The Shadow of the Rock – Bon Echo's Story by Marg Axford

reviewed by Jeff Green | Jan 24, 2024

Mazinaw Rock's first recorded history had been maintained in the rock for centuries, perhaps millennia, in the form of red ochre pictographs, some 135 of them, that were painted on the rock, likely by Ojibwe artists. There are similarities between the Mazinaw Rock pictographs and others at sites along the Lake Superior shoreline.

Settlement on Lake Mazinaw and the surrounding region, began in about 1830, and within decades the land around the rock, which had been dominated by White Pine forests, had been denuded by unrelenting clear cut logging, but the rock remained, along with a hard scrabble farming community, which was separated from the outside world by a difficult to navigate road south to Kaladar.

Then, in 1897, Dr. Weston Price, a dentist from Cleveland who was born in Newburgh, and his new bride Florence, came paddling up what was then called Massinog Lake to the rock, setting in motion a series of remarkable events that form the bulk of the story in the new book by Marg Axford, The Shadow of the Rock.

Using archival material from the Cloyne Pioneer Museum and other sources, Axford has put together a compelling narrative in this 70 page book.

Weston Price decided to purchase the land and open a tourist hotel. Within two years, he began to build an inn, in the style of the large inns in the Muskokas and Adirondacks.

It was an audacious plan. As Axford points out, “It is difficult now to look back and try and imagine why someone would choose to buy land here in order to build a tourist hotel.”

She talked to some of Weston Price's descendents who assume that Price and his wife, “being religiously minded, were interested in building a place where visitors would come to meditate in an atmosphere of quiet beauty.”

Within two summers, Price and his crew had constructed the main lodge, 5 cottages, a staff house, a boat house, laundry, an ice house, water tower, docks, a bridge across the narrows and an iron staircase up the face, and to the top of the rock.

The inn was open for 8 weeks in the summer in those early years, and since most of the records were eventually destroyed, it is hard to know how many visitors took the hours-long trip from Kaladar north to spend between $9 and $15 for a one week stay at the inn.

One family that came to the inn, in the summer of 1901, were the Denisons; Howard Denison, Flora Macdonald Denison, and their young son Merrill.

They stayed in the Royal Suite, and quickly decided they wanted to buy the inn, which had been named the Bon Eco Resort.

The Price's were not selling, having just finished building the place, so the Denison's bought a lot nearby.

When the Price's son took ill, ten years later, they were willing to sell, and Flora Macdonald bought the inn at that point, for $13,000, which included an island and a large tract of land.

There is a history of strong, determined, women, in the communities surrounding what is now Bon Echo Park, but it is fair to say there has never been anyone else quite like Flora Macdonald.

She was a writer, a suffragette of note, a spiritualist, a devotee of Walt Whitman, and a seamstress, in addition to being a less than successful resort owner. Although there are very few references to her husband Howard in her writings, her devotion to her son Merrill is well documented.

She brought all of this to Bon Echo, including dinner plates with “Votes for Women” engraved on them.

She became the President of the Canadian Suffragette Association in 1911, but was ousted in 1914 because her radical feminism was too much for the rest of the group. Women won the right to vote in Ontario, in 1917.

Flora Macdonald saw the inn as a “haven for artists, thinkers, writers, and spiritualists, all under the northern lights, beneath the great cliffs”, said Betty Tennant, in an article she wrote about Flora. Among those were people devoted to the poetry and thinking of Walt Whitman. Whose ‘Leaves of Grass’ is among the most famous poems in American literature of the late 19th century.

Horace Traubel, Whitman's literary secretary and one of his biographers, made an ill-fated trip to Bon Echo in 1919, to officially christen what Flora called the Whitman monument, which had been carved into the rock.

He was in poor health, and early in his stay he reported to Flora that one evening, Whitman (who died in 1892) had come to him and said “come on”. Ten days later, after the dedication ceremony, Traubel died.

The Flora years at Bon Echo were certainly tumultuous, but among all of the scrambles in her life, she wrote a series of pamphlets, Sunset of Bon Echo, that have survived and provide a glimpse into the thinking of her insights.

She took ill with pneumonia, and died in 2021, at the age of 54.

Her son Merrill, a playwright, novelist, and corporate historian of considerable renown, took over the inn in 2021. A steady stream of his Toronto-based contemporaries visited the inn through the 1920s, including members of the Group of Seven painters, but the inn was showing its age, and required a significant investment in order to be viable into more modern times.

Merrill did not have the finances that were required, but all of that became mute when the main lodge burned to the ground in the fall of 1936. The cause of the fire was recorded as being a lightning strike, but there is some doubt about that since there were no storms reported that night. There were only a few people in the inn at the time of the fire, since it was the off-season, and luckily no one was on the third floor. No one died or was seriously injured in the fire, but all of the records and memorabilia documenting thirty years of the Bon Echo Inn went up in flames.

Merrill Denison, who was away at the time of the fire, continued to spend his summers in one of the cottages at Bon Echo for decades. He wanted Mazinaw Rock to remain a centre for arts and culture, and after a few plans did not come to fruition, he eventually made arrangements to transfer the land to the Province of Ontario for the establishment of Bon Echo Park.

While the Bon Echo Inn gave Mazinaw Rock a public profile in literary and artistic circles in Toronto, it was never what could be called a successful business. The park, which took its name, has been an economic driver for the region, rivalling the impact of the summer influx of cottagers in the local economy thanks to the 200,000 visitors who come every summer to camp out, swim, hike and canoe in the shadow of the rock.

“In The Shadow of the Rock” is a quick and interesting read. Axford has distilled decades of research into a compelling story that is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of North Frontenac and Addington Highlands.

It is available through the Cloyne and District Historical Society and copies will be on sale at the Cloyne Pioneer Museum in the summer.