The case for ‘Patten Bay’

This story appeared in the October 26, 2010 Manitoulin Expositor

By Joel Thurtell

A government surveyor in Ontario’s pioneer times could name places pretty much as he pleased, so Thaddeus Patten, who surveyed much of northern Ontario including McGregor Bay, named many Bay sites after friends and relatives.

But there is no place in McGregor Bay — in Canada’s Georgian Bay north of Manitoulin Island — that bears his name.

His great-granddaughter, Zoe McDougall, wants to correct that. She’d like to see Patten’s name on the map of McGregor Bay.

She’s hoping to have a small lake in the Bay named in honor of the man whose surveys helped open the region to railroads, roads, towns, farms and industry.

McDougall plans to ask the Geographical Names Board of Canada to officially attach the name “Patten Bay” to the small part of McGregor Bay where her forebear built a cabin in 1917.

Between 1883 and 1934, Patten surveyed much of northern Ontario between the border of Quebec and Thunder Bay. He was born in 1859 in Carlyle, Ontario. His father died in a farm accident when he was eight. He began his apprenticeship at 14 with Little Current land surveyor George Brockett Abrey, his brother-in-law. Twelve years later, he received his license as an Ontario provincial and Dominion of Canada land surveyor.

He surveyed town sites on Manitoulin Island, Lake Panache on the Whitefish River First Nation reserve and the Little Current and Espanola highway. Patten served for many years on the Little Current municipal council and was a Valuator for the Canada Permanent Mortgage Corporation for 30 years. He died in 1939.

According to McDougall, “His original survey stakes, placed in McGregor Bay in the summer of 1916, still remain on many of our islands.”

Places sometimes get their names in quirky ways. For instance, McDougall lives year-round with her husband, Burnley McDougall, in an expanded version of the cottage her great-grandfather built on what is locally known as Vim Island. He bought half of the 21-acre island numbered “TP 1916” in his survey. It got its name informally from a slogan on boxes of “Force,” a wheat flake breakfast cereal: “Vigor Vim made him Sunny Jim.” Once, members of the family ran out of food on the island and had only Force to eat. So they started calling the island “Vim.” The name stuck.

One McGregor Bay spot took its monicker from an incident that produced lots of mirth. A Little Current man named Oliver Vincent fell asleep while hunting in McGregor Bay and missed shooting a deer. His companions jokingly named the place of his nap “Vincent’s Bunk,” according to “McGregor Bay, The Quiet Paradise,” By Louis Nees.

Halcyon Rock is an island in Pathfinder Bay named after a yacht that anchored near it. Pathfinder Bay is named for a yacht, too, according to Raymond F. Hunt Jr.’s “A Short History of McGregor Bay.”

There were plenty of nameless places, and Patten put them on the map with handles of his choosing. One of his brother-in-law Abrey’s daughters, Nellie, married Stuart Jenkins, a former owner of the Manitoulin Expositor newspaper in Little Current and later proprietor of a store on Iroquois Island in McGregor Bay. Their friend Patten named “Little Lake Nellie” after Nellie Jenkins.

He named Lake Josephine after a Little Current friend, Josephine Currie. Lake Marjorie he named after his daughter. Lake Helen honors Helen Bridges Heintz, an early cottager. Beatrix Tatham, a Little Current high school teacher, has a lake named after her.

For the past two summers, McDougall has hosted the Patten Bay Potluck to popularize the name.

But she doesn’t trust tradition to make the name stick.

Will the Canadian place names board agree that Thaddeus Patten’s accomplishments as a surveyor and pioneer are worthy of placing his name on the map?

Jeff Ball of Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources said the little bay that would be “Patten” already meets two of the board’s requirements. It has no name now, and Patten is dead.

But McDougall needs to show that Patten “made a significant contribution to the legacy of the area where the entity is located and/or a significant contribution to the legacy of the Province,” Ball wrote.

As evidence of Patten’s connection to McGregor Bay, McDougall will submit a 1916 photograph showing Patten beside a surveying instrument in front of a tent on Vim Island, officially TP 1916, where he built his cottage. And she will send a long list of Ontario places he surveyed.

McDougall has letters of support from cottagers from neighbors on the proposed “Patten Bay.” She plans to contact local government and First Nation officials too, but will submit her request soon because the board could take more than a year to act.

Her letters to local officials could help in an unofficial way, though, by advertising the name in government circles.

No harm giving tradition a boost, and easier than holding a potluck.

As one of McDougall’s neighbors on Patten Bay, though, I have a wish. Regardless of whether the name is officially adopted, I hope she keeps holding her Patten Bay Potlucks.

They’re a tradition!

Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com