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50 UNIQUE MUSKOKA September 2020
real estate investments in Toronto, seven years
earlier, which lost $38,000, then continued
with losses of $15,000 due to business failures
of lumbermen and others to whom he’d
advanced cash.
rough Muskoka’s weekly papers, Sheri
Bettes publicly advertised Hunt’s assets for
sale: 33 vacant properties in Bracebridge,
lakeside properties, and farmland in
Macaulay, Brunel and Stisted townships.
ere were town lots and properties in
Gravenhurst, and a timber limit in Parry
Sound’s Armour Township. ere were store
and house properties in Bracebridge: three
brick buildings occupied by Merrill,
McEachern, omas & Booth, and Mahay
& Ashworth; his own brick bank building at
34 Manitoba with oces above rented to the
provincial government; a laundry; nine lots
with houses; stores occupied by Tillson &
Whitten, J.W. Ney, Macready & Company,
J.O. Phillips, and the store south of the
Dominion Hotel. Quantities of lumber were
also put up for liquidation sale.
Initial sheri sales enabled Bettes to
announce by November an initial 20 per
cent dividend for Hunt creditors. Solicitor
Mahay’s view of the bank’s operations being
basically sound was born out. As Hunt’s
assets were liquidated, bank creditors
recovered close to 100 cents on the dollar for
all their stolen assets.
Alfred Hunt, though still a member of
town council for 1898, attended no further
meetings after May that year. Nor did he ever
again run for elective oce. His operations
contracted to things like brick veneering the
British Lion Hotel across from the new
District Court House on Dominion Street in
1903. He died in 1917, in the bleak depths
of a cataclysmic world war.
In the wake of his bank’s demise, the
nancial needs and opportunities in
Muskoka which private banker Alfred Hunt
had shown existed sparked the big banks to
swiftly ll the vacuum. First to set up shop
was the Bank of Ottawa, which on June 2,
1898, hurriedly opened a branch in the
Manitoba Street building of tailor Robert
McEwen, who himself went out of business
and relocated to Vancouver.
Joining the parade in 1904 was the new
Crown Bank of Canada, chartered only the
month before it opened a Bracebridge branch
on July 18 on the west side of Manitoba
Street. Some directors of the Toronto-based
Crown Bank were Muskoka summer
residents who saw the need for a branch in
the district. One of Crown’s major accounts
was e Bird Woollen Mill Co. Limited,
pillar of the Muskoka economy, which had
banked with Alfred Hunt.
In 1908, Crown amalgamated with
Northern Bank of Western Canada to
become Northern Crown Bank and relocated
its Bracebridge branch into another main
street building once owned by Alfred Hunt.
In 1918, when Northern Crown and Royal
Bank of Canada merged, the local branch
displayed its next name, Royal Bank.
More national banks, with changing
names from corporate takeovers and mergers,
opened local branches across Canada,
including in Muskoka’s towns and villages,
like common franchises of an increasingly
monolithic operation whose design, decision-
and direction would increasingly lie beyond
local control.
In 1919, when the Bank of Ottawa
merged with Bank of Nova Scotia, the
Bracebridge branch simply changed its name
and kept operating in the same ne premises.
In addition to Bracebridge and Huntsville,
other Muskoka communities began getting
banking service. In 1901 the Dominion
Bank, which had been sning around
Bracebridge, set up shop in Gravenhurst
instead, in a rented building before moving
into its newly-constructed facility at the
south-east corner of Muskoka and Royal
streets. Port Carling was another. In June
1920 the summer-busy village got a pop-up
Bank of Nova Scotia, under direction of
Bracebridge’s branch. Two years later,
enjoying steady boat-builder business, it
became a full branch operating not June-
September but year-round.
By 1919, the Dominion Bank nally
appeared in Bracebridge. From 1906 to
1914, Dominion’s interests had been
represented locally by Henry Warren,
nancial ocer of J.D. Shier Lumber
Company, who returned to his former
position with the bank as a manager in
Toronto. When the Bracebridge branch,
with Warren’s lobbying, materialized after
the war, he came back to town as its manager,
occupying Alfred Hunt’s former bank
building at 36 Manitoba Street.
is Bracebridge heritage building has
been boarded up in recent years, its basement
steel vault standing open, about the way
bank clerk Pringle discovered it on that ill-
fated morning of May 27, a century and
a-quarter ago.
The brick building at the right, on the west side of 1890s Manitoba Street, with TAILOR sign, was
vacated by Bracebridge’s garment-maker Robert McEwen so the Bank of Ottawa could open a
Bracebridge branch on June 2, 1898 – one week aer Alfred Hunt liquidated his bank.
Photograph: Richard W. Ryan, Photographer; Boyer Family Archives, Bracebridge
