Canada John Muir Resources

John Muir at Trout Hollow

John Muir lived near Meaford, Ontario Canada in 1864-1865. A few miles upriver from the town he found a place where he could work, botanize and commune with nature. 

In a cabin at Trout Hollow, often referred to only as “The Hollow” Muir had some of his closest friends.

This was his home between 1864 and 1866.

The property where Muir lived and worked has been donated to the Escarpment Biosphere Conservancy. This means it will become a public access site in perpetuity. The E.B.C is Ontario’s most active environmental organization. 

The sketch on the right is Muir’s own rendition of what the cabin looked like while he worked at William Trout’s sawmill and manufacturing operation.

Book cover - My Summer of Glorious Freedom by Robert BurcherNew book explores Muir’s two formative year as a young man living at Trout Hollow, Meaford, Ontario, Canada. Titled My Summer of Glorious Freedom: John Muir Saunters Around Southern Ontario in the Summer of 1864, the book  by Robert Burcher traces Muir’s botanical discoveries  which culminated in his discovery of the rare Calypso borealis orchid, leading to his very first written publication.

For a review of this book, see “30 Years of Research Results in Book About John Muir” by Helen Solmes in The Meaford Independent (April 17, 2020)

A new documentary was released in 2019, “John Muir at Trout Hollow” by filmmaker Amy Phelan.  It tells the story how in 1864, John Muir came to Canada where he lived and worked with a family named “Trout,” in a Meaford, Ontario sawmill. As an impresionable young man,  he developed lifetime friendships with the family. Decades later, he became a famous writer, adventurer and preservationist, and the reason the American national parks exist today. The documentary examines Muir’s evolving spiritual ideas involving nature and the ideas that were the thrust behind his international influence.
Read more about the film on Internet Movie Database.

Muir’s famous story of his discovery of the rare Calypso orchid in a Canadian marsh was his first published writing. Muir’s rapture at this discovery was only the first of his many experiences – which he always referred to as “glorious” –  in wild nature.  This version of hte essay is excerpted from The Life and Letters of John Muir.

William Trout’s 1916 book on Trout Family History includes an extensive section discussing his acquiantance with John Muir. The full book is available at archive.org.

 

This hiking trail along the Bighead River near Meaford, Canada, goes through the site of the Trout sawmill where John Muir lived and worked for two years. 

Photo and plaque text for this historical plaque.
Location: Epping Lookout, Bruce Trail, about 12 miles from Trout Hollow, near Meaford, Ontario, where Muir lived in a cabin while working in a factory which made rakes for agriculture. On County Road 7, south of County Road 40, off Highway 26 in Grey County.

Additional photos and explanatory text for this historical plaque from Alan Brown’s comprehensive website featuring all of Ontario’s Historical Plaques.

It is often incorrectly repeated by those with only a casual knowledge of John Muir that he must have been a draft dodger during the U.S. Civil War, since he spent the last year of the war in Canada. However, this article shows that the allegation that John Muir was a draft dodger is thoroughly discredited by the historical record.

The Sierra Club John Muir Exhibit provides here a list of resource links about Muir’s time in Canada.

This is the archive website chronicling the efforts of the Canadian Friends of John Muir to re-discover Muir’s time spent in Trout  Hollow, near Meaford, Ontario. Although the website is no longer updated, it contains valuable information telling how in 1998, The Canadian Friends discovered the site of theTrout Hollow mill in the Bighead River Valley where Muir spent time botanizing and working with his friends making rake handles. The group also helped preserve letters between Muir and local residents, and created a display about John Muir in the Meaford Museum.