But year by year, he says, fewer and fewer charter buses would pull in. In the ’90s, Actinolite still saw lots of traffic from charter buses, along with the Voyageurs-cum-Greyhounds, Lee says. READ: Greyhound says goodbye to western Canada Once, Lee says, a girl came up to him and paid her bill 10 years after the fact. Sometimes they would come back and repay the kindness.
THE LOG CABIN RESTAURANT FREE
“We offered lots of free meals to students,” Lee says. Many were college or university students on shoestring budgets, who’d schlep back and forth on the Greyhound to visit their families. to offer a hot beverage to travellers held up by the occasional snowstorm.Īt its peak, the restaurant served some 100,000 customers a year, Lee estimates. in the evening, sometimes they’d stay up as late as 2 a.m. They’d rise early enough to open it before the first bus arrived for a stopover around 9 a.m. The Lees lived in an apartment on the second floor of the restaurant. They’d get together with the Lees for dinner sometimes, Lee says, and show them old menus-the ones where hamburgers were listed for 25 cents. For a long time, members of the Price family still lived across the street. The Lees, who had immigrated to Canada from South Korea, enjoyed connecting with all different kinds of customers, some of whom would regale them with stories about the bears that drank Coke. Lee at the Log Cabin in the ’90s (Courtesy of Sung Hwan Lee) “But Bud Price always made sure they had a balanced diet.” “They enjoyed Coke and Pepsi and chocolate bars and ice cream,” Morton says. Two others, Buster and Bandy, were captured in 1950 they died in 19, respectively. In the Price brothers’ care, in cages adjacent to the restaurant, they lived longer-than-average lives. The bears, Morton is at pains to emphasize, were rescued cubs that would have otherwise been killed in the wild. The Prices would welcome weary travellers to stay overnight in several smaller, rudimentary cabins on the property. “Their dining room was highly acclaimed.” It wasn’t just a restaurant, but a kind of motel, too. “The original log cabin was very attractive,” says Evan Morton, curator of the nearby Tweed Heritage Centre. READ: Greyhound Canada’s cuts are a public safety crisis for Indigenous people His sons, Bruce and Bud, opened a restaurant in the new log cabin-and welcomed its first bear-in 1933. Price bought up an old Lutheran church and used its logs to start building what would become a landmark along the route. In 1932, when a new stretch of Highway 7 was paved between Kaladar and Actinolite, Merritt Price, a retired United Church minister, saw an opportunity. The longer it does, the more it looks like a relic of a bygone era. And this once-bustling rest stop sits empty. Then, citing pandemic losses, Greyhound announced in May it was shutting down its services in Canada altogether. Almost two years ago, as business subsequently dwindled, its owner-operators of almost 30 years retired. It was during those heady days after the Second World War, when a place like this symbolized all the potential of the postwar economy, that the buses started coming.įrom the first day Colonial Coach Lines pulled over in 1947, through the Voyageur years and into the Greyhound era of the late ’90s, this much-loved joint-or much-hated, in more recent times, if you were cranky from the cramped bus seats and dissatisfied with plastic-wrapped baked goods-was a reliable place to stretch your legs and buy a candy bar.īut three years ago, Greyhound ceased using the Log Cabin Restaurant as a rest stop.
The Price brothers’ log cabin in Actinolite, Ont., was such a natural stopping point between Toronto and Ottawa that “Halfway House” was written on its placemats. Giving the resident caged bear bottles of Coke to guzzle? Now that was just priceless. In the restaurant’s heyday, Supertest gas flowed from the pumps, hamburgers cost a quarter and homemade ice cream-made from 50 per cent milk, 50 per cent separated cream-was five cents a cone.
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