So wrote the Cobourg Star as early as 1848. The reader will, by this time in our story, be familiar with the Star's boundless enthusiasm for whichever local improvement scheme it chanced upon.

By 1865 all efforts at repairing the bridge over Rice Lake were dead in the water, so to speak. Although 12-million board feet of lumber came down the railway from Harwood that year, 19-million feet passed through Port Hope. Mayor Daintry's not-so-confident assertion the year before that Cobourg wasn't dead yet, seemed rather wistful.... Grass wasn't actually growing in Cobourg's streets, but the business atmosphere was certainly depressed.

Enter the Marmora Iron Works. The mines were located a scant nine miles north of the navigable part of the upper Trent River. The market for this ore was expanding in the United States as the steel mills around Pittsburgh responded to the huge growth in American industrial power during and after the Civil War. As Cobourgers pointed out, much of the ore the mills needed had to be brought down from the great ranges in the Northwest. Here was Cobourg with a convenient supply right in its own back-yard, with water connections to a railroad that would bring the stuff to Cobourg where there were water connections to anywhere.

Without doubt, this was the most productive period in the entire venture's history. It also had a surprising sequel in that during this time the American steelmen and financiers who came to conduct business here, fell in love with Cobourg's atmosphere of aristocratic society and country-town charm and the idea of Cobourg as a summer resort was born. (More here) One of the directors of the railway, an amiable southerner named Col. William Chambliss, proceeded to build the Arlington Hotel in 1874. With 150 rooms, situated on the north edge of the present Victoria Park, the Arlington was readily judged to be the grandest hotel between Toronto and Montreal. More