Gradually a hinterland economy took hold. Those with good farms stayed. Others moved on, or resettled into District villages. Yet for local government, Muskoka remained very much a “work-in-progress.” Our townships were linked either to Victoria County to the east, or Simcoe County to the south, whose county councils, with Muskoka township reeves participating, made all decisions that mattered.

The second phase came in 1880 when Queen’s Park established Muskoka as a “provisional district,” with central Bracebridge designated as district town. However, the most “provisional” aspect wasn’t the District’s legal status but Muskokans’ utter lack of unity. A parochial perspective remained dominant into the 1900s.

Settlers arriving during the land rush and pinned down on it by hard work ever since, remained isolated. Homesteaders moving into villages and towns identified mostly with their immediate neighbourhoods. The Muskoka Herald sought a comprehensive focus, as the newspaper’s name and contents made clear, but folks in the district’s competitor towns dismissed it as “just a Bracebridge rag.”

Hockey and lacrosse teams, popular across Muskoka, were all village-based and their fans celebrated triumphs over rival communities. The Boer War kindled pro-war militancy, but simultaneously in the district’s different parts, not commonly for all: Huntsville and Gravenhurst mentioned, but did not grieve the way Bracebridgites did, the two Bracebridge soldiers killed in South Africa.

Electing representatives to Queen’s Park and Parliament, though taking place across the district, divided Muskokans first along party lines and then further segregated them into widespread small polls. The District’s militiamen were split between Parry Sound and Simcoe regiments because Muskoka lacked its own military unit. The Orangemen’s July 14 parade and celebrations drew hundreds of families from Muskoka’s twenty Orange lodges to a single centre each year, but the event was exclusively Protestant. Even when formation of Muskoka’s overseas battalion began during the Great War, its four companies and one detachment were organized along geographic subdivisions in the District.

Even so, a third phase in district history opened. Creating the battalion was the first thing Muskokans had ever done together. The soldiers’ single identity as Muskokans, and the 122^nd’s district-wide supporters, shared an emotional wartime communal spirit transcending institutional structures for local governance. Their military, social, and cultural unity aroused a new recognition of being “Muskokan.”

After the war, fuelled by this larger spirit, progressive township reeves realized local government coordination could advance municipal councillors’ shared interests across the district. On September 10, 1919 ten reeves gathered in Bracebridge to discuss Ontario’s Municipal Assessment Act and other statutes touching local government. When reassembling September 14, 1920, four more reeves had joined. All voted into existence “a permanent organization to be known as the District Municipal Association of Muskoka.” President was steamboat captain Levi Fraser who, on land, was Monck Township’s enterprising reeve, instigator of what today is Muskoka Road 118 West.

Stage four had been reached. Two decades later, this first-ever form of district government, with representatives from all municipalities, rechristened itself “Muskoka District Council.” However, still lacking statutory authority, the assembly remained a clearing house, lacking municipal powers of government.

Only in 1970 would “district government” become a formalized legal reality. That fifth and current stage anchors my next column.