Spanish River (Huronsee)
The Spanish River in Northern Ontario, Canada flows 240 km in a southerly direction from its headwaters in Lake Biscotasi (west branch) and Duke Lake (east branch). Several other tributaries empty into the river, which passes through Agnew Lake before emptying into Georgian Bay just outside of Spanish.
Tributaries include Pogamasing Creek, Mogo Creek, Agnes River, the Aux Sables River, the Vermilion River and the Wakonassin River.
The river's name and the name of the nearby towns of Espanola and Spanish are said to be due to French explorers and Jesuit priests encountering Ojibwe peoples speaking Spanish in the area, apparently as a result of a Spanish woman having been taking captive during an expedition far to the south.
The Lower Spanish River Forest houses the world's oldest red pine and white pine forests, and much of that is under provincial protection, in form of provincial parks and reclamation acts.
History
This river has been used as a transportation corridor for thousands of years, first by First Nations and later in the 19th century by fur trader. During the late 19th and mid 20th centuries, it was used to transport timber from logging camps in the upper Sudbury District to Georgian Bay, where they were towed by tugs to sawmills on the Great Lakes. Until the mid 1960's pulp wood, mainly jack pine, was driven down the river to the paper mill at Espanola. A diesel tug towed large rafts of logs the length of Agnew Lake to big Eddy dam where they were sluiced down a flume by crews with hand held pike poles. Secondary flumes took them past the High Falls and Nairn Falls power plants and on to Espanola. The sap and bark from the pulp logs was a major pollution source in the lower river.
Today the river is mainly used for recreational canoeing and has been protected as a waterway provincial park. There are four hydroelectric dams on the river: one, known as Big Eddy, above High Falls forming Lake Agnew; High Falls dam about a kilometer below Big Eddy dam; Nairn Falls dam about 12km below High Falls and the other at the Domtar mill in Espanola.
See also
External links
- The Spanish River, connected waterways
- Canoeing the Ancient Forest of the Spanish River
- Webshots, Great Pictures from Spanish River