The Wah Wah Taysee Association is a member of the Georgian Bay Association and participates actively in municipal and regional planning matters, water quality and other environmental issues affecting Southern Georgian Bay, on behalf of its members.
It is governed by an Executive, which is elected annually by the Association membership.
The Wah Wah Taysee area has historically been one of the least developed areas in the southern Georgian Bay area, south of Parry Sound.
Many of its residents have cottaged in the area over multiple generations. The Wah Wah Taysee community has a long and close relationship with the Moose Deer Point First Nation. The people of Moose Deer Point are descendants of the Pottawatomi of the American Mid-West. The Pottawatomi responded to an invitation from the British Government to settle in Southern Ontario in the late 1830′s, eventually joining the Beausoleil Band on Beausoleil Island. Later, some members of Beausoleil and some Pottawatomi moved north and established a settlement at Moose Point. The Moose Point Reserve was vested by an Order-in-Council in 1917.
The Wah Wah Taysee community values its remote wilderness landscape, and has carried on a long history of stewardship, preservation and protection, including cultural heritage sites such as the nearly 6000 acres of Tadenac Club lands that contain most of the lakes in the Tadenac Watershed, American Camp, O’Donnell Point, and Indian Harbour. The Tadenac Club, which has applied to be recognized as an Area of Natural and Scientific Interest. Many areas in the community have been donated by its members to the Georgian Bay Land Trust, to protect them in perpetuity.
Wah Wah Taysee is a special landscape, and includes locations where members of the Group of Seven played and painted. It is part of the cultural heritage landscape of Canada. Through local and personal histories, poems, pictures, the art of the Group of Seven and more recent visual artists, and the living memories of generations of cottagers, the Wah Wah Taysee area has an important cultural history.
Like much of the Georgian Bay shoreline, the Wah Wah Taysee area was opened up by logging, which took place on the shores of Georgian Bay for over 200 years, starting in the 1700’s and continuing until early in the twentieth century. Logs were floated down the length of Georgian Bay to the sawmills. Logs were formed into booms as large as 25 acres in size and containing as much as eight million board feet of lumber. Today, in the Wah Wah Taysee area, cottagers can still spot some of these logs, preserved on the bottom of the lake.
By the 1880’s, The Georgian Bay Lumber Company was turning out 300,000 board feet of pine per shift. Old growth pine was attractive for shipbuilding, and the lumber demand for construction in the northeast US and Ontario was immense. After the pine was depleted the loggers harvested hardwoods: birch, white oak, maple, beech and birdseye were cut and sent to the mills, and much of the shoreline was clearcut. The abundant forests we see today are relatively new growth, which is also the result of the natural fire cycle.
Today Wah Wah Taysee is a pristine stretch of shoreline in the archipelago of Georgian Bay, along Monument Channel and its outer islands and shoals, with a vista overlooking the Westerlies and Pine islands, and extending to Hope, Beckwith and Christian Islands. It is a highly diverse ecosystem with the greatest biodiversity and part of the most productive habitat in the Great Lakes.
Wah Wah Taysee Cottage Association