Episode 25: Interview with Wilderness Adventurer Sandy Lewis

ALGONQUIN DEFINING MOMENTS

Episode 25: Interview with Wilderness Adventurer Sandy Lewis

In the last episode I shared some of the origin stories of a few Algonquin Wilderness Adventurers whose ancestors, some as many as five generations back, were invited by the Ontario Government to lease small plots of land on a specific set of Algonquin Park lakes and build summer cabins. In this episode I’m thrilled to be chatting with the patriarch of one such five-generation family Sandy Lewis. Sandy is the grandson of both Dr. Alexander Pirie and Thomas Bertram who were Algonquin’s first wilderness Adventurers. The two purchased in 1906, Allan and David Gilmour’s summer cabins and leased the land on the south-end of an island in the middle of Canoe Lake, just south of what is today’s Big Wapomeo Island. The sawmill that the Gilmour brothers owned that existed at the north end of Canoe Lake had gone bankrupt some years earlier and the cottages abandoned. Lewis shares not just his grandparents and parents experiences, but also his own as a young child, hanging out by himself in the woods.

Biographical references include my own 2002 book Algonquin Voices, Selected Stories of Canoe Lake Women and Gary Long and Randy Whitman’s 1998 book When Giants Fall – The Gilmour Quest for Algonquin Pine.

This episode’s musical interlude is called Forever Unknown and comes from fellow Algonquin lover Sarah Spring. Sara is a composer, sound artist, pianist and music educator and her music can be found on www.saraspringpiano.ca