Trestle at Parry Sound, 1914

Trestle at Parry Sound, 1914. . Tom Thomson paddled into the mouth of the Seguin River one evening in mid-July, 1914. He had come from Go Home Bay, stopping to stay in the South Channel for a few days. Seeing the new CPR trestle, the longest bridge east of the Rockies, and the Parry Sound Lumber Company aglow in the setting sun, he selected one of his 8" by 10" wooden boards, and made this evocative sketch in less than an hour., Today Tom Thomson is acknowledged as Canada's foremost painter. Those small wooden boards he gave to friends can be worth more than a million dollars., What he saw in 1914: Fifty years after the lumbering began, logs, arriving down the river, are trimmed and cut in the mills. The river is dammed; both shores are lined with tramways, thousands of board feet of lumber piled high, waiting to be loaded in ships. The lumber goes to railheads around the Great Lakes to build the cities of North America and the world., Seven years later, the last of the mills had burned to the ground, and Parry Sound had welcomed the first of the cruise ships with visitors to enjoy the natural beauty of the area., Caption: Tom Thomson, Trestle at Parry Sound, 1914 From a private collection