John Rudolphus Booth was already one of Canada's wealthiest men when he turned his attention to grain. In 1891, he merged several railway lines to form the Ottawa, Arnprior and Parry Sound Railway, creating a route from Georgian Bay through southern Algonquin Park to Ottawa. The Canada Atlantic Railway, as the broader system became known, offered the shortest and quickest path for shipping prairie grain to Atlantic ports. At its peak, trains arrived at and departed Depot Harbour every twenty minutes, hauling grain to be loaded onto lake freighters. The harbour itself was praised as the finest natural harbour on the Great Lakes, sheltered and deep enough for the largest vessels of the era. Booth built his town to match the ambition: by 1926, Depot Harbour had 1,600 permanent residents, swelling to as many as 3,000 in summer when seasonal workers arrived to handle the grain rush.

Booth sold his railway to the Grand Trunk Railway in 1904, and by 1923 it had been absorbed into the government-owned Canadian National Railways. The decline that followed was death by a thousand cuts. The reconstruction of the Welland Canal in 1932 opened a competing shipping route through the Great Lakes. In 1933, ice damaged the Cache Lake trestle in Algonquin Provincial Park, and the railway abandoned that section of track rather than repair it. The Great Depression crushed grain prices. The CNR, with its own facilities at South Parry, had no reason to maintain a rival port. One by one, the reasons for Depot Harbour's existence disappeared. The population dwindled. Buildings fell into disrepair. The town that had risen so fast began its slow slide toward abandonment.

The end, when it came, arrived with a bang. During World War II, cordite manufactured at the nearby Nobel munitions plant was stored in Depot Harbour's dockside freight sheds, directly across the inlet from the grain elevators. By the summer of 1945, the timber-frame elevators were being dismantled. On August 14 -- the very day the rest of the world was preparing to celebrate Victory over Japan -- the partly dismantled elevators caught fire. Wind carried burning embers across the water to the freight sheds packed with explosives. The detonation destroyed what was left of the harbour facilities in a single catastrophic blast. It was a grimly fitting end: a town born from the ambitions of empire, erased by the leftover munitions of war.

Depot Harbour refused to die quietly. After the explosion, the surviving wharf found new purpose as a coal distribution terminal for the Century Coal Company, a subsidiary of Canada Steamship Lines. When the coal market faded in the late 1950s, the National Steel Corporation took over, installing a rail-mounted gantry crane to load pelletized iron ore from its Low Phos Mine at Sellwood. Ships called regularly until the mine closed in 1979, and then the docks fell silent for the last time. By late August 1959, all residential buildings had been removed, leaving only foundations. The bank vault, impervious to everything that had destroyed the town around it, still stands in the undergrowth. One building survives as a cottage. The port itself now operates as a small fish farm, run by a local resident of the reserve.

In 1987, the Anishinaabe of the Wasauksing First Nation reclaimed the expropriated lands. The reserve that Booth's surveyors had trespassed upon in 1895, the territory carved away by legal force, returned to its original stewards. It is a quiet reversal of the story that created Depot Harbour in the first place -- land taken for an empire of grain and railways, returned when the empire had crumbled to rubble and rust. The foundations that poke through the forest floor are monuments to impermanence, reminders that the busiest port on the Great Lakes could vanish in barely half a century.