Before guests came aboard, this was a working waterfront.
For centuries, St. Margaret’s Bay was a working forest harbour. Trees from the hinterland came down the Ingram River and the woods roads. At the water they became boards. Boards left by schooner and by rail. The shoreline under and around the Land Yacht was part of that industry.
The community takes its name from Charles Ingram, a sergeant of the Warburton Regiment who settled near the river after 1749. The place was officially named Ingramport in 1905 — port because this was a shipping place, not only a village.
Lewis Miller Lumber Co., Ingramport, seen from Boutilier’s Point. Photograph taken after the railway (1904/1906) and before the 1928 fire. The Land Yacht is built on the very foundations of the tall smokestack.
A massive fire in 1928 ended the mill. The forests that fed it had also been heavily cut. When the whistle stopped, many workers left. Ingramport became quieter — cottages and year-round houses where mill yards and piling grounds had been.
Period photographs show a dense industrial waterfront: mill buildings, rail, stacked lumber, smokestacks and vessels lying close to shore.
Local memory recalls Ingramport as one of the Bay’s significant lumber exporters, with cargoes moving to markets including the West Indies and the United States.
For generations, the forests and sheltered waters around Ingramport supported sawmills, rail traffic and ocean shipping. The Land Yacht now occupies a shoreline once defined by lumber, wharves, smokestacks and vessels loading for distant ports.
Undated photo of a train derailment on the Land Yacht grounds. Rumour has it the boxcars were filled with rum!
From working harbour to living reef
Today, the Land Yacht’s relationship with the water is taking a different form. The Land Yacht Living Reef is creating new marine habitat within the three acres of seabed beside the property — in the same bay that once supported an industrial harbour.
To learn more about the Land Yacht Living Reef, click here.