[2023-03-17] McEwen's Pancake House
I have a tradition of retracing my rural roots on St. Patrick's Day. Two years ago, in Reflecting on the past, I shared stories about St. Patrick's Church and the Community Hall in Ferguson Falls, a small, rural village about 70 kilometres west of Ottawa, near which I grew up. Last year, in 4-H, I recalled my years in 4-H, officially an organization for teaching agricultural skills to youth and unofficially (from my vantage point) home ec for country kids.
This year, I'm focusing on McEwen's Pancake House, owned by Bob and Kaye McEwen. This family-run maple syrup business employed many young people who lived in and around Ferguson Falls and Prestonvale. In fact, according to Lanark County historian and author Arlene Stafford Wilson, who wrote in a recent Facebook post:
Bob McEwen (1916-1984), son of Ewan McEwen and Ida McFarlane, decided to build a pancake house, as a centennial project, in 1967, to provide employment to local youth. Bob, along with local carpenter, Mansel Horricks, built it using logs from an old barn on the McEwen property. When it opened in March of 1968, it was the first Pancake House in Eastern Ontario, offering tasty meals of pancakes and sausages, along with McEwen's maple syrup.
I worked at the Pancake House from 1979 to 1984—from the age of 12 to the age of 17.
Like many girls from the community, I waited tables in the log cabin Pancake House, delivering steaming pancakes to hungry patrons. Customers could order one, two or three pancakes, accompanied—if they so chose—by one or two sausages. Every table had a pitcher or two of maple syrup, which was refilled as often as needed. During my time at the Pancake House, an order of 3 pancakes and 2 sausages (the famous #1 on the menu) cost about $3.25. Even by 1990 (according to an article in the Ottawa Citizen), that combination was only $5.30. A bargain.
The recipe for the pancakes was a family secret. No one but the owners seemed to know what went into the flour mixture, which was turned into batter on site with the addition of eggs, milk and a little oil. Two women of the community would ladle the batter onto sizzling hot griddles, making 12 pancakes at a time. The resulting pancakes were golden and fluffy: 6-7" across and about ¼-½" thick. The cooks piled the pancakes and sausages onto paper plates to be whisked away by eager waitresses. One year, the paper plates were so thin that by the time we got the just-off-the-griddle pancakes to the tables, our arms were red and sore.
The sausages were also delicious, roasted in paper bags, as I recall, by Kaye McEwen. For those who didn't fancy pancakes, they could order a bun with two sausages. The soft, squishy rolls were made by one of the long-standing cooks at the Pancake House: Dorothy Horricks. She was also the maker of the apple pie. A piece of the sweet, fruity tart was probably no more than $1 in the early 1980s since in 1990 (according to the Ottawa Citizen piece) it was a mere $1.25.
For those who didn't like sweet pancakes, buns or pie, there was one option: a hotdog. I hated when someone ordered a hotdog. Compared to pancakes—which were cooked for us—we waitresses had to prepare the hotdogs. Whenever someone ordered this menu item, I'd throw a wiener in a pot of hot water that was always steaming on the back of the stove. Sometimes, I would be so busy that I would forget about the hotdog; by the time I retrieved it from its hot tub, it would have split open. I would simply turn that part of the hotdog inside the bun and hope that my culinary oversight would go unnoticed.
Drinks at the Pancake House were simple and limited: coffee, tea or lemonade. The coffee was made in large commercial coffee machines. One of the men on the crew, often Bob McEwen himself, would lift the large coffee maker up onto the counter. The lemonade was as tart as it was sweet. In hindsight, I wonder how kids could drink lemonade while eating pancakes drenched in maple syrup. We served all drinks in small white Styrofoam cups, which were ubiquitous in those days.
In my final few years at the Pancake House, I cooked pancakes. By then, the McEwen's had made an addition to the Pancake House, a room at the back known as the Coach House. I could make 6 pancakes at a time, which didn't go far when a table of 10 or 12 people would order up to 3 pancakes each. To keep things moving, I would receive pancakes from the front kitchen to get me through the rush in the back room.
On April 25, 1983, I wrote in my journal: "I got paid for working at the Pancake House: $351.25. Adding to this my tip money of $147.00, I made a total of $489.00 this spring." Not bad for a part-time job 30 years ago.
There's not a lot of information available online about McEwen's Pancake House, but these three pieces add some interesting details.
"For The Sunday Driver"—a March 25, 1990 article in the Ottawa Citizen—featured McEwen's Pancake House as the first stop on a proposed Sunday drive:
With a log sugar shanty and a log pancake house set into the bush, this is a welcoming spot.
In the pancake house, you can get one plate-sized pancake for $2.35 or any variation up to three pancakes and two sausages for $5.30. You can also buy homemade apple pie ($1.25 a slice), a variety of sizes of maple candy and syrup to take home.
If the sap's been plentiful, the sugar shanty will be operating, sending its sweet steam into the winter air. If there's enough clean, fresh snow, kids can also enjoy rolling up their own maple taffy for 75 cents.
Be sure to take a tramp through the woods, where signs identify different types of trees and explain some of the principles involved in maple sap collection. There are 200 buckets being used in the old-fashioned spigot method of sap collection and 2,800 taps that are hooked up to a tube system.
"Sunday Best"—a March 29, 1992 article in the Ottawa Citizen—had this to say about McEwen's Sugar Shack:
This maple syrup business near Ferguson Falls has been in Tom McEwen's family since 1936. The sugar shanty that's still used today was built in the early 1950s. The public is welcome to stroll through to see an open evaporating system fueled by logs that turns sap to syrup. Sunday travellers can also explore some of about 75 acres of forest and then sample some of the sweet bounty at the McEwen's pancake house.
"Maple Trailblazers: Founding Families of Lanark County’s Maple Legacy"—a February 17, 2017 blog post by Arlene Stafford Wilson—fills in a few more blanks:
The McEwen clan in Ferguson Falls was another family who made their mark in the maple syrup business back in the 60s. In 1966 Robert McEwen of Prestonvale opened up the first pancake house in the area. Originally, Robert made his syrup the old fashioned way, out in the bush, and boiled a cauldron of sap over the fire. Later, in the 1970s I remember that he was one of the first to use plastic pipelines to bring the sap from the trees to one main location. Our Dad knew the McEwen family well, having grown up in that area, and said that Robert often spoke of the difficulties involved in syrup production. It was difficult to find reliable labour, and also challenging was finding the capital to purchase new equipment. Robert was very active in the local industry, and at one time was the President of the Lanark and District Maple Syrup Association.
When the former McEwen Sugar Shack went up for sale, Charles Temple and his wife Susan Snyder bought the property—the very first day it was on the market. The property known now as Temple’s Sugar Bush consists of 70 acres of maple bush where 5,000 trees are tapped annually.
Just a few years after I finished my tenure at the Pancake House, my family started producing maple syrup on my mom's farm. Our 100+ taps is paltry in comparison to the several thousand taps of the McEwen and Temple operations, but the resulting syrup is no less sweet. In the visual below, the photo of McEwen's Pancake House was reproduced from Arlene Stafford Wilson's Facebook post. All other photos are from the Hollington family maple bush and sugar shanty.
On this St. Patrick's Day, if given the choice between a green beer and maple syrup, I would choose the latter. I may be one-eighth Irish, but I'm 100% Lanark County, which is—after all—the Maple Syrup Capital of Ontario.
