Samuel Wilmot’s 19th century family home, called Belmont House, is still standing on a slope overlooking Wilmot Creek. (CAROLA VYHNAK)

It’s no fish tale: Samuel Wilmot started Ontario’s first salmon hatchery in his basement

The facility served as a model for hatcheries across Canada and in other countries — but things didn’t always go swimmingly.

It was an unusual project to do in a house basement: hatch salmon eggs and raise the small fry on a diet of minced liver.

But Samuel Wilmot’s experiment succeeded and in 1868, he opened Ontario’s first full-scale fish hatchery in the Village of Newcastle, 80 kilometres east of Toronto.

See the full article in the Toronto Star, March 18, 2018