Jackfish, Ontario: Memories of a Lake Superior Ghost Town

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Jackfish, Ontario, is a real ghost town. When I visit, I imagine the wind whistling through the bulkheads of the old coal freighters that once plied Lake Superior to get there.

Now the wind buffets through the rock cuts that guard both ends of the abandoned village on the mainline of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The spirit of the past is present in the reality of today. I always feel it.

And I hear it … I have “Jackfish ears” that let me differentiate between the sounds of the waves, the wind and the trains. “There’s a train coming,” I tell visitors as we walk the woods that are Jackfish today, and sure enough, the train does come.

The town came and left, it seems, on the rails, and my family history is tied to those tracks, still active, and the town, now mostly disappeared.

I grew up with photos of Jackfish still alive with families. Today my grown children, Luke, Bret and Kate, when they get the chance, love to walk among the disintegrating homes and cabins with me. There is a sense of ownership in them. My parents were married in a little church on a hill and I spent my early years there. Memories are tied up in the lake, the railway and in the characters who called the small town home.

I remember as a boy standing by my father in the early 1950s as a diesel-engine train pulled into Jackfish. I was in awe of the big diesel; my father was quiet. He and the other townspeople knew this “new technology” meant the end was at hand for their town and way of life.

Jackfish did exist before the Canadian Pacific Railway discovered it. The location had been a minor stopover for fur traders and by the late 1870s, when the C.P.R. surveyors came, the small village was home to some hardscrabble Scandinavian fishermen and their families. “Jackfish” is another name for northern pike.

When the C.P.R. surveyors came through, looking for the best path to lay the tracks crossing Canada, the town’s protected natural harbour attracted them. Steam engines can only go so far without coal and water; Jackfish was the perfect, safe place to unload coal from freighters hauling it west from Pennsylvania. Even before the tracks arrived, the town became a focal point for construction of the Lake Superior section of the C.P.R., beginning in the early 1880s. Ships of rail supplies came into Jackfish bearing “ties, switches, rails, spikes, timbers, kerosene, coal, flour, meat” … and explosives. “The C.P.R. had three dynamite factories built at and near Jackfish to speed up construction,” says an unpublished history kept in the Thunder Bay Museum. “They literally ‘blew their way forward,’” the author writes.

The spike linking the northern tracks was pounded on May 16, 1885, at Noslo, just a stone’s throw west of Jackfish. A monument and plaque celebrating the last spike that united the rail between Montreal, Quebec, and Winnipeg, Manitoba, still exists, but no roads or trails lead to the site; Noslo, too, has disappeared.

The history of Jackfish as a bustling community stretches from the 1880s to the arrival of the diesel engine in the late 1940s when Jackfish lost its stopover role. Diesel engines did not need to stop for coal and water on their long run along the rugged north shore.

An average of 30 to 40 coal freighters docked each year at the 200-metre-long (600-foot) wooden trestle dock constructed about 1895. During summer when the boats arrived, more than 300 men were employed to unload them. Many of these transient workers then shifted to the fruit farms of the southern United States when Lake Superior shipping shut down for winter.

At its peak, Jackfish had a resident and transient population of about 500. My grandfathers were employed by the railway. One was a coal-yard superintendent and the other a station-to-station agent. My mom and dad courted, married and lived in Jackfish.

In addition to its C.P.R. jobs, Jackfish maintained a fishing community. People could make a living supplying lake trout packed in ice to major centres like Montreal and Toronto and for meals in the passenger train dining cars. A minor economic resource around 1910 was selling pebbles mostly from Pebble Beach to be used for grinding stones or cement industry.

Pebble Beach is still one of my favorite places on the planet. I always end my visits these days to Jackfish with a trip to this long cobbled area east of town. Wide open to Lake Superior and very deep just offshore, this beach has treated me to the many moods of the inland sea, from flat calm to towering, rampaging waves. Occasionally, a family of ravens will share the beach with me. They may be descendants of the town, as I am, because there is a nest that I check yearly, high on one of the rock walls leading into Jackfish.

I spent summers in Jackfish at our cabin there, and it was an idyllic childhood time. There was never any lack of stuff to do. I had no fear of the woods, so I’d go prowling in the bush. My father had an old rowboat and I’d row around a lot. You’d get into all kinds of things that you’d imagine Huckleberry Finn might do, like crawling under houses or daydreaming on the huge flat rock that was 100 metres (300 feet) from our home but felt like it was 40 kilometres (25 miles) away. You couldn’t see the house from there.

Sometimes Mom would join me there with a picnic lunch, or she and I would go across the bay to pick berries. With our small boat and its 5 horsepower motor, we got caught a couple of times in waves we shouldn’t have been in.

Jackfish was a feisty community and lively. There were the C.P.R. offices, the rail station (passenger trains stopped), rail sheds and railway employee homes along with those of fishermen – about 30 total – as well as a general store, the 26-room Lakeview Hotel (and its highly frequented beer parlour), a one-room school house and two churches.

The usual women’s clubs and a Boy Scout troop sprang up. The Jackfish Fish Derby was considered the “best in North America” for a time, when catching a 20-pound fish was common. In summer, the townsfolk would organize a Sunday baseball game against the crew of whatever freighter happened to be in town.

In winter, the Jackfish hockey team dominated the North Shore Hockey Association, often winning against Schreiber, Rossport, White River and Nipigon. In those early days, players used magazines for padding, according to Thunder Bay Museum’s history collection.

For a time during World War II, the population of the area increased due to unfortunate, racist fears of the time. Japanese-Canadian men were brought from British Columbia to work construction and live at a camp built at Mile 101. Not much remains to remind us of that dark period.

Old-timers will tell you that the end was quick for Jackfish. For the fishing industry, the sea lamprey invasion decimated lake trout by the 1950s. Meanwhile, planners of the upcoming Trans Canada highway, proposed in the 1930s, decided to bypass Jackfish by a few kilometres, which added to its demise.

As to the real economic lifeblood of the community – incoming coal – it was first thought that the 1938 decision by the C.P.R. to use western coal brought by rail would kill Jackfish. No coal freighters came to town that year. That death knell was premature, though, as the Alberta coal proved to be low-steam producing and not efficient for the engines. The restart of Pennsylvania coal-laden freighters arriving was only a short reprieve for Jackfish. A new technology – engines powered by diesel fuel – ended those boat arrivals permanently in 1948. By the early 1950s, there was no need for the train to stop for coal at all and soon thereafter even the passenger stops at the local station ended. By 1964, the permanent residents had left town and a seasonal population continued for a time.

Just before the last exodus, the Lakeview Hotel burned down one night in 1960. It burned so quickly that I think even the nails were made of wood. We still have one piece of fused glass from the bar. Foundations of the hotel remain as reminders of the town, but the mighty coal dock and its overhead coal hopper are gone.

Some people left reluctantly, some gladly. A few left belongings behind with the idea that they would return one day. Perhaps they thought the diesel was a fad. But their houses are now rotting into the woods, nearly hidden. People who lived there became scattered. Some moved to Terrace Bay to work in the paper mill while others moved farther away.

It became open season in Jackfish. Souvenir hunters and opportunists looking for cheap lumber descended on the site. My cabin, originally with five rooms and a full veranda, had all the interior lumber and roof rafters cut out. Reduced to one large room, I jury-rigged the building, and it ably served as a summer retreat for several years. One spring, though, I found the roof on the floor. Its age, reduced structural integrity and heavy winter snow caused its crash.

In reflection, helping yourself to someone else’s apparently abandoned treasure is often difficult to suppress. I once found an old copy of Dante’s Inferno, complete with the Gustav Doré engravings, on my wanderings into decrepit buildings. I tossed around the idea, but finally left it. It felt like I was plundering from myself.

These days, my wife Vicki and I still poke around the village, explore grown-over landfills and sit beside the fire pit on our property. Lake Superior is just across the tracks. Jackfish’s history is still on display in the shards of glass, pottery and polished coal fragments that continue to wash up on the village’s sand beach. Maker names can be found on larger bits of china and this makes me wonder about the teas, socials and ordinary lives of all the forgotten townspeople.

Jackfish continues to be listed in travel guides as an authentic ghost town. Consequently, the site remains a destination for the curious and the passionate. To get there from our Thunder Bay home, we drive three hours east on Highway 17 and through Terrace Bay. About 25 kilometres later (15.5 miles), past the large highway hill that runs up from Jackfish Lake, the village’s namesake, a gravel road heads down to Lake Superior. At the end of this road, an overgrown yet passable bush trail takes us right into Jackfish. This is the recommended route. I can remember my father and a group of men pitching in to carve this road out of the bush.

Otherwise, the only way in was by boat or by rail. Walking the tracks is legally discouraged today because of the danger posed by the new generation of diesel engines. They are relatively quiet despite their size and can sneak up on an unsuspecting hiker.

A link to the past can be found in the names of sailors or boats and other messages painted on boulders from as far back as the early 1900s. The permanence of the paint amazes me; the words remain legible after the heat, cold, rain, sun, snow and frost of a century. Sadly, the words are becoming fainter. By infinitesimal degrees, the “I was here” of the old sailors is disappearing.

My family’s legacy here is fading, too, though I often come back to remember and to appreciate what remains – the beauty of the rugged destination and the lingering whisper from its past residents. Sometimes I stroll along the tracks, but remember, I have Jackfish ears. I can hear the train coming, the train that can bring life and death to a small northern Lake Superior town.

Lyle Nicol is a Thunder Bay writer who has lived near Lake Superior most of his life. He owns property in Jackfish and makes several trips a year to the old village.