Barnharts & Mechlings on the French River

Mary (Kunkle) Guthrie#16116's obituary read, in part:

She was a lifelong summer resident of her cottage on an island on the French River in Ontario, Canada.

That sentence could have applied to thirty or forty folks in the Barnhart and Mechling families, including John Edward Kunkle#16081 and his descendants, as well as Ruth (Knepper) Copeland#6, and her descendants.

It might seem a bit odd that a group of distantly-related Pennsylvanians would find themselves spending their summers within a half mile of each other, some 600 miles from their homes, in a part of backwoods Ontario where the total number of cabins could be counted on your fingers.

If you were a pickerel (walleye pike to most people in the U.S.) fisherman, the French River was a distant but great place to go. John Kunkle had started taking his family there in the early years of the 20th century. In 1923, a small island came up for sale and he decided to stop renting and purchase a place for his family.

Over the years, he brought his Westmoreland County friends up: his law partner, Fred Trescher; Rev. Harold Post, minister at the First Presbyterian Church in Greensburg, who baptised many of the family (including yours truly); my grandfather Charles Daniel Copeland#5, who was a judge in Greensburg; John's dentist, Dr. John Braillar; a Latrobe businessman friend, Ed Anderson. They all loved the French River so much that they built their own places on the islands around the Kunkle Cottage. They, in turn, brought their friends and family who put down their own roots: Dr. McClain Post (Harold's brother); Al Moore, who owned a steel business and was one of my grandfather's great friends. By the 1950s, that part of the French River was an enclave that might well have been called Greensburg North.

John Sr. passed away and left his cottage to his son, John, Jr.#16109, who eventually deeded half of it to his sister, Mary (Kunkle) Guthrie#16116. Another sister, Katherine#16106, married Hacke George and they put up their own cabin on the next island. My grandparents passed away and the Copeland Cottage passed to my mother, Ann (Copeland) Deffler#3, and my aunt, Mary (Copeland) Baker#7. Many of us grew up knowing it as our summer vacation home from the time we were born. I went up when I was just a few months old; one of my daughters made her appearance at 6 weeks of age.

Over the years, the number of cottages have grown. It's still rather empty — Ontario turned most of the land into a provincial park — but you can't count them on your fingers any more. The George Cottage passed out of the family. The Braillar Cottage moved into the family, becoming the Akin Cottage when my niece and nephew, Laura Akin#123 and Bill Akin#124, bought it in 2013. Still, most of the original cottages are with the descendants of their first owners, as well as the addition of the Deffler Cottage when my wife and I built in 1999. Three and four generations beyond those earliest visitors have continued to enjoy the place...my children are growing up with their first, second & sixth cousins on the place we all know simply as The River.