Georgian Bay is visually dramatic in a way that the rest of southern Ontario is not. The eastern shore — the Thirty Thousand Islands — is a maze of granite islands, windswept white pine, and clear water running from Midland north to Killarney. It is also a landscape with a commercial history that the beauty can obscure. This was a major shipping corridor. Steamships and schooners carried lumber, fish, and passengers between dozens of ports. Sawmills processed timber from the interior. Fishing stations operated on remote islands. When the industries declined, the bay reclaimed the infrastructure, and now the ruins sit among some of the best scenery in the province.
Depot Harbour: The Ghost Port
Depot Harbour is the most significant ghost town on Georgian Bay. J.R. Booth, the Ottawa lumber baron, built it in the 1890s as the terminus of his Ottawa, Arnprior and Parry Sound Railway. The purpose was to move grain from the Great Lakes to his Atlantic shipping connections, bypassing Montreal. Booth built a massive grain elevator, rail yards, a roundhouse, docks, and a residential community of over 600 people on Parry Island near Parry Sound.
For several decades, Depot Harbour was one of the busiest ports on the Great Lakes. Then the railway was rerouted, and the town's reason to exist vanished. The residents left. The grain elevator burned in 1945. The concrete ruins of the elevator base, the foundations of the houses, and the remains of the rail infrastructure are all that remain. The site is on Wasauksing First Nation land, and access requires either a boat or a rough trail from the mainland.
The ruins, set against the rocky Georgian Bay shoreline with pine trees growing through the concrete, are among the most photogenic ghost town remnants in Ontario. The OA&PS railway remnants extend along the entire route from Ottawa through Algonquin Park to Depot Harbour, creating a linear archaeological record of Booth's empire that stretches nearly 400 kilometres.
The Lumber Ports
Depot Harbour was the most ambitious port, but it was not alone. Byng Inlet, French River, Midland, and Penetanguishene all served the lumber trade. Byng Inlet, north of Parry Sound, had a booming mill operation in the late 1800s that shrank dramatically when the timber ran out. The settlement survives in diminished form, but the scale of the old mill foundations along the inlet hints at its former importance.
Midland and Penetanguishene, at the southern end of the bay, were major lumber ports connected to the interior by rail and river. Both towns have preserved some of their waterfront heritage, but the scale of the former lumber operations is difficult to appreciate from the modern waterfronts. Historical photographs at local museums show a shoreline stacked with lumber to the horizon.
Georgian Bay's rugged eastern shore hides the remnants of communities that once thrived on lumber and fishing.
Island Abandonment
Many of the Thirty Thousand Islands were seasonally or permanently inhabited. Fishing stations supported small communities on remote islands. When the commercial fishery declined in the twentieth century, most stations were abandoned. Some islands also had logging operations, quarries, or summer resorts that have since been abandoned.
Paddling the islands, you occasionally come across foundation walls, old dock cribs, or buildings in various states of collapse. These sites are fragile. The combination of harsh winters, wave action, and thin soil over granite means structures deteriorate quickly once unmaintained. Leave No Trace principles are especially important here because these sites cannot absorb heavy visitor traffic.
Shipwrecks
Georgian Bay was notoriously dangerous for shipping. Storms build quickly on the open water, and the eastern shore's maze of islands and shoals was treacherous even in good conditions. Hundreds of vessels were lost over the centuries: lumber schooners, passenger steamers, bulk freighters.
Fathom Five National Marine Park, at the tip of the Bruce Peninsula, protects some of the most accessible wrecks. The clear, cold water preserves wood and iron better than warmer lakes, and several wrecks are popular dive sites. Other wrecks lie in deeper water or in less-accessible locations around the bay. The wrecks are an underwater archive of the bay's commercial history, from the lumber era through the transition to modern shipping.
Exploring Georgian Bay
Much of the bay's most interesting exploration requires a boat. Kayaking is the best way to access the eastern shore's small bays, channels, and island ruins. The towns along the shore — Midland, Penetanguishene, Parry Sound, and Killarney — all have museums and heritage sites that provide historical context.
On land, the Bruce Trail follows the Niagara Escarpment along the western shore. The Killbear and Grundy Lake provincial parks provide land-based access to the Georgian Bay landscape. For those interested in combining abandoned places with natural scenery, the bay is hard to beat. The ruins are set against one of the best backdrops in Ontario, and the remoteness of many sites means you are likely to have them to yourself.
The Near North region begins where Georgian Bay meets the boreal forest, and the two regions share both landscape character and industrial history.