Southernmost jewel
100-year-old Point Pelee National Park finds a balance between playground and preservation
Green moss is taking over the corner of the black remnant of a road in the forest of Point Pelee National Park.
Sixty years ago the road would have hosted summer traffic jams of cars heading to the tip, beaches, cottages, farms and even a hotel. Now a hackberry tree grows just feet away from the spot where the faded yellow centreline ends, and the surrounding forest is home to red-headed woodpeckers and the reintroduced southern flying squirrel.
Broad is the road that leads to destruction, and the chunk of asphalt left on purpose in the forest is a jarring reminder of the path that almost lead to the end of the national park that juts out into Lake Erie and turns 100 in May. In 1962, a federal government report suggested it no longer be a national park. Despite restoration efforts, rumours of its sale or closure emerged again in the mid-1980s. In 2000, a report on the ecological integrity of national parks warned Point Pelee was one of the highest-stressed parks in the country. A task force member said at the time that “if it’s worth keeping in the long run ... not enough is being done.” Point Pelee, the smallest national park on Canada’s mainland, has wavered since its inception in 1918 between protection and playground. It’s finally finding a balance. Park naturalist Dan Dufour said the two-kilometre road that was removed in 1998 is part of the park’s story of restoring half of its five-square kilometre land mass while welcoming a few hundred thousand visitors a year.
In its first 50 years, the park resembled a village with two hotels, more than 300 cottages and farms, including asparagus fields and apple orchards. There was a school, life-saving station and commercial fishery. Just a small section of forest north of the tip was marked off as a natural area.
There are pictures of cows standing on the beach and cars parked in the forest. Early on, people could drive on the beach and almost to the tip. They camped everywhere. Beach-goers flocked to the park in the 1950s and 1960s in what had become a party atmosphere, much like Grand Bend on Lake Huron, Dufour said.
The park started buying back land in the 1950s, and since then more than 350 buildings and two roads have been removed, he said. In the last few years the federal government has invested almost $11.4 million in the park on recreation and restoration. At the Northwest Beach, it is restoring sand dunes and rare Lake Erie sand spit savannah habitat in a $2.8-million project to update change rooms and add a 100-person beachfront rental pavilion and a natural playground.
“It’s not people or plants,” Dufour said. “It’s people and plants.” On May 29, 1918, Point Pelee became Canada’s eighth national park. The first event in its centennial year is a Windsor Symphony Orchestra evening performance in the newly-renovated theatre at the visitor centre on April 28. More celebrations are being planned. There’s much to celebrate, especially since mainland Canada’s southernmost point and birdwatching hot spot almost became a subdivision of summer homes not long after part of the point became a national park. The park still has a 1925 Point Pelee Park Colony development plan — for the land between what is now the visitor centre and the tip — that advertised to Americans a concrete provincial highway being completed to nearby Leamington. The stock market crash ended the sale of lots. “My notion of what Point Pelee would’ve looked like had they not preserved it would have been houses right as far as the tip,” said Henrietta O’Neill, author of two books on Point Pelee who used to drive a shuttle bus to the tip. “People would not have had access to what we see today. The marsh, the beaches on the west side and all of this stuff would be owned privately and we wouldn’t have this at all.” O’Neill, who wrote a book on the park history, said busloads of people came to see the site which the owners thought would become “one of the most exclusive summer home colonies in the country.” She said London naturalist W.E. Saunders was the first to realize something special was going on at Pelee.
Saunders had come to the peninsula in 1882 to hunt ducks but his eyes turned to the abundance of other birds. He and his friends formed the Great Lakes Ornithological Club to study bird migration. One of those men, Percy Taverner, became Canada’s first Dominion Ornithologist in 1911 and in 1915 recommended Point Pelee become a national park. By that time Kingsville conservationist Jack Miner had joined the push for the park that was established in 1918.
“It would never have lasted unless the government protected it,” O’Neill said.
Banff was the first national park and the early parks were established more for recreation, said Point Pelee National Park superintendent Maria Papoulias. Point Pelee was the first park established for conservation purposes, she said. “That was a breakthrough in thinking around national parks.”
The marshy peninsula had been home to native settlements for thousands of years. French explorers called it “pointe pelée,” or bald point, since the peninsula they encountered would have been much wider and about four kilometres longer than today.
In 1799, the point became a British naval reserve and its boundaries remain the boundaries for the park. The naval reserve didn’t stop up to 22 commercial fisheries or squatters from taking up residence starting in the 1830s. The settlers were able to buy their land in the 1880s.
While the park had started for conservation, the farmers, cottagers, campers and beach-goers would certainly test that mindset in the decades to come. By the late 1930s the park had two hotels including the Aviation Inn, which lasted until 1963 on a site where the visitor centre parking lot sits today.
Windsor Star photographs from the 1960s show campers with laundry hanging by trees and tents, and packed beaches. Traffic peaked at about 781,000 visitors in 1963, making Point Pelee the most visited national park.
“It’s interesting how the first national park established for conservation shifted to being almost destroyed by recreation in the 1960s and 1970s,” Papoulias said.
Then the pendulum began to swing back toward protection. Visitors would no longer be able to drive to the tip once the shuttle service started in 1971, and a 1972 master plan recommended buying back cottages and phasing out camping. The concession stand near the tip was removed.
The controversial duck hunt endured until 1989. Deer culls to protect the Carolinian plants started in 1991. Beach-goers dwindled so much that in 1986 the park had to evict nudists from secluded spots along the east beach.
Last year, as Canada celebrated its 150th anniversary with free passes to national parks, Point Pelee’s attendance skyrocketed to about 535,000 visitors, said Papoulias.
“That was about a 70 per cent increase over 2016 and, in fact, it’s a record in recent history,” she said. “The only time in history we had higher numbers was in the wild years of the 1960s and 1970s, when there was a free-for-all and people were all over the beach.” O’Neill, who lives in Leamington and still enjoys walking in the park where she worked for 15 years, said air conditioning and swimming pools might have saved the park from itself.
The park went too far to save plants, O’Neill said. Crowds of birdwatchers needed somewhere to go, but there were fewer trails at Point Pelee and management was strict about making visitors stay on them. The message in the 1990s was the park was too stressed by human use. But O’Neill argues, why preserve something you can’t go see? “Basically they were saying don’t bother to come here because you’re just damaging the park,” she said. O’Neill applauds recent moves that help plants and people, such as adding open areas for butterflies and rare birds, and a family picnic area and a playground for children at the Northwest Beach.
For the first time in 40 years, Parks Canada has brought back public camping with 24, A-frame camping structures called oTENTiks on the former road bed. Other improvements made with the more than $11 million spent in the last few years include upgraded bike trails, a new theatre at the visitor centre and the $2.8-million Northwest Beach makeover. The park is bringing in sand to restore sand dunes on part of a parking lot and help the endangered five-lined skink and eastern prickly pear cactus, Dufour said. “It’s really neat because it’s a rare habitat and really a rare opportunity.”
The point is part of the Lake Erie sand spit savannah, or red cedar savannah, which is a globally endangered ecosystem that supports a quarter of the species at risk in the park. Parks Canada is spending $3 million to restore the open habitats that will help a songbird, the endangered yellow breasted chat, and the cactus, which is only found in Canada at Point Pelee and on Pelee Island.
Even on a snowy March day the park has the power to attract firsttime visitors.
“I saw on the map Point Pelee,” said Roger St.-Amand, 60, from New Brunswick who wanted to visit the park since he was a child. “I know it’s the southernmost point of Canada and I say, ‘I’ve got to go see this place. This has got to be awesome.’”
Adrien Cornelisse, 73, has an annual pass. “It’s a good place just to get away from things and find some real quiet,” he said. “I enjoy what God has made.”
The Leamington resident has come across the asphalt in the forest in previous walks.
“It’s awesome. You can see how nature turns back. It restores itself.”