The Early Development of Ril Lake
Ril Lake is located just east of Baysville and to the north of Muskoka Road 117. In 1874, Joseph
and Harriet Gilmour, and their four adult children all took up land in Ridout Township. Joseph
and his son Henry, took up two hundred acres apiece, while his sons William and Alexander, and
his daughter Mary, took up one hundred acres each. By the end of the 1870s, the Gilmours held
seven hundred acres north of Ril Lake. The Gilmours appear to have struggled with the land they
settled. Muskoka is generally very poor farming country. There are pockets of soil suitable to
grow some crops, but most pioneers confronted thin, acidic soils mixed in amongst rocky
outcroppings of granite and low marshy areas. For reasons that are unknown, at some point after
taking up their land - probably during the early 1880s - the family gave up four lots along the
shore of Ril Lake but retained three lots next to the road. The reason for this may lie with the fact
that, in an effort to discourage land speculation, locatees were required to clear a certain amount
of land each year and build a home under the terms of the Free Grants Act. If these requirements
were not met, the locatee forfeited any claim to the land. Thus, while it is possible that the
Gilmours sold the four lots, it is much more likely that the land simply reverted to the Crown.
Eventually, the Gilmour’s son William moved away from Muskoka with his family. In the
1930s, however, William’s grand-daughter returned to the family land north of Ril Lake for her
honeymoon. In the 1950s, she and her husband bought land along the shore of Ril Lake where
the family has been cottaging ever since. Thus, after roughly three quarters of a century after the
family first took up land in Ridout Township, the great, great, great, great grandchildren of the
Gilmours continue to have a presence on Ril Lake.
This information was collected in an interview in the summer of 2013 with Allan McDonald.