Victoria County Centennial History F 5498 ,V5 K5 31o4 0464501 »» By WATSON KIRKCONNELL, M. A. PRICE $2.00 0U-G^5O/ Date Due SE Victoria County Centennial History i^'-'^r^.J^^, By WATSON KIRKCONNELL, M. A, WATCHMAN-WARDER PRESS LINDSAY, 1921 5 Copyrighted in Canada, 1921, By WATSON KIRKCONNELL. 0f mg brnttf^r Halter mtfa fell in artton in ttje Sattte nf Amiena Angnfit 3, ISiB, tlfia bnok ia aflfertinnatelg in^^iratei. AUTHOR'S PREFACE This history has been appearing serially through the Lindsaj "Watchman-Warder" for the past eleven months and is now issued in book form for the first time. The occasion for its preparation is, of course, the one hundredth anniversary of the opening up of Victoria county. Its chief purposes are four in number: — (1) to place on record the local details of pioneer life that are fast passing into oblivion; (2) to instruct the present generation of school-children in the ori- gins and development of the social system in which they live; (3) to show that the form which our county's development has taken has been largely determined by physiographical, racial, social, and economic forces; and (4) to demonstrate how we may, after a scien- tific study of these forces, plan for the evolution of a higher eco- nomic and social order. The difficulties of the work have been prodigious. A Victoria County Historical Society, formed twenty years ago for a similar purpose, found the field so sterile that it disbanded, leaving no re- cords behind. Under such circumstances, I have had to dig deep. The Dominion Archives at Ottawa and the Crown Lands Department at Toronto have been systematically ransacked; libraries at Kingston, Peterborough, Lindsay, and Toronto have been consulted; the muni- cipal records of the county have been thumbed over; scores of inter- views have been secured v/ith old and prominent citizens; and com- plete local press files for 47 years have been read through in their entirety. To provide a proper background of general history, over one hundred standard works on history, economics, and sociology have been studied. Every page of the book represents the results of laborious and incessant research. General readers may perhaps be interested in the following "background" sketches, which, to the best of my knowledge, are not to be found anywhere else in printed form: — (1). The review of Trent Canal construction, in Chapter IX. (2). The sketch, in Chapter XII, of the development of the Ontario school system. (3). The history of the early Canadian militia, in Chapter XIII. (4. The con- densed outlines of Canadian military campaigns, in Chapter XIII. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the many friends wh,o have given me generous assistance ,aud especially to Mr. J. R. McNeillie (for municipal data), Colonel George E. Laidlaw (for data regarding Bexley and Indian occupation), Senator George McHugh (for material on early Ops), Mr. G. W. Beall (for notes on Lindsay), Mrs. W. V. Lynch (for her late husband's notes on the early Roman Catholic church in Lindsay), Mr. H. J. Lytle (for municipal data), and Chief Johnston Paudash (for data regarding the Mississaga Indians). WATSON KIRKCOWELL. Lindsay, Ontario, September, 1921. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter ' Fage I Introductory Outline 9 II The Southern Townships 24 III An Agricultural Transformation 60 IV The Northern Townships 74 V Economics of North Victoria 85 VI The Town of Lindsay 91 VII The Record of the Rocks 116 VIII Annals of the Red Man 122 IX Kawartha Navigation 136 X Spinning the Railway Web 145 XI A Century of Politics 154 XII A Schoolhouse Revolution 164 XIII Military Annals of Victoria 181 XIV Pages of Parish History 202 XV Research into Pioneer Survival 218 XVI Biographies from Past and Present 228 XVII Problems in Development 244 Index 258 Victoria County Centennial History Chapter L Iiilroiinctory Outline of Coiintj PTistory. One hundred years ago, in 1821, the government of Upper Can- ada first offered land for sale in the region that is now Victoria County. Since then, a hardy phalanx of Celto-Saxon stock has swept away a wilderness of swamp and forest and established a prosperous agricultural civilization after the manner of that race. The coming of the pioneers calls for a prologue and a setting. In 1791, the British Parliament passed a Constitutional Act, by which the Canadian colony was divided into two provinces. Upper and Lower Canada, corresponding roughly to the Old Ontario and Quebec of today. The first governor of Upper Canada was Colonel John Graves Simcoe, who foresaw and provided for the future needs of the country with an enlightened disinterestedness unknown among his immediate successors. He explored the pro- vince diligently by canoe and forest trail. He built trunk roads, such as Yonge Street from York (now Toronto) to Lake Simcoe. He set aside tracts of good land for genuine settlers and encouraged the immigration of those who would guarantee to clear and occupy the country. In all this, however, he aroused the ill-will of a clique of speculators, who were already strongly entrenched among the officialdom and so-called aristocracy of the province. The intrigue of these enemies brought about his removal in 1796. Govern- ment officials and their friends then quietly secured possession of all the good land in the Lake Simcoe country and blocked settlement for another twenty years. After the war of 1812-14, however, a rising flood of immigration demanded the opening up of fresh territory. Ac- cordingly, in 1818, the government went through the formalities of buying from the Mississaga Indians a tract of some four thousand square miles, comprising the modern counties of Peterborough and Victoria and a fringe of twenty-eight adjoining townships. It is with a limited portion of this Mississaga Tract that we have now to deal. The work of survey began at once. Emily was the first of the townships of modern Victoria to be laid out. Mariposa came next, and VICTORIA COUNTY HISTORY. then Fenelon, Ops and Eldon, in that order. Verulam, Somerville and Bexley were opened up later, and the more northerly townships of Garden, Laxton, Digby, Dalton and Longford much later still. These townships first came under the Newcastle District with head- quarters at Cobourg, on Lake Ontario. Then, in 1841, along with some of the inland townships lying to the east, they became the Colborne District, which was reorganized in 1850 as Peterborough County and in 1854 as the "United Counties of Peterborough and Victoria." From 1841 to 1861 municipal authority was centred at Peterborough but in the latter year Victoria was given provisional and in 18G3 complete independence. A New Domain and a Virile Race. The area of Victoria County is about eleven hundred square miles. It is thus larger than Cheshire or Dorsetshire in England; larg- er, too, than Lanarkshire or Dumfriesshire in Scotland; and almost equal to the combined areas of Fermanagh and Monaghan in Ire- land. In shape it is roughly rectangular, with a length from north to south of fifty-two miles and a breadth from east to west of twenty- six miles. The chief irregularities iie m the northeast and northwest corners, where three townships, Anson, Lutterworth and Ryde, each eight miles equare, have been chopped out and allotted, the former two to Haliburton County and the latter one to Muskoka District. This rough rectangle is cut into approximate north and south halves by the Kawartha Lakes, Balsam, Cameron and Sturgeon, and their modern canal affiliations. Immediately north of this water system is a region of severely glaciated limestone, covered with thin, uncertain soil. This tract soon merges into a wilderness of crystalline limestone and Laurentian gneiss. South of the Kawartha system, however, the land is distinctly suited for agriculture, for the underlying limestone is covered with glacial clays which become rapidly deeper and more fertile in passing southward towards the morainic hills of Durham. But in 1821 the intrinsic character of rock and soil was not the most evident feature of the region. It was rather the towering forests of pine that spread away to the farthest horizon. To the transformation of this wilderness came a virile race of white men from the far-off islands of Great Britain and Ireland. The years that followed Waterloo and the close of Britain's continental wars were full of distress. The economic aftermath of war pressed hard. The population of Ireland was growing beyond the safety limits of the precarious potato. The introduction of weaving machinery brought tens of thousands of Scotch and English handloom-weavers face to face with starvation. To cope with this distress the British government deliberately encouraged emigration to Canada. Once start- ed, the human stream poured steadily across the Atlantic. The pres- sure of a straightened food supply, the oldest and most powerful cause of human migration, was once more in operation. In 1814, Upper Canada contained only y5,00U inhabitants. By 1849 the population had risen to 791,000, an increase of 732 per cent. In a single year 50,000 immigrants arrived at Quebec. The younger sons of the Celto- Saxon stock had struck their tents and were on the march. Their 10 INTRODUCTORY OUTLINE. great campaign against tlie forests of Upper Canada is recorded today in the magnificent prosperity of Ontario. The first sf-ttlers in whaL is now Victoria County were Protestant Irishmen from the County of Fermanagh. Humphrey Finlay and his family first established themselves in Emily Township, and were fol- lowed by James Laidley and William and Samuel Cottingham, who cleared and built on the site of modern Omemee.