The Fossmill Story wins Best History Book Award
Toronto, Ontario: On May 5. 2001 First time authors and small publishers
Doug and Paul Mackey were awarded the Ontario Historical Society’s Fred
Landon Award for the best book on regional history in Ontario for the year
2000 for their book The Fossmill Story: Life in a Railway Lumbering Village
on the Edge of Algonquin Park.
Bryan Walls, the OHS president, noted that the book tells the “story
of the beginnings of an isolated village built around a lumber mill in
the 1920s, the intertwined lives of its people, and its return to wilderness…Two
threads run through this tale - the workings of the lumber camps and mills,
and the daily lives of the families whose lives revolved around them. Work,
school, church, sports and a variety of social activities are portrayed
here, both in the lucid text and the numerous illustrations that vividly
depict those Depression years.”
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The photo shows OHS president Bryan Walls presenting the
award to Doug and Paul Mackey. The incoming president of the OHS Frank
Bartoszek is behind them.
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In 1995 Doug Mackey, a retired teacher, and his son Paul, history buff,
photographer and aspiring publisher, began to research the history of the
ghost town which is located near Doug’s home in Chisholm Township south-east
of North Bay near Algonquin Park. They interviewed over 50 people who lived
in the village. Paul, who lives in Toronto, spent hours in archives
and libraries reading old logging magazines, forestry student reports and
looking at old maps to reconstruct the village. In 1996 they discovered
a 1934 film of the logging, railway and mill operations in Fossmill and
produced the successful video Logging by Rail in Algonquin Park.
The Mackeys formed their own publishing company, Past Forward Heritage,
to produce the video and the book. Doug Mackey said that they had originally
written “text heavy history, but decided to cut the text down and focus
on the dramatic stories and fascinating characters in the village. We also
had accumulated hundreds of photographs and decided to feature them in
the book.”
Paul, who also did the book design and layout, said “I had the idea
of a dramatic relationship between the photographs and the story. I like
to see the photos alongside the story and I like the photos big with the
text flowing around them.”
Coincidental to the OHS Award, the Mackeys have just released their
second book My Childhood in the Bush. They co-wrote the book with Rebecca
Atkins from North Bay who grew up in the railway village of Brent in Algonquin
Park from 1913 to 1919. The book is her memoir of those years and also
features her photographs of the era. Past Forward’s books and video are
available in many bookstores and directly from them. They have a web site
at www.pastforward.ca.
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