All that really remains is this community centre -- the doors locked for who knows how long, certainly unused since the 1960s. (The bright orange curtains visible through the window give away the last time anyone anyone redecorated.)
By far the vast majority of individuals to walk past this old hall are hikers. This is not on a road you drive down to go anywhere but to the trail or one of the few remaining farms.
One of the roads has become solely part of the Bruce Trail; it's not just a trail alongside a road, it's a road that became a trail in the woods. The hydro-electric lines run through the woods here, as if there might be some remote hermit living on the grid miles back into the bush. But really, they're just the sole remainder of modern infrastructure left.
I wondered: what's the story of this place?
So I did what any web-savvy person does -- Googled it. Oddly enough, had I done this a month, or even a week earlier, nothing would have come up. It just so happened, the same day I was pondering this question, the Owen Sound Sun Times published an editorial on the very subject of Hopeness -- a place where the residents were bought out, forced to move, for the needs of the Dow Chemical Company (who ended up never using the place for anything).
A neighbour farmer has been going back and forth down the Hopeness Road with his tractor and wagon for the past week or so trying to get his hay in between rain showers and threatening skies. It's late in the hay season but it was too wet earlier. Even so, he took a little of his precious time to stop for a chat a few days ago. It served to remind me again of the huge challenges the pioneers in this area faced in clearing the land for cultivation, or risk having it repossessed by the Crown for their failure to do so. (source: http://www.owensoundsuntimes.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1691556)
Now that I've finally gotten around to posting these pictures, I can link to the article quoted -- which is now very hard to find in a search engine due to a lack of anyone linking to it. Take a read of the article when you have a few minutes -- in these days when everything thinks everything is online, this article is the sole existing story of a once-community called Hopeness.
