Campbell’s soup has long been an icon in kitchen pantries across Canada. The symbolic red and white can has even appeared in a famous Andy Warhol painting. But the soup company has also made its mark on Six Mile Lake.

On the surface, the cottages on the western shores of Six Mile Lake look like any other. They’re nothing out of the ordinary, but the stories of those who built them — and the friendships that were cemented in trying times — certainly are.

For 42 years, Bill Croxall worked at the Campbell’s soup factory in Toronto’s west end. In 1952, he started in the accounting department. Not long after, he heard a few guys talking about their new land on Six Mile Lake.

“One guy read about it I guess, and told everybody else,” he says. By 1953, Croxall too had purchased waterfront land, which at that time cost him $73.20. But there were no clearings, only wilderness. And the area wasn’t road accessible.

“We sure helped one another. We did it all together,” he says of the Campbell’s crowd, which came to be known as “the soupers.”

There are only two left of the bunch — the rest have either sold their cottages or died — but the memories of the soupers’ heyday live on. About 10 families of soupers met every weekend and built the area, adjacent to Six Mile Lake Provincial Park, from the ground up.

For Don Foreman — the other remaining souper — the cottage is his second home. His dad heard about the property from a friend who was a boss at Campbell’s. “Dad bought the place site unseen based on what he had heard,” says Foreman. “He always said nothing ever got cheaper, so he went ahead and bought it.”

Foreman recalls “working like a dog” every weekend the two visited. “Dad would put me to work and that’s what I’d do, when all I could think about was engines and girls.”

And what work there was to be done. Croxall says the first time he saw the property that now houses his three-bedroom, two-storey cottage, it was “just trees and more trees.”

The soupers got to work; they sawed down the trees together, built mostly every cottage by hand and moved furniture across the lake.

It was an endeavour that required patience, Foreman says, as they had to park on the southern tip and take everything in by boat.

“You remember that time we saw a big turtle in the lake?” Foreman asks Croxall, as the two stand on the shore of Six Mile. “It turned out to be the roof of a car! I couldn’t believe it.”

Foreman remembers taking trips in his dad’s 1954 pickup truck across the ice in the winter.

“I can still hear dad and his buddy talking about the best roof to build for snowfalls,” says Foreman. “They argued for hours and hours about peaked or flat.”

After a few years, the area started to take shape and the good times began to roll.

“There were some memorable parties, for sure. We’d be up to the early hours out here, drinking, partying, carrying on,” recalls Croxall.

The lighthearted, relaxed old-timers get serious when asked about their soup production.

Foreman fondly remembers watching over two labourers who went by “Scrappy” and “Jingles.”

“Scrappy was the size of my pinky finger, but I’m not kidding you, he could move skids of soup so fast,” he recalls. “He was so strong. He could build a wall of soup that would fill this cottage in four hours. I’m not telling one lie.”

On why Foreman left the factory after 10 years of employment: “Well, I kept calling my boss a jerk — which he was — until he fired me.”

Croxall has fonder memories of his job, and has kept immaculate records. He still owns his first pay stub — dated 1952, with a weekly net $30.87. The pins commemorating his years of service, ranging from five to 40 years, neatly line the laminated pay stub.

A quick tour of Croxall’s pantry and it’s clear he still has ties to his old company. “I’ve got tomato, cream of mushroom, Gardennay. I’ve got soup coming out the yingyang!”

Croxall and Foreman, both in their 70s, regularly share a drink together and remember the “good ol’ days.”

“We did it all piece by piece, one thing at a time,” says Croxall. “And it got to the point where we’d go to work together in the week and then say, ‘see you at the cottage, boys.’”