Harbour has long shaped Bayfield’s history

  

Bayfield is named after Admiral Henry Wolsey Bayfield, the greatest hydrographic surveyor in Canadian history who mapped our vast coasts and inland waterways during his 40 years with the British Admiralty. With such a pedigree, the village’s connection to its waterways is bound to be evident to all.

Looking down from the Hwy. 21 bridge over the Bayfield River, the harbour is an impressive sight — in summer it is a forest of sailing boats’ masts and rows of power boats tied up at slips. 

The mouth of the Bayfield River has provided boaters with an inviting inlet to the Huron coast for more than 175 years. In the years after farms sprung up inland, and before railways and roads provided efficient landbased transportation, Bayfield flourished as a grain port. Despite difficulty getting grain down the steep hills to the harbour, boats were filled and grain shipped to Kingston.

In 1874, $36,000, an immense sum at the time, was spent improving Bayfield harbour, but, townspeople felt an additional $10,000 was needed to complete the project and provide a safe harbour because in snow or fog, schooners continued to miss the harbour entrance and wreck on the beach. 

One such wreck occurred in November, 1882 when the three-masted wooden schooner Malta, so the story goes, saw a light from the Orange Lodge where a meeting was taking place and, mistaking it for a light at the Port of Goderich, headed the boat inland. Luckily, after the boat ran aground, the Orangemen came to the rescue of the crew of nine men, one woman and one parrot. 

Long after the commercial shipping industry died in Bayfield with the coming of better inland transportation, the lack of a railway link to the village and the concentration of shipping in Goderich, fishing continued to be an important part of the local economy.

The beach and marina are now an important economic driver for the municipality, drawing visitors from all over the world to Bayfield’s shores. It’s no coincidence that the explosion of new shops in Bayfield followed the expansion of marina facilities several decades back.