro. The Pro version added a new color profile called D-Cinilike, which is a 10 bit video in a pseudo "log" format. The color from this new drone is absolutely beautiful, and like the C200, the ability to color grade is greatly improved thanks to the new color profile.
I hope I have done this old structure justice. I'm very proud of the video and I can't wait to show it off! It's currently entered into 4 local film festivals, so fingers crossed some of the judges like Ottawa Valley history. I'll likely release the video in January 2025, but until then, enjoy the short trailer!
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