Huntsville

The Anishinaabe peoples of the Canadian Shield knew these lakes long before settlers arrived. The first European settler was George Hunt, who came in 1869 and built a small farming centre on the Muskoka River; a post office opened in 1870 and the place took his name, with Hunt as first postmaster. A navigable water route north from Port Sydney opened in 1877, the railway arrived from Gravenhurst in 1885, and Huntsville was incorporated in 1886, with the Muskoka Colonization Road reaching it a year later. Sawmills, planing and shingle mills and a tannery made it an industrial town by the end of the century, and a fire swept Main Street in 1894.

The lakes became the town's fortune. A canal dug in 1888 let large steamboats into Peninsula Lake, and the Huntsville and Lake of Bays Transportation Company, chartered in 1895, ran steamers and hotels across a chain of lakes, joined by a short narrow-gauge railway over the portage to Lake of Bays. Tom Thomson painted in the area in the 1910s. The system ran as a unit until 1959; its little locomotive left, returned in the 1980s and has run as the Portage Flyer at Muskoka Heritage Place since 2000.

In 1971 the town absorbed four surrounding townships and the village of Port Sydney, making it the largest of the Muskoka towns. A landmark Main Street hotel burned in 2009, and in June 2010 Huntsville hosted the 36th G8 summit on Peninsula Lake.

Huntsville's cultural identity is bound up with the landscape painters who made these rocks, pines and lakes into national images. Tom Thomson and his successors in the Group of Seven painted here often, and the town has turned their work into an outdoor gallery of murals on downtown buildings. Many visual artists live in the area; the Huntsville Art Society runs its own gallery, the Art Space, and holds shows and workshops through the year.

The Huntsville Festival of the Arts organises music and performance, including a Nuit Blanche North, the Film North international film festival began in 2010, and the Muskoka Novel Marathon began in 2001. The Algonquin Theatre, added to the 1926 town hall, is the main stage. Summer camps for children have long surrounded the town, and the singer Shania Twain was discovered while performing at a local resort in the late 1980s.

Sport follows the seasons. Hockey and lacrosse are the town's games, played in the two arenas of the Canada Summit Centre, and Huntsville has one of the largest girls' hockey associations, running since the early 1970s. It is one of the Canadian towns to host an Ironman 70.3 triathlon, and golf, paddling, skiing and snowmobiling fill the rest of the year.

The 2021 census counted 21,147 people in the town, up 6.7 per cent on 2016, spread over more than 700 square kilometres of lakes, forest and small communities. The town centre is compact, and much of the rest is cottage shoreline, farms and villages, with seasonal residents adding greatly to the summer population.

The economy is mainly service-based, built on tourism and on the cottagers who spend summers on the lakes. Major employers include a large resort, the regional school board and a Kimberly-Clark plant, and many people work in construction. The seasonal nature of tourism has long kept unemployment above the provincial average. The district hospital is a community teaching hospital linked to the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, and a university research centre opened with G8 legacy money lost its partner when the University of Waterloo ended its lease in 2017.

Life swings between seasons: busy summers of boats, traffic and full restaurants; autumn weekends of colour-seekers heading to Algonquin; long, snowy winters of hockey, skiing and snowmobile trails; and a quiet spring. Residents shop on Main Street and at the mall on Main Street East, and the empty lot where the old Main Street hotel stood is still a reminder of the 2009 fire.

Huntsville's food is that of Ontario cottage country rather than a cuisine of its own. Main Street has small restaurants, cafés, bakeries and dessert shops serving locals and cottagers, and the Huntsville Brewhouse brews small batches of beer on Main Street East with its own kitchen. Diners and snack bars along the highways feed travellers on their way to Algonquin.

The province's simple classics are well represented. The butter tart — a small pastry filled with butter, sugar and eggs, with or without raisins — is sold by bakeries across the region, and Great Lakes and inland fish such as pickerel and whitefish turn up on menus. Spring is maple season in Ontario, when sugar bushes open for pancakes and syrup, and summer brings berries and farm produce.

For many visitors, eating here means cooking at the cottage or the campsite: a barbecue on the dock, a picnic at a park beach, or a meal over a camp stove in Algonquin, with supplies bought in town before heading into the woods.