Pioneer profiles: Woman’s life provides fascinating segment of local history
by Keely Grasser
Oct 10, 2007
SUNDRIDGE – Margaret Clark was a master botanist, an educated multi-linguist and a frog farmer.
She was a writer and a researcher, both well-read and well-travelled.
She’s also a memorable figure in the recent history of the Sundridge area, even if the remarkable facts about this decades-deceased woman aren’t well-known.
What is well-known, or well-remembered, is Clark’s presence and the dozens of tidbits of information about the mysterious woman’s life, whether fact, fiction or legend — or somewhere in between.
Most small communities have that one person — perhaps a free-thinker, a hermit, an oddball with lofty dreams — that stick to the collective memory and spawn countless unofficial entries into local history.
Margaret Clark is Sundridge’s.
Getting to the bottom of the mystery that is Ms. Clark was a task recently undertaken by Sundridge cottager Gary Cook and his friends.
He and a group of retired teachers who cottage on Lake Bernard have a connection to their intriguing subject — their vacation homes all lay on the property that originally brought Clark to the area.
Their research made Clark all the more intriguing, as Cook recently reported, through a presentation on his findings, to the group of retired teachers.
“Nothing is authoritative,” he warned of his research. “But there’s lots of interesting, interesting stuff.”
Her story begins in 1890, when she was born at the University of Toronto, where her father was a custodian.
Naturally, when she came of age, Clark chose to pursue a degree at the educational institute she was born at.
Clark graduated with a modern language degree in 1910.
Cook has a copy of the page in the university yearbook of that year.
Clark, Margaret Jane — “A deedful life, a silent voice,” her entry is headed.
It carries on “Margaret Clark was born in the Queen City in the very midst of the halls of learning. Their influence she showed by getting a certain stellar body associated with her name, when she matriculated from Harbord Collegiate. Disregarding her gift for astronomy, she entered Moderns with ’10. Despite the rigorous demands of such studies, she found time for further celestial investigations, adding two more stars to her name. We are sorry she abandoned her adventures among the stars, and decided to win some of the very dust of the earth — though it may be gold dust. How she will collect this dust, Margaret does not know yet, but is, like Micawber, waiting for something to turn up.”
What that elaborate and lofty description of the young Clark means, no one knows, reported Cook.
Clark’s life immediately after graduation carries the same sense of mystery — and legend.
One account says she moved to Maryland, U.S., Cook said. Another report has her working as a court reporter, another claims she taught English as a second language (ESL) (Clark, apparently, was fluent in several tongues).
Clark’s whereabouts in this wartime period may be fuzzy, and various reports of such contradict each other, but what came next, Cook is sure of.
In the mid-1920s, Clark purchased a large piece of property on the east side of Lake Bernard. That’s where the group of retired teachers come in.
“Without her, none of us would be here,” Cook said.
The fact that she bought the property is uncontested. However, the reason why she bought it is another matter.
Clark’s family can’t even agree on the matter.
The group connected with Clark’s 92-year-old nephew, Larry.
“She was in Maryland,” he said. “She had a beau that she broke up with. She moved up north.”
Another family member, Judy, said that the beau died in the war, causing the young heartbroken woman to make her way up north.
Ivy, another Clark kin, told Cook that Clark was teaching an ESL class, where she met a Lithuanian man looking for property. Clark bought the Lake Bernard lot to be sold to him, and when the gentleman backed out, she was stuck with it.
Still another account, provided by family member Helen, said she had purchased the property on sponsorship, so she could get citizenship for an Armenian resident. However, he was sent back, and Clark was left with the land.
Whatever the reasoning, Clark made her way to her newly-acquired property, legend claiming that her beloved piano was moved across the frozen Lake Bernard in the winter.
She moved into an old farmhouse on the property.
But alas, Cook tells us, her housewarming would be short-lived. In the 20s or 30s both house and barn burnt to the ground.
Again, legends give varying account as to why.
One story says there was a man stealing apples from trees on her property and he wanted Clark out, so he burnt her house to the ground when no one was home.
Another account has a tramp carelessly smoking in the barn.
Nephew Larry said Clark was in town when she saw the smoke billowing over the lake. By the time she returned home, the house was gone.
Another tale says the fire happened the day she moved.
In 1931 or 1932, Clark had a new house built.
“Consequently,” Cook said, “Margaret had her first home.”
Clark worked at Johnston’s, now Foodland in Sundridge. John Norman, of the retired teacher’s group, recalls how Clark got to town from her lakeside home.
She canoed across Lake Bernard in the summer, he said, and walked around the lake in the winter, holding a pole “so she wouldn’t fall in.”
She took a board with her in the spring, he said, and when the ice was breaking up, she would put down the board and walk across.
He also recalls that his father boarded with Clark — she ran a boarding house — while he built his cottage.
“My father said it was a toss-up whether the smell of (his companion’s) socks or Ms.Clark’s cooking was worse,” he said.
The boarding house, the group remembers, attracted an array of travellers.
“There was one guy who was strange,” Norman remembers. “He was called ‘The Kid.’ He had a boat he had made…he stored it there (at Clark’s home). Then he would get in this thing…It looked like it would fall all apart but he’d sail across the lake…The Kid’s boat was eight feet long…he occupied most of the boat with his pack…only his bottom was on the boat…his feet went over the front.”
Despite being a full citizen of the Township of Strong, the mysterious Clark’s activities were still well-veiled to the townspeople.
“One of the most profound things,” Cook said, “was that she was incredibly well-read and well-travelled.”
An expert in botany, Cook said Clark wrote papers for American publications on the subject, not only to the ignorance of her neighbours, but at a time that few Canadians were involved in the field.
At her home she researched, as well as raised, orchids — it’s rumoured that she invented a species of the bloom herself.
In a letter to Cook’s family, dated May 13, 1939, Clark showed her interest in the natural world around her.
“Dog tooth violets, mayflowers and Dutchman breeches are all gaily nodding in the woods now but only the skunkberry bushes have begun leaf out, except the dogwood that has the thimbleberry-like bloom, only more of it,” Clark scrawled. “I have been looking for the French morel mushroom but so far, only those colourful cup-like red ones and a few of the tan-coloured false morels (poisonous by reputation, but I’ve never tried them) are showing up. The other morels are delicious. I usually gorge myself when they are in season. There are a few porcupines with Lot One — I should kill them but when they look at me so trustingly with their little brown eyes, how can I do it? And then at night, I can’t see them anyway.”
“That’s sort of Margaret Clark,” Cook explained. “She always talked that way. Half the time she’d be using Latin statements for plants.”
But among Clark’s most peculiar communications comes her little-known passion for farming certain small, green amphibians.
Evidence of this peculiar farming practise comes to Cook and company through a series of 80-year-old letters.
The first in the series is dated Sept. 20, 1935 from the Live Stock Branch of the Department of Agriculture, Ottawa.
“I beg to acknowledge receipt of your letter dated Dec. 16,” wrote J.M. McCallum, chief of market services. “In reply I regret to say that the Branch has no literature for distribution on Frog Farming. I understand, however, that there is a book on the subject entitled ‘Bull Frog Farming As a Side-Line of Muskrat Farming,’ by M.H. Fenton, Pickerel, Ontario.”
Later, “I do not know of any market for frogs’ legs, either fresh or canned, in Canada at the present time. I should suggest, however, that you enquire from some of the largest hotels and restaurants in the big cities, such as the Royal York and Prince Edward Hotels, Eatons and Simpsons in Toronto; the Chateau Laurier, Ottawa; Windsor, Mont Royal, Ritz Carlton hotels in Montreal and the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec. It may be possible that some of these or some of the wholesale meat and fish markets would be interested if a supply were available from time to time.”
Later, in a letter dated Jan. 9, 1936, the veterinary director general of the Health of Animals Branch of the Department of Agriculture, Ottawa wrote, “I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of Dec. 29 in which you ask regarding the canning of frogs. In so far as I am aware there is no law governing the manufacture of this product, providing of course it is made from sound, raw material. The Meat and Canned Foods Act does not deal with the food material.”
In an undated letter from the American Frog Canning Company, the manager tells Clark that “if you can get wood cheap your fencing problem is practically solved because board fencing is the best you can use.”
The manager, in a subsequent letter, tells Clark that the company will gladly ship breeders carrying frog spawn until the early fall.
“This is the best season of the year to start,” he wrote, adding that the company will be glad to help her out regardless of how large or small her frog farming operation was.
The last letter, dated March 1936, welcomes Clark as a “Broel System” frog raiser.
“You are to be complimented for deciding to start now when the industry is young and easy to get into. With ‘Nufond Giants’ and the famous ‘Broel System’ I feel confident you should find both pleasure and profit in a greater measure than ever before known…We wish you every success.”
Whether she found success, unbeknownst to local residents, will forever be a mystery.
Clark’s mythology related to animals doesn’t stop with frogs.
Norman remembers that Clark would walk to a nearby farm when she needed butter.
One of those trips became legend.
“Walking back with her butter,” Norman said, “A bear swung out in hot pursuit of the butter, so she walked the rest of the way home backwards…She knew what the bear wanted.”
Al McLean, another in the teacher’s group, says Clark was an avid fly-fisher. It was rumoured that she was practicing her cast in her field one day, and “lo and behold, she caught a bass.”
Turns out an osprey had dropped it at her feet.
The group of teachers ended Cook’s presentation, sharing their own experiences, and rumours they heard, of the mysterious Clark.
In 1950, Clark moved away from her Lake Bernard property and sold it, moving into the house near Kent’s Trusses she’d call home until the time of her death.
“Margaret, for the rest of her life, was somewhat more sedimentary,” Cook said.
She may have been reclusive, but it added to her mysterious allure to many townspeople, an allure that continued until her death in 1979.
What did Cook and crew dig up on the figure still so intriguing to them?
As Cook pointed out, there are no definitive answers.
There’s just more legends, stories and fragments of information filling in the blanks of Margaret Clark’s life.
What these aging letters, family memories and local legends do is paint a picture, possibly embellished but fascinating all the same, of a women, perhaps ahead of her time, who pursued her passions and lived and loved the environment around her.
“She was one of Canada’s first hippies,” Cook said. “Margaret Clark was a pioneer, true to her philosophy of living lightly on the land.”
She provides a fascinating segment of Strong Township history, he pointed out. “She was an incredible individual that made a great contribution, even if we didn’t know it.”
And her contribution continues.
Only a truly unique, larger-than-life figure could continue to capture the imagination of a community even today: legends about Margaret Clark and her fascinating life continue to be told and re-told, decades after her death.
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