Gaye I Clemson

Governor Smith's Ontario Retreat Gaye I Clemson

In early 1896, just as the Ottawa, Arnprior and Parry Sound Railway (O. A.& PS) was nearly finished, Edson Chamberlin, the then General Manager of the Canada Atlantic Railway (C. A. R.) was granted by the Ontario Government over 25,000 acres of patent land around Victoria Lake. East of the newly created Algonquin National Park his intent was to build a hunting lodge and use the area as his own personal recreation reserve. This desire to experience the wilderness was part of a growing movement where people (mostly men) headed to the wilds in order to escape their urban lives and industrial jobs. The idea was to leave the Victorian perspectives of gentility, respectability, self-mastery and restraint (to a fault sometimes) behind and recapture a rougher, more primitive identity in a frontier environment. Soon after, Chamberlin built himself a hunting lodge on the south end of the lake and transferred some of the lots to business partner (and one presumes friend) Col. Edward Curtis Smith the then President of the Central Vermont Railway. Like Chamberlin, Smith loved the outdoors and in 1897, built himself a large ten-bedroom and five-bathroom lodge on the north end of the lake, which he named Camp Madawaska. Two years later he was elected Governor of the State of Vermont and served for a standard two-year term. Nearly ten miles from the closest town and the railway line, this narrative captures the story of Smith, his lodge and the family, (Wilmot and Victoria Hamilton) who with their 15 children were the lodge and the lake's caretakers and protectors for over 50 years.