Bylaw revised to make Speed River bathing legal
Local swimming spots such as Kate’s Hole known for its danger of drownings
As the pages of this column have discussed on a prior occasion, the Priory was the first permanent building in Guelph and home to John Galt, the city’s founder.
In addition to these distinctions, it was also home to the finest bathing house for miles around. Former resident David Allan recalled the bathing house built by his grandfather many years before:
“… he made many improvements to the property such as building a stone bathing-house in the design of a fort (with turrets) at the riverside, and the stone wall which still surrounds the property, which he had built in a style to conform to that of the walls supporting the approach to the C.N.R. Bridge across the street.”
This bathing house can be seen on the left in a fine sketch of the Speed River made by David Kennedy in 1864.
The Allans were one of the few families in Guelph with a dedicated place to change into their bathing costumes. Lucky for them! Guelph’s bylaw regulating bathing in the rivers made it practically illegal for anyone else since it was not allowed within about 400 metres of any bridge or riverside roadway in daylight. Since bathing involved being in a state of semi-undress, bathers were to be kept strictly out of sight unless they had their own facility.
Petitions against this draconian bylaw eventually persuaded the city fathers to revise the rules.
In 1880, the city council decreed that bathers could swim in the rivers as close as 50 feet to bridges and roadways provided their costumes covered them from knees to neck. They also established the fee that commercial bathing houses could charge guests for rental costumes: 12 cents apiece. Although a few entrepreneurs had a go at running commercial bathing houses along the Speed, none were successful.
Most likely, this was because many people simply bathed illegally. Young men (and some not-so-young ones), in particular, took pleasure in splashing in the rivers in whatever place suited them, usually clad only in their birthday suits.
Each summer, the pages of the Guelph Mercury conveyed expressions of displeasure with this situation, such as (August 5, 1887):
Bathing at Gow’s bridge. — Numerous are the complaints that are made about young men and boys bathing at Gow’s bridge in broad daylight and in the evening. They run around the bridge, and dive from the parapet as naked as the day they were born and the language they use is most offensive beyond imagination. Ladies living on the other side of the river, and whose direct road home is over this bridge, are compelled to walk around by Dundas bridge.
In later years, old men recalled fondly their summer days spent frolicking au naturale at the many “swimmin’ holes” along the city’s creeks and rivers.
One such place was “Kate’s Hole” (today the north end of Herb Markle Park), where the gentle slope of the shore dropped off suddenly into the Goldie Mill pond, much larger and deeper in those days because of the mill dam.
Legend had it that the name derived from the drowning there of a woman named Kate in the town’s early days. Indeed, Kate’s Hole (among others) was the site of several drownings, as inexperienced or unlucky bathers floundered in “the remorseless waters” of the Speed.
In 1885, the town council responded to this persistent problem by purchasing six grappling irons and positioning them near the most dangerous holes, those being Kate’s Hole, Goldie Mill pond, the Norwich Street bridge, the Eramosa bridge, the Speed skating rink (now the site of the River Run Centre), and Johnston’s boathouse (now the site of The Boathouse on Gordon Street). The point was to make it easier to retrieve the drowned bodies so that family members could have closure all the sooner.
Clearly, drownings were regarded with some resignation, a regrettable consequence of the popularity of bathing. However, things were to change with the advent of supervised swimming sites.