History
This river has been used as a transportation corridor for thousands of years, first by First Nations and later in the 19th century by fur trader. During the late 19th and mid 20th centuries, it was used to transport timber from logging camps in the upper Sudbury District to Georgian Bay, where they were towed by tugs to sawmills on the Great Lakes. Until the mid 1960's pulp wood, mainly jack pine, was driven down the river to the paper mill at Espanola. A diesel tug towed large rafts of logs the length of Agnew Lake to big Eddy dam where they were sluiced down a flume by crews with hand held pike poles. Secondary flumes took them past the High Falls and Nairn Falls power plants and on to Espanola. The sap and bark from the pulp logs was a major pollution source in the lower river.
Today the river is mainly used for recreational canoeing and has been protected as a waterway provincial park. All park sites and portages are currently maintaned by park staff. There are four hydroelectric dams on the river: one, known as Big Eddy, above High Falls forming Lake Agnew; High Falls dam about a kilometer below Big Eddy dam; Nairn Falls dam about 12 km below High Falls and the other at the Domtar mill in Espanola.
Read more about this topic: Spanish River (Ontario)
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