The man with fish in the basement
Samuel Wilmot started Canada’s first experimental salmon hatchery
It was an unusual project to do in a house basement: hatch salmon eggs and raise the small fry on a diet of minced liver.
But Samuel Wilmot’s experiment succeeded and in 1868, he opened Ontario’s first full-scale fish hatchery in the village of Newcastle, 80 kilometres east of Toronto.
By the time the facility closed almost 50 years later, it had produced 155 million baby fish and served as a model for hatcheries across Canada and in other countries.
Wilmot himself earned a global reputation as an accomplished pisciculturist. The Canadian Geographical Journal called his work possibly the “greatest single contribution ever made to the North American fish culture.”
But things didn’t always go swimmingly for either salmon or their would-be saviour, who hoped to restore Lake Ontario’s depleted Atlantic salmon stocks.
Back in the early 1800s, overfishing along with environmental damage from agriculture and industry took a big bite out of the piscine population. Wilmot Creek, a noted spawning stream that skirted Newcastle and named for Wilmot’s father, was a popular fishing spot among early settlers and First Nations people. By the mid-19th century, salmon were headed for extinction after wagonloads were taken by spearing and clubbing. (Nets were prohibited.)
Tensions rose among locals riled over commercial anglers and First Nations people grabbing too many. According to legend, a “salmon war” involving hundreds of combatants broke out on the banks of the Wilmot in 1842. But no casualties were recorded in the bloody brouhaha.
More than 20 years later, Wilmot, a farmer, entrepreneur and local politician whose large family homestead overlooked the creek, began his save-the-salmon project. Long fascinated by the spectacular scene of autumn spawning runs, the 40-something sportsman attempted artificial propagation “for experiment and amusement,” he explained in a later report. (The practice already existed in some parts of the world.)
In his basement, he built a wooden trough through which he piped spring water for a handful of fertilized eggs he had retrieved from the creek’s gravel bed in the fall. Following a successful hatching that winter, he moved to the next stage that involved scooping adult salmon, then manually stripping eggs from the females and fertilizing them with milt squeezed from the males.
After three-quarters of them hatched — almost15,000 — Wilmot set up shop in a small hatchery building he erected on the creek bank of his sprawling farm. Poachers who saw him as competition stole his mature fish, but Wilmot persevered, soliciting support from the newly minted federal fisheries department.
In 1868, two years after his first experiment, he received government money to expand his fish-culture facilities and officially take charge of the operation. Several years later, he was promoted to superintendent of fish culture to develop 15 government hatcheries across the country.
Wilmot’s Newcastle establishment was an impressive sight, with a large two-storey building for incoming fish called the “Reception House” and a network of ponds for the fry.
Salmon journeying upstream to spawn were diverted into the building where their eggs and milt were collected and combined before the fish were returned to Wilmot Creek and on to Lake Ontario about three kilometres away.
The fertilized eggs were ladled into trays — 4,000 in each — that were set in long troughs to hatch. Once the youngsters were big enough, they were released into natural waters.
Some of the villagers, however, suspected Wilmot was angling for private gain and in 1871, a group of “15 vaga- bonds, with blackened faces” tried to torch the hatchery, according to Carleton University PhD candidate William Knight who mentioned the incident in his 2014 thesis on Canadian history.
The arsonists failed in their mission but still managed to slaughter salmon in the holding ponds. It was a minor setback for the hatchery, which produced one million babies a year — 1.5 million at its peak in1876 — and enabled Wilmot to develop techniques for artificially breeding other fish such as lake trout and whitefish.
Around the mid-1870s, the inveterate self-promoter opened the site to the general public. Easily reached by train from Toronto, the hatchery hosted tours of the landscaped grounds and a showand-tell in fish reproduction.
As an added attraction, Wilmot set up a natural-history museum where guests could gape at tanks of different aquatic species and an odd assortment of mounted creatures that included a moose and 600-pound tuna.
The proprietor boasted that nowhere else in the world was there “a more wonderful or pleasing exhibition.”
Indeed, the ichthyologist wowed the judges at the 1883 International Fisheries Exhibition in London, England, with an exhibit he curated that included a miniature working model of his hatchery. The entire Canadian display — topped with a 50-pound stuffed beaver, according to Knight — won a gold medal.
Back home, habitat destruction and overfishing continued to take a toll and when Wilmot died in 1899, it was clear he’d failed at saving the salmon. The last wild Atlantic salmon was taken from the lake in 1898.
But the hatchery, which closed in 1914, is credited for the existence of several game species in provincial waters and for laying the groundwork for conservation measures. The techniques and equipment developed by Wilmot were copied in hatcheries across North America.
A century and a half after he launched the Newcastle Hatchery, tangible fragments of fish history remain, though not the complex itself. Wilmot’s Given Rd. house, built on the same foundation as his original home which was destroyed by fire in 1896, still has a wooden trough in the basement where he hatched his first eggs.
A historic plaque nearby on Hwy. 2 commemorates the hatchery and Wilmot’s work. And today the creek that bears his name is considered one of the best fishing streams in the province.
Wilmot’s Newcastle establishment was an impressive sight, with a large two-storey building for incoming fish called the ‘Reception House’ and a network of ponds for the fry