During Ontario’s pioneer era, roadside inns were located every 12 to 15 miles, or an approximate day’s travel in the horse-and-buggy era. Here, people could find a brief respite from the fatigue of travelling along primitive, rutted roads.

At their peak in the 1880s, there were thousands across the province, but today few survive. One of the best preserved, the Spence Inn, is found in the pioneer village at Muskoka Heritage Place in Huntsville.

Built by Levitt Simpson in 1878, the Spence Inn was originally known as Halfway House, because it was located roughly at the midway point of Nipissing Road, which ran from Rosseau to Commanda on Lake Nipissing. Sitting astride the junction of Ryerson Road and Nipissing Road, the inn was intended to cater to road-weary travellers passing through and did a brisk business doing just that for many years.

Soon, a small village called Spence grew up in its shadow.

Simpson was a 54-year-old gentleman who had just recently stepped off the boat from England. With his wife, Ann, and four children in tow, he headed for the wilds of the Parry Sound District and took up a new life as a hotelier. Whether he had any experience in this vocation is unknown, but he ably guided Halfway House and built it into one of the finest anywhere along Nipissing Road.

Halfway House was a place where people could find refreshment, stabling for exhausted horses and shelter for the night. A dollar bought you a bed, but not privacy — guests of the same sex would be accommodated together in large rooms. For 25 cents, guests could also get a bath, though this was likely only enjoyed by affluent travellers.

Halfway House also served as a stop for cadges (buggies that served as stages) bringing mail from Rosseau to Commanda.

In the 19th century, whisky flowed fast and cheap. It was heavily consumed, on par with how frequently we drink coffee today. As a result, most 19th century hotels made tidy profits from the sale of alcohol, and their barrooms were always alive with men in various stages of drunken revelry. Halfway House was a rare exception.

Simpson was a religious man with strong morals. He detested the “devil-drink,” and as a result Halfway House was a dry, “temperance hotel” in the vernacular of the day. Simpson was able to hold to his beliefs because the steady-stream of traffic passing through town — mostly settlers on the way to taking up their new lands — provided more than enough profits to keep the business afloat, without having to resort to selling booze.

At the time, Spence was a thriving little community, home to two stores, a blacksmith shop, two sawmills, a church, school and about a dozen log homes. Most of the 50 inhabitants were farmers, but the soil was too threadbare to provide for anything beyond subsistence-level agriculture. They, and the village they founded, were sustained by logging and serving the needs of travellers.

By the year 1890, Halfway House was owned and operated by Donald MacEachern. The first thing he did was build a sizable addition to the side of the dining room to serve as a bar. Farmers came here to drown their sorrows, imagining in their drunken haze that their fields were bountiful instead of rock-riddled and bare; travellers washed away the dust of the road with a shot or three of whisky; and loggers congregated here after weeks or months spent in the bush to enjoy a semblance of civilization.

Other than obviously not sharing his predecessor’s strict religious beliefs, there was probably a practical reason why MacEachern elected to begin serving alcohol. At the time, the railway was being pushed north from Muskoka toward Callander on Lake Nipissing, and MacEachern would have realized that when complete this line would cause traffic along Nipissing Road — the very foundation of the inn’s prosperity — to decrease heavily. Therefore, to buttress against this eventuality, MacEachern decided to throw off the shackles of being temperance.

Sadly, it wasn’t enough to save the hotel. The completion of the railway in 1896 did indeed cause road traffic to decline, more so than most likely would have anticipated. This, and the fact that most of the failing bush farms were hastily abandoned around the turn of the century, spelled doom for Halfway House.

The once-bustling business began to change hands every few years, and with each sale its value decreased. Finally, it closed for good in 1911, thereafter serving as a private residence and farm.

By the 1950s, Spence was enveloped in a ghostly shroud. No more than one or two homes were lived in, and the hamlet had been reduced to a handful of weathered and leaning buildings, crumbling foundations and a few cellar holes. The owners of the former hotel simply abandoned it, walking away from the malaise that seemed to cover the entire area.

In 1977, the Rotary Club of Huntsville (which at that time operated Muskoka Pioneer Village) purchased the sad, neglected and badly-in-need-of-repair inn, and moved it to the museum site. Throughout 1978-79 it was painstakingly and accurately restored so that it looks today much as it would have a century or more prior, with a few notable exceptions.

For example, the original inn was unpainted, but to protect the wood, yet still maintain a semblance of the original appearance, a grey stain was used on the exterior. In addition, there would have been no veranda across the front prior to 1929. Instead, there were verandas on either end of the inn. Aside from these minor but necessary alterations, however, the Spence Inn is a faithful reconstruction.

A large room on the second floor reveals an important role for inns: that of an office for dentists, salesmen or, as in this case, a travelling doctor. Instead of paying for the room, these professionals would oftentimes provide services to the innkeeper and his family — free medical visits, for example, or goods traded in kind — in exchange for room and board. In this manner, small rural communities would gain the benefit of essential services they otherwise would have gone without.

The Spence Inn serves as a reminder of pioneer-era hotels, and of the countless crossroad hamlets that clung to existence along the well-intentioned but misguided colonization roads. In a very real sense, it speaks of the rise and fall of early settlement in the summer playground that Muskoka has become.