Kagawong

Kagawong, a North Channel village located on Highway 540 mid-point between M’Chigeeng and Gore Bay, has it all: history, one of Manitoulin’s landmark natural tourist attractions, a heritage village (complete with lighthouse), a historic pulp mill that now serves as the waterfront municipal office of the Township of Billings, a bubbling brook, hiking trails, art galleries and even a chocolate factory.

That was a very long sentence but Kagawong (which one of the village’s official signs aptly designates it as ‘Ontario’s prettiest village’) just merits a lot of descriptors.

The original, and historic, community grew up around a port on Mudge Bay, the village’s North Channel water feature.

The town was established nearly 150 years ago by two enterprising brothers, the Henrys, from southern Ontario who saw the advantage to them of harvesting the thousands of acres of spruce and white pine that was, at that time, right for the cutting.

Lake Kagwang, above the village, empties into a river, over a very scenic, accessible and photogenic falls and then follows a downhill path to empty into Mudge Bay

The energy from this fall by a canal cut deeply into the limestone, powered Manitoulin’s very first electricity operating station which was built, of course, to provide power to the pulp mill (now the municipal office, Old Mill and, upstairs, home to the Edwards Studio and Gallery).

Cutting timber, and processing it too, were the pioneer village’s charter industries in the late nineteenth century, the time when the collection of buildings in the original village were all built.