The Legend of Larder Lake is Solved? We’ll Drink to That!

A bottle Jason Ploeger recovered from a taxi that sunk into Larder Lake back in 1937.

Jason Ploeger

Larder Lake is both a lake in northeastern Ontario, Canada and the township that surrounds it. It has a significant history of gold mining, with mines located across the eponymous lake from the town. Travel to and from the mines required crossing the lake, which froze solid into an ice road in the winter. Local legends tell of a taxi carrying an especially valuable passenger falling through the ice in December 1937.

Like most legends, there are several versions of the story. Some say the taxi was coming from the mine, carrying gold. Others say it was going to the mine, bringing the miners their holiday bonuses along with live turkeys and whisky for a Christmas party. Or it may have been bootleggers transporting whisky.

Ontario prospecting corporation CJP Exploration has searched the lake for decades, looking for the taxi and its contents. So, generations of Larder Lake residents have been captivated by the story. Jason Ploeger is one of them. Last year, while participating in a local fishing derby on the lake, his fish finder turned up something besides lake trout. Ploeger spotted something that looked like the outline of a car.

Ploeger returned to the lake with a team of divers. There, 15 meters deep (or 50 feet, as we say in the U.S.), covered in silt, was a very old car, now determined to be a 1929 REO Flying Cloud. Inside it were several sealed whisky bottles, still full and intact.

The hub cap showing the REO logo of the 1929 REO Flying Cloud taxi that sank to the bottom of Larder Lake in 1937.

Jason Ploeger

One bottle brought to the surface exploded from the decompression. Ploeger, in the spirit of adventure, sampled some recovered liquor and described it as “very, very smooth.”

Ploeger and the divers went back about a year later, bringing up five more bottles. Two broke, and Ploeger gave one of the intact bottles to local nonprofit Friends of Larder for their charity auction on Sept. 28. The whisky sold for $4,500 ($3,285 U.S.).