YORK RIVER SETTLEMENT

The Stringer Saga

After his falling out with Sparks in Bytown ( Ottawa ,) John Stringer left with Peter McIntyre and his family and settled near Arnprior along the Madawaska River at Burnstown where he married McIntyre’s daughter Catherine. Among their children were Peter ( named after Grandfather McIntyre,) and John ( named  after himself ,)  both of whom fought for the northern side in the American Civil War. “ Their bones are buried somewhere in the northern states,” says Henry. Another son, Joe, married the Scottish born Isabella McAllister and they raised a family of 12 – 10 boys and 2 girls.

Joe Stringer came to the Conroy area by canoe. Where the York and the Madawaska meet he encountered an Indian, Exzbya Fronsway. “ When Fronsway  spoke he ended his sentences with the expression “ in it,” and if he was really excited he said “ in it tin.”

Stringer asked Fronsway about a good location for a farm. Fronsway replied:

“ You go up this river you are on, in it. You will see a small river on your left hand, in it. Go up that river, over 2 portages, in it. You will find a big pine tree limbs hanging out over the water, in it. A trail leads from there to a lake, in it. A good place for a farm, in it.”

“ Well that Indian made no mistake about that land ( just east of Frazer Lake along the Fort Stewart – Boulter road ) for it is today the best land in the Township of Carlow,”says Henry Taylor.

Of course Joe Stringer couldn’t bring any heavy equipment in the canoe so he had some hand tools, wood augers, brace & bits, and his broadaxe. He hewed pine and built one of those campboose camps with the big wooden smoke stack. He also pinned everything together with hardwood pins. He got work with the Conroy Lumber Company as a hewer because he was an expert broadaxe man. “ He could shave a chalk line all day with that big twelve pound broad axe which had a fourteen inch blade. And never miss a stroke.”

According to Taylor the Conroy Lumber Company had everything on the York River watershed while the Helyard and Dixon Lumber Company had all the watershed of the Little Mississippi River. “ That’s the way they divided up the timber in unsurveyed country,” says Taylor. “ As long as they were going down hill along the rivers they knew they were in the right place.”

At this time, according to Taylor, the Conroy Marsh was a big soft maple and black ash swamp. The Indians tapped the maples as a sugar bush using birch sap buckets. In March they could walk to the trees to tap. In April the swamp flooded and the Indians had to paddle to gather the sap. ” Of course the white man always messed up the Indian way of life. In this case it was the Conroy Lumber Company who built a dam on the Madawaska River at Palmer Rapids and flooded the Indians’ sugar bush, and thus formed the Conroy Marsh about nine miles long. “

Joe Stringer lived there just like the Indians for he hunted and trapped with them.  “ On one occasion Fronsway came to hunt with my grandfather and brought his squaw and small son with him. The boy was 7 or 8 years old. They left the boy and his mother with my grandmother and went for the hunt near Ballard’s lake. That little Indian was too shy; they couldn’t coax him into the shanty. Grandmother coaxed him for a long time and finally got dinner ready and she said :’ Come in you little Windigo and get something to eat.’”

“ At that the boy took off for the river as hard as he could run and the squaw after him. When the hunters returned they wanted to know where the boy and squaw were. When grandmother told them they both started to laugh for she had unknowingly called the lad an evil spirit.