Each flouts the sordid earth and ether’s sting:
Unconsciously, they realize a Plan
Which mortals match with faulty ships of Man.
A DECEASED CANADIAN RAILWAY
The Sheriff Runs Away From His Spoils
S. E. MacKechnie
Mayor of Cobourg, 1853.
When Sir John Franklin, arctic navigator, with canoe crews of Indians and voyageurs, eastbound after exploring the Great Lakes, pitched wigwams in the summer of 1839 at the confluence of stream and lake where the nucleus of present Cobourg, Canada, was taking root, little did these adventurous and actual forerunners of easy steam locomotion think that from a point where they camped a railroad would thirteen years later bisect the unbroken forest. Yet, it is so, and the whirligig of time has, likewise, seen recorded the obituary of that railway—has witnessed the effacement of the name of those early laid metal ribbons from the time tables of a young country which still hungers and lobbies for more and more tracks and trams.
Cobourg and thereabouts, is ancient territory as settlements go nowadays. In 1796 the district was surveyed. Eluid Nickerson, who espoused the United Empire Loyalist cause, took out the first patent in 1802 during the reign of King George III., but in spite of its monarchial predilections, the locality has long been of interest to our cousins of high and low degree living south of Lake Ontario, and a few years after the construction of Cobourg and Peterborough Railway, of which I speak, several iron masters and capitalists from Pittsburg acquired the property, altering somewhat its original mission.