Why stop
Actinolite is the corridor’s junction with Highway 37 — the turn for Tweed — and one of the very few places anywhere named after a mineral. Actinolite (the mineral) was quarried here in the 1880s, and the marble and greenstone bluffs along the river still show why geologists slow down through this stretch.
The hamlet has lived three lives under three names: Troy, then Bridgewater — a genuine boomtown with mills and quarries until a fire levelled it in 1889 — and finally Actinolite, the quieter version that grew back. It’s a small place on the highway now, but one with a better backstory than towns ten times its size — and worth slowing down for.
The man behind the boom was Billa Flint, a Belleville merchant and later a senator, who bought the water power on the Skootamatta here in the 1850s and built the mills. He did the same thing upstream on the same river, and that village still carries his name: Flinton, 23 km north on Flinton Road — which leaves the 7 just east of the Hwy 37 turn and, fittingly, cuts through actinolite-bearing rock on the way.
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