In the early days, Port Hope wasn't much of a port. There was no real natural harbour at the mouth of the Ganaraska, so ships had to anchor offshore and their cargo and passengers were ferried to town. But as competition with other Lake Ontario towns, especially Cobourg, heated up, town fathers decided it was time something be done. In 1829, a private company the Port Hope Harbour and Wharf Company was charged with the task of building a harbour which should be accessible to and fit, safe and commodious for the reception and shelter of the ordinary description of vessels navigating Lake Ontario. The mandate was to be completed by 1844.
The results were underwhelming. One report from the 1800s noted that the shareholders got to quarrelling immediately and for a long time, the scenes enacted between the two rival factions were anything but edifying. The first wharf on the east side of the Ganaraska River was built in 1832 with the help of an $8,000 loan from the Upper Canadian government. A second pier, extending from the west side of the river, came later; eventually they would stretch some 180 metres (600 feet) into the lake. Even so, the two wharves offered no protection in a gale and the relentless onshore swells prevented many a vessel from approaching Port Hope during a storm.
Plans took an ambitious turn in 1851, when the town sued the Wharf Company and took over the construction and operation of the harbour. Among the priorities were more substantial piers, but it was only when engineers dredged and drained a natural marsh just to the west of the river, that Port Hope finally had a legitimate safe anchorage remote from the winds of Lake Ontario. Moreover, the new harbour had a turning basin large enough for ships to manoeuvre. Wedged between the turning basin and the river lay a long spit of land that stretched toward the lake. It is this slice of ground that would become known as the "Centre Pier," the very property that the Pier Group is concerned with today.
The new harbour arrived just in the nick of time, because Port Hope was about to enter the railway era and needed a decent port if it was remain competitive with other lakeside towns. The strategy worked. The railway, which eventually stretched to Midland on Georgian Bay, was a resounding success and as the Victorian era progressed, the harbour handled more cargo than the town founders could ever have imagined. At first, the main commodity was lumber, harvested from the primeval forests of the Ontario interior. By the 1880s, the focus shifted to grain on its way from the Canadian Prairies to overseas markets.
As the 19th century drew to a close, the harbour had been improved several times. It was dredged regularly and in 1898, a sand fence 170 metres (560 feet) long was built into Lake Ontario to bolster the western pier against drifting sand. It was about this time that the harbour took on a new industrial character with the arrival of several factories, including the Canada Radiator Co. and what is now Cameco Corp. Meanwhile, an enterprise that would eventually be known as the Port Hope Crane Co., which manufactured toilets, bathtubs and other plumbing fixtures, set up shop on the Central Pier.
Today, the Cameco plant still flourishes, but the harbour's industrial heyday seems long past. Now strictly the domain of pleasure craft, the old turning basin still exists and it still needs occasional dredging. Meanwhile, the harbourside bathtub factory, which eventually occupied most of the Central Pier, has been silent for decades. However, the old Crane buildings are far from obsolete. It just takes a little imagination just as it did to build the harbour in the first place to see how they might be put to good use again.
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