The Coboconk Dam
In the years leading up to the First World War, Fred Peel worked at Grip Ltd., a Toronto design firm that published a satirical magazine Grip. Many members of the Group of Seven met while working for this company, and Fred became a close friend of J.E.H. MacDonald. J.E.H. would become one of Canada’s most famous landscape artists, as would his son Thoreau MacDonald. After these friends left the Grip, Fred Peel managed Coboconk’s Gull River Lumber Company Mill (built 1913) and J.E.H. often stayed at his cottage on the Gull River around 1920.
While visiting Coboconk, J.E.H. MacDonald produced a few nationally renowned pieces including Cattle by the Creek (1918) and River Pastures, Gull River of 1922. Perhaps his most memorable Coboconk painting was Mill at Coboconk. After MacDonald passed away in 1932, Sampson-Matthews Ltd. began producing silkscreen reproductions of notable Canadian paintings, initially for the armed forces. The first silkscreen was produced in 1941, and by the time the project ended in 1963, 117 different images had been produced and distributed across Canada, including the Mill at Coboconk—making this scene an iconic Canadian image.
Mill at Coboconk shows the Coboconk dam, circa 1920, with the bait shack and Simon Plewes’ grist mill on the river bank. Coboconk’s Anglican Church appears in the background—since then Peel deigned a new steeple for it. Much of the commercial activity in Coboconk occurred in close proximity to the dam. On the opposite (west shore), Cronk and Bateman’s sawmill would become a tannery, then the Sunset Dye Factory. The mill that Peel managed was just across the pond to the northwest, where the river bent to northeast on its way to Silver Lake.
In 1939, the Coboconk dam was replaced with a new concrete barrier just downstream, which continued to be a very active part of the community. For many years, fishing from the dam was popular, as it served as the (unofficial) pedestrian bridge. In those days, when the dam was a centre of community activity, there were no railings on the structure. Today, railings have been added, but pedestrians can no longer cross and many people might not realize that the vista looking across this dam was once a famous piece of Canadiana.
