Barry’s Bay — Many local boob-tube viewers bear joyous if somewhat embarrassed witness to the History Channel’s incredible hit TV series, The Curse of Oak Island. But there are few locals living today who know the truth behind another intriguing 150-year-old mystery that keeps rearing its wild and woolly head involving the Curse of Skead’s Oak Tree.
It’s a local story — some would say ‘myth’ — that has entangled more than a few, and not all have survived with their professional reputations in tact.
For those who don’t know or have never heard of Skead’s Depot, first established in the winter of 1840 along Bark Lake just west of Barry’s Bay, the curse of Skead’s Oak Tree first started there on St. Valentine’s Day in the winter of 1873. And, as with all great stories of human depravity and horrific violence, it’s really best to begin learning about it among those many large American daily newspapers such as The Chicago Tribune.
In its February 21st 1873 edition, the Tribune reported as fact the following bit of horrific news: “One of the party which lynched a man at Skead’s lumber shanties in Hastings has made a confession and says the man was tried by twelve of his comrades and condemned to death and was hung to a tree.”
The Tribune, along with countless other American newspapers of the day, had picked up that curious St. Valentine’s Day lynching story from various newspapers in Montreal, Toronto and Hamilton, to name only a few. Some claimed the incident had happened at Bark Lake, then part of Hasting County; others claimed the dastardly deed occurred in Abinger Township in Lennox & Addington.
All agreed, however, that it most certainly only happened at a Skead’s lumber shanty.
That’s when the precursor to the Kingston Whig-Standard, the old British Whig newspaper, thought it would investigate further, given that the story first reared its ugly, rumorous head in nearby Tamworth. It only took the venerable Whig 24 hours to sort it all out. Triumphantly, it declared on February 22nd, the very next day following the Chicago Tribune’s publication, that the Skead lynching story was, as its headline screamed: “A Hoax.”
Its news pages went on to declare that the so-called tragedy was no tragedy at all. Or as the august Whig editor put it: “The report of the alleged murder in the township of Abinger and the subsequent lynching of the murderer was so unhesitatingly accepted by the press and the public that it will be something of a surprise to them to hear that it was, after all, only a canard, and not a bad one at that.
“Certain it is that Mr. Skead has received no information of such a tragedy occurring in any of his shanties, and it is somewhat singular evidence of the groundless nature of the report that nothing has been heard of the affair since the first alarm, and that not one of the twelve lynchers, who were said to have been marching to the front as prisoners, has yet been observed….
It was The Napanee Beaver, founded in 1870 and still a going concern today, however, that did real yeoman press service, if not all the heavy lifting during these early 19th Century times. It was The Beaver that had let the proverbial cat out of the bag. Said The Beaver, “We have been informed that this is nothing more than a hoax; that no prisoners were taken to Belleville, and that the apparent cause of the report was that a man had died in Skead’s shanty very suddenly, apoplexy being the real cause of his death.”
Still, perhaps The British Whig and its lesser-known equal, The Napanee Beaver, made some rather hasty assumptions that may still not be quite valid today. For instance, as any good conspiracy theorist can attest, The Napanee Beaver assumed that because not a single prisoner had appeared in Belleville nor Napanee to be arraigned following the alleged lynching, well, then the incident couldn’t have happened.
Shrewd observers of the day, as well as many local historians of the day know that the accused, if arrested at Bark Lake, would have been taken, more than likely, not to Belleville nor Napanee but to Perth. As a result, the story of the Bark Lake lynching never really died a natural death, despite the best efforts of those herculean editors in Kingston and Napanee, never mind the cigar-chomping Chicago editors who never, let it be said, let facts get in the way of a good story. Remember, this is 10 years before Billy the Kid or Wyatt Earp’s doings were to be splashed across countless American newspaper headlines to brighten everyone’s day with gratuitous violence and shameless bullying.
Thus, over the past 150 years, the immortal story of The Curse of Skead’s Oak Tree keeps coming back. As recently as this time last year, it caught up another hapless journalist, the editor-in-chief of the august Literary Review of Canada, Kyle Wyatt.
It seems Mr. Wyatt made reference to the Skead lynching as a matter of fact, while reviewing Chad Reimer’s Deadly Neighbours: A Tale of Colonialism, Cattle Feuds, Murder and Vigilantes in the Far West.” Mr. Wyatt soon found himself corrected by Richard Marquardt, one of his more astute readers who happens to hail from Denbigh, only a stone’s throw from Abinger Township. Mr. Marquardt conclusively showed Mr. Wyatt that he had been badly mistaken. No such lynching ever happened in Abinger Township.
In due course, a very contrite Mr. Wyatt ran a correction, very much asserting that, indeed, there had been no lynching in any of Mr. Skead’s timber shanties.
But if you think that’s the end of this horrible story, you would be wrong. Only this very month, the Stationkeepers MV, a non-profit group of volunteers dedicated to preserving and promoting the unique heritage and local culture associated with the old Barry’s Bay train station built in 1894, decided to republish that old Chicago Tribune article about the Bark Lake lynching. And just to set the record straight, after 150 years, the Stationkeepers MV made no assertion about any lumberjack lynching having ever happened in Lennox & Addington County.
Still, it was like throwing the fox in with the hens. Not a week later, some anonymous local scribe scribbled out a fresh manuscript and sent it to the editors of The Opeongo Line, a podcast associated with The Stationkeepers MV. Only a few days before Halloween, a fresh retelling of that very old Opeongo Hills myth was read out over the digital airwaves. It shamelessly asserts that the heinous act indeed was committed at Bark Lake.
Truth? Fiction! The podcast makes no assertions other than it hoped it wouldn’t scare the bejeepers out of anyone thinking of trick or treating along what still passes for Skead’s Road just west of Barry’s Bay and where the alleged, if not cursed, hanging tree purportedly once stood.
Whether or not there ever was a vigilante mob of bleary-eyed, blood-thirsty lumberjacks who actually set up a kangaroo court and eventually hung one of their fellow foresters, may never be known with any certainty.
What is absolutely certain is that long before the American media ever invented its own wild west with the likes of Billy the Kid and that famous shoot-out at the OK Corral, there was our very own wild and woolly Opeongo rogue’s harbour of high drama and low morals — a place well-known in the streets of Chicago, even before Al Capone’s St. Valentine’s Day massacre; a place called the Bark Lake Settlement, still a rough and ready ghost town, the remains of which can still be seen today just west of Barry’s Bay.
It’s not as photogenic as all those technicolour places found on the History Channel’s Curse of Oak Island, but for anyone with an insatiable curiosity for an imaginary world that passes for the wild, western frontier of Renfrew County back in the 1870s, there’s always that half-hour story, partly true and partly fiction — The Mystery of Skead’s Oak Tree — readily available in all its grizzly details on The Opeongo Line podcast.
