5/15/2023 0 Comments Buster the bus“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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