CENTURY-OLD ‘SIMPSON BARN’ TORN DOWN — BUT PART OF FAMILY HISTORY PRESERVED WITH OLD BRIARS DAIRY MILK WAGON ‘BACK HOME’ ON FARM ‘WHERE IT BELONGS’

Mark Clairmont | MuskokaTODAY.com

GRAVENHURST — A lot of history was lost last week when the old “Simpson Barn” was torn down on Bethune Drive at the north entrance to Gravenhurst.

What once took a small army of men to build came down in just more a week by a couple of men with a blue lift and a next to little effort comparatively.

“Inside me it kind of hurt,” said Rusty Draper, whose mother Eileen’s parents, Joe and Matilda Simpson, built it around 1914 at the start of the First World War.

Making it well over a century old.

Gone, but soon not forgotten, the old ‘Simpson Barn’ will live on with parts of it to be reused in future building projects, says new Hale owner Eric Hale. PHOTOS Mark Clairmont MuskokaTODAY.com

Eric Abugov, the new Hale Muskoka outdoor events centre owner said Iconic Contruction workers were able to salvage and save “about 60-70 per cent” of the great old timbers and barn board from inside and the hay loft for his future building plans on the property.

He is lucky it was never declared a heritage building as it should have been.

Draper’s not 100 per cent sure, but believes neighbours of the Simpsons probably pitched in to erect it, much as Mennonites did in a day.

“They couldn’t afford to build on their own, so their neighbours probably helped.”

He said new property owner Eric Abugov, of Hale Muskoka, told him a few months back that now it was deemed “unsafe” after an inspection. And that he wanted to make the new building he’s putting up at the outdoor and events site to be a “people’s place.” So that wouldn’t have worked.

An elegant final dinner party was held inside a couple weeks back with legs of BBQ lamb among items on the menu.

The barn, more than a century old, is one of the last that was standing in Muskoka in core sections of the community.
The inside of the venerable old building housed hay and farm implements, above, and cows, below, for generations of the Simpson and Draper families.

Their conversation led to a deal that Draper e brokered to “bring home” the last remaining Briar’s Dairy milk wagon to Gravenhurst and the farm “where it belongs,” said Draper.

Joe Simpson ran a dairy farm and sold his cows’s milk to Briars, which also stored their wagons, milk cans and bottles in the barn above where the cows used to be milked.

“There were hundreds of them in there,” Draper remembers from when he built his own home on the family farm property on Simpson Road.

The old unmistakeable round yellow milk wagon with its own storied history sat “dilapidated” in the field next to the barn after Draper inherited the property sub-divided five times due to new roads and highways built all over and around it dissecting into different family parcels. One that still remains in the family with Drapers two kids — a great-grandson and great-grand-daughter of Joe and “Tillie.”

About 40 years ago Draper, who was working as the morning man at CFOR Radio in Orillia “and I had a pony but no horse,” wanted to restore the wagon.

“But I’m not too handy,” so he sold it a friend in Severn Falls. And over two years Jack Nolan “restored it to showroom condition.”

The barn has had many uses over 110 years and finally during Hale’s first event in August that included treasurers and troves.

Fast forward to late this winter and spring.

Draper got to thinking about the milk wagon and repatriating it back to Gravenhurst “where it belongs.

“I was in a predicament,” he said. “Who should I contact first? Abugov or the Nolan family? And what if they didn’t want to sell it?”

After talking to the Hale owner, Draper (a former real estate agent) brokered the deal to “bring it home.

“I was really happy about that. I don’t know what he paid for it. But the Nolans donated the money to GAP (Gravenhurst Against Poverty).”

Old pieces of horse harness rest in the front of the Briars milk wagon, which once was laden with bottles of milk with thin little paper caps on them. A similar shelf was behind on the other side of where driver Frank Laycock stood. The tiny holes at the top centre were where the reins reached out to the one horse that pulled it. Was one of them called Mack?

Draper recalls his own funny story about the milk wagon and the horse that plodded through town delivering dairy door-to-door.

“Frank Laycock, the driver, used to give me small bottles of chocolate milk. I was horsing around and fell under a back wheel and he had to carry me home.

“Now the wagon sits in a field pretty much in the same place as it did for decades,” Draper said Sunday.

Its vibrant outside still looks pretty good, but inside where old harnesses still sit a lot of new work remains to done.

As it awaits its latest revival and re-incarnation, which Abugov said recently could be a unique vendor outlet perhaps for his own merch.

A new indoor events centre and commercial kitchen are planned for the existing footprint, the owner says.
Demolition of the family’s dairy farm barn, which began Thursday Oct. 23, 2025, took about a week to complete. PHOTO Eric Abugov

EMAIL: news@muskokatoday.com

31 years of TRUSTED ‘Local Online Journalism’

SINCE MAY 20, 1994

Twitter: @muskokatoday, Facebook: mclairmont1

SUBSCRIBE for $30 by e-transferring to news@muskokatoday.com

Mail cheque to MuskokaTODAY.com Box 34 Gravenhurst, Ont. P1P 1T5

And include your email address to get stories sent to your inbox