Below is a snippet of an Ontario Motor League route map from the 1940s showing the drive between Orillia and Huntsville. At the time, Highway 11 in the vicinity was two lanes, and passed through every community en route–Orillia, Washago, Severn Bridge, Gravenhurst, Bracebridge and Huntsville.

I am fond of studying the few decades, say from about 1920 until 1955, when the railways, highways and waterways of Ontario were all viable transportation routes. Construction and upgrading of our road network ultimately made the highways prevail. Railway lines were abandoned or relegated to freight-only. The big change, which began in the early 1950s and continues to the present day, saw the settlement areas re-aligned in accordance with highway transportation. Each of the communities along Highway 11 between Orillia and North Bay have been bypassed with four-lane highway, leaving the former two-lane route in the core. It is along the pieces of the former highway where remnants such as old gasoline stations (most often converted to other uses), tourist cabins, small hotels and restaurants tell a story of an earlier era.

In many of my books, I enjoy exploring the two-lane highway era in Ontario, as depicted in the above map. In the Highway 11 corridor which is featured in The Secret of the Old Swing Bridge, a series of bypasses were constructed in the 1950s. Each in turn alleviated a bottleneck, but at the same time created a new one. The book features a tourist camp along Highway 11 north of Orillia named the Riverview Cabins. Establishments like this one took hold along provincial highways when motor car transportation gained popularity in the 1920s. They were a step up from sleeping in the car (with a “car blanket”), but much more economical than the hotels which were thriving in city centres (those, of course, declined into local watering holes as the highway bypasses took the motor trade outside the city core).