The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

occasional hunters or fishermen came to the area, by common consent, they guided them away from their best hunting and fishing grounds. For many years the natives were the only inhabitants of this part of the country. Their way of travel was by canoe -- their highway, the Magnetawan River system--or by foot on well known paths established in the forest. I have heard no mention of horses being used in the days before logging and settlement came to disturb the native way of life. There were some private explorations made in the early eighteen hundreds. Rev. Firman was minister of the United Church in Magnetawan from 1964 to 1969. He wrote a small work which he called "God's Country". He speaks of these explorations in his book. These brought about no settlement of the area. In government files the area went by various names. In 1788 it was called the Nassau District, Province of Quebec. In 1872 it was renamed the Home District of Upper Canada. As late as 1859 the area remained relatively untouched by the white man. The government planned to turn the entire district into a gigantic Indian reservation. But, time was running out for the peaceful life of the natives in God's Country. The great white pine forests in Southern Ontario had been depleted. Lumber companies were looking to the north for new sources of pine. They moved into the area bringing their crews. Samuel Armstrong is reported to have had lumber camps on Ahmic Lake as early as 1865. The Ministry of Natural Resources in Parry Sound wrote the following for the history: "In 1868 or 1869, Chapman and half of Croft Townships and parts of Ryerson and Spence were licensed to Wm. E. and Anson Dodge of New York and Pennsylvania. They built a mill near the mouth of the Magnetawan River on Georgian Bay to saw logs floated down from Ahmic and Cecebe Lakes. They also exported hewn timber {long sticks flattened on both sides}. The Dodges erected an inland depot at Port Anson on the Nipissing Road, to serve as headquarters and supply centre for the lumber camps. Just when actual cutting began is not known but it must have been late in the 1860s. The depot was in operation as early as 1869 and there were logging camps on Lake Cecebe at least as early as 1872. The Dodges {father and son} first came to Canada in 1867. The enterprise started by Dodge went through several changes of name and ownership:-The Magnetawan Lumber Company, Georgian Bay Lumber Company, Merrill and Ring, Holland and Emery, Holland and Graves and finally Graves Bigwood. The last named surrendered the timber limit when they wound up operations in the 1920s." At the same time as the pine trees were disappearing in southern Ontario, the fertile acres there were getting well settled. There were still people in Europe and the British Isles who for various reasons were looking for new lands in which to settle. The government looked to the north. In 1853 a Free Grant Land Act had attempted to open up areas for settlement but progress was slow because of the lack of roads into the areas offered for free grants. By 1861 the government had changed its mind about leaving this area as a large Indian reserve and decided to take steps to offer it for free grants. The first step was a colonization road. This was the well-known Rosseau- Nipissing Road running from Rosseau on Lake Joseph to Nipissing on Lake Nipissing, a total of 70 miles. It was plotted in 1864, surveyed by Ontario Public Land Surveyor J. S. Dennis in 1865 and started in 1866. In return for certain timber privileges the Dodge Lumber Company was contracted to build the road. Then the lots along both sides of the road were surveyed as Concession A and Concession B. 2