Last week, my daughter’s boyfriend drove up from Toronto to his home near Thunder Bay, so I tagged along for the ride. Ostensibly, I came to keep him company, but I had an ulterior motive. I keep a photographic bucket list and one of the items on that list is the Camp Bison Prison Farm just south of Sudbury. Typically, I make the run up to Thunder Bay with my wife who doesn’t enjoy long hikes through the woods to grub around inside abandoned buildings. My daughter’s boyfriend is a more willing captive. My interest in the Camp Bison Prison Farm is twofold. First is the photographic interest of exploring an abandoned space. Second is more personal: I grew up occasionally hearing my dad tell the story of its most infamous inmate.
When I was eight or nine, my dad showed me a gift from one of his students, a pen knife. Early in his career, my dad had been an elementary school teacher and in one of his first cohorts was a boy named Wayne Ford. Wayne’s pen knife turned out to be portentous. Wayne’s father had prospered as owner of a North York gas station and operator of the local motor vehicle licensing bureau. Unfortunately, Lorne Ford died prematurely, leaving behind his wife, Minnie, and teenaged son, Wayne. A further misfortune struck the family when, in 1963, Minnie disappeared. Nothing ever happened in Willowdale, so the disappearance of a prominent business man’s widow was big news. My dad says he bumped into Wayne shortly after the news broke and said how sorry he was to hear about his mom. Wayne answered that, yeah, it was too bad, a real mystery.
After his mother’s disappearance, Wayne went wild, buying drugs in Yorkville and selling them from the family home on Kingsdale Ave., running a brothel from the basement, accidentally shooting a friend in the foot. A growing list of offences finally landed him in the Burwash Industrial Farm—Camp Bison Prison Farm—south of Sudbury. On May 17, 1966, Wayne Ford walked away from a work detail, hiked through 16 km of bush, stole a car, and drove down to Toronto where he was picked up on the Danforth by a police officer who recognized him. Escape from a minimum security facility meant automatically he got sent up to Kingston Penitentiary, hard time. While Wayne Ford was in KP, Minnie Ford’s badly decomposed body floated to the surface of Lake Couchiching. Police soon had enough evidence to charge him with his mother’s murder. The facts have never been in dispute. During his lunch break, Wayne got into an argument with his mom and beat her to death with a baseball bat. He went back to class at Earl Haig Secondary School and finished the day before returning home to clean up the mess. He placed her in a crate, filled it with plaster, and dumped the weighted crate into the lake near the family cottage. I guess you could say he was a precocious kid.
The province of Ontario founded the Burwash Industrial Farm (and the town of Burwash for its employees) in 1914 as a minimum security correctional facility. Deemed too expensive to run, the province closed it in 1975 and, gradually, has sold off tracts of land to various groups. The town has been razed, as have most of the buildings except the main prison building. This main building was our goal. You get to it by exiting Highway 69 onto Ontario Highway 637 then making a quick right onto Burwash Farm Road. At the first bend in the road, where it turns from asphalt to gravel, there’s an official plaque declaring the site a heritage trust. Beyond the plaque, the road grows increasingly rough and, given how low a Prius rides, we had to pick our way with care through potholes and ruts. Along the way, we paused to stare at a hawk that stared back at us. It seemed unfazed by booms that sounded in the background, like rolling thunder. I remember reading that 3000 hectares had been sold to the Department of National Defence and was used as an artillery range. That would explain all the No Trespassing signs on the metal fences to either side of the road.
We passed a parked blue pickup truck with a trailer for an ATV but the trailer was empty. We continued down a dirt track but a massive puddle blocked our way, so that is where we parked. We assembled our gear as it began to pour rain. In my case, gear means my 5DS and two lenses, waterproof backpack, and monopod. Despite my best efforts to research the site beforehand, my online tools proved deficient. Google Maps had indicated that we could drive our car to the very end of the road and then make a short hike to the building. Instead, we came to a railway line with a track bed raised almost two metres above the road. Even without the puddle, we could have driven no further, not only because the tracks are elevated, but also because there were boxcars on one of the lines and both the boxcars and the line seemed abandoned. The steel of the other line was bright and polished so, we assumed, still in use, confirmed on our return as we saw a train pass. We climbed onto the tracks and took shelter under the boxcars until the rain let up a little, then continued along the road which began to look less and less like a road (the sort that Google Maps would recognize) and more and more like a path in the woods. Large stretches of the path lay submerged and we had to pick our way around the edges of the path. My boots and pants were soaked. The mosquitoes were ferocious, especially when the path veered into open areas of long grass.
Someone had tacked a home-made sign to a tree: “To Visit Prison Call Dave” along with a phone number. When we were about half an hour in, an ATV emerged from the bush driven by a man of about 60. With his goatee and globe-shaped helmet, he reminded me of a character from South Park. He carried what looked to me like gun cases for (what I hoped were) hunting rifles and wore a camouflage jacket. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he was retired military.
He addressed us as “You Boys.” Do you boys realize you’re trespassing?
I found the “You Boys” bit funny given that I couldn’t be much younger than him. Then again, I’d buzzed my head that morning and a shaved head takes years off my life. At first, I thought he was joking, but I quickly discarded that theory; the man was utterly humourless, as seems to be the case with military types. He struck me as a man devoid of all irony, as our subsequent exchange proved.
So I suppose you boys are on your way up to see the prison, are you?
We said yes.
Did you see the sign to call Dave?
Are you Dave?
Yes, I’m Dave.
I was going to explain that I didn’t call the number on the sign because it was a home-made sign and looked like something a teenager had done to make a quick buck, but given that Dave appeared to be well-armed, I opted instead for a simple Okay, Dave.
So you haven’t spoken to Josh?
Who’s Josh?
Josh Reynolds is the fella who owns the prison.
Josh Reynolds is also the name of an English portrait artist but, as with so much else, I decided it was best to keep that one to myself.
Instead, I confessed that I did not know Josh Reynolds owned the prison. Here we come to the second deficient tool in my preliminary research. Under the Burwash, Ontario entry in Wikipedia, there is a list of groups that have purchased parcels of land severed from the the original Burwash Industrial Farm. However, it fails to note that in 2014, the provincial government sold 200 acres, including the prison building, to a private individual named Joshua Reynolds. At any rate, for a small fee and a signature on a waiver of liability, Josh lets people explore the building. Dave acts as his agent and keeps a camp to the left inside the prison entrance where he can keep an eye on things. They have been having problems with people coming in and vandalizing the place and it is frustrating them to no end.
A couple ironies occurred to me but, again, I kept them to myself. The first was that, as far as I could surmise, Josh purchased the building pre-vandalized as it had been abandoned for 39 years before he came on the scene. How on earth could he be frustrated by the slow destruction of a property whose only interest lies in the fact that it’s falling to ruin? The second was that this retired military type was acting as a prison guard…to keep people out.
Dave looked us up and down.
You boys don’t look like the sort who’d go wild in a place like this.
I raised the camera slung around my neck and assured him I was there for only one reason. He decided that $20 from each of us would take care of the matter. I thought back to my initial impression of the home-made sign—Call Dave—and wondered if maybe my impression wasn’t more accurate than I’d first supposed. Dave was just a teenager on an ATV trying to hustle a few extra bucks. I handed him the cash. Like a sphinx with the right answer, he smiled and let us pass.
We spent maybe an hour and a half in the building, walking down cell blocks, into common rooms, the shower, dining hall, theatre. We climbed onto the roof and had a good view of the property. I found spent shotgun shells scattered over the tarred and pebbled roof. All the windows were broken. All the toilets were smashed. Porcelain and bricks lay scattered across the floor. Swallows started at our footsteps and swooped up and down the halls. Graffiti, cushions, beer bottles, rusted hinges, racial taunts scrawled on the walls, water pooled in broad puddles. The memory of unrest? The lingering taste of violence?
The cornerstone for the existing building is dated 1958. In design, the building resembles other institutional buildings constructed during the post-war boom. A few remain in the Willowdale area where Wayne Ford grew up, most notably a handful of churches and schools. It’s natural to suppose a minimum security prison would adopt the design of an educational facility assuming the prison’s official function was primarily educational rather than punitive. Inmates would learn lessons about socialization, the importance of a daily regimen, and the value of hard work. But it strikes me as equally plausible that lines of influence also ran in the other direction: despite the high-minded aims of churches and schools, their prison-like design encouraged conformity and obedience to authority. Whatever social meanings we ascribe to the designs and materials of these buildings, nevertheless I found it difficult not to draw an association between the places I knew as a child—the church my parents attended; my junior high school—and these cell blocks last occupied in the same era. I expect Wayne Ford drew the same association when he was incarcerated here. How could these halls not remind him of Earl Haig Secondary School.
At 4:30, we realized we’d lost track of time. The whole afternoon and we’d had the place to ourselves. We still had an hour back to the car and another four hours to the Sault. We walked in silence and, despite the exhilaration of a wonderful photographic opportunity, I felt an odd melancholy, maybe driven by the recognition that this was all so familiar to me, this post-war cookie-cutter building style. And it was all falling to ruin.
Nice article…but one thing. The Militsry never used Burwash as artillery range. Reason not deemed arty by DND. We do have a regular rifle range on site and training area. Only live fire on that range. All other areas use blanks.
Thanks for visiting, Greg, and thanks for your correction.
Camp Bison Prison has been sold again in March of 2020. There are plans for a historical type hiking trail to go in with access off HWY 637.
To the new owner of Camp Bison,
thanks for letting me visit Camp Bison early this summer. (actually your grand children let me pass). I came by mountain bike. Didn’t enter any buildings but enjoyed having been there and seen the site.
Hans Schwendener