Past years in Pickering : sketches of the history of the community / by William R. Wood.

Front matter

from

the estate of

J. Stuart Fleming

Preface

Ontario, that once was “ Canada West,” is becoming in more senses than one “Old Ontario.” Not a few of its settlements have passed and many more are nearing a hundred years of life. The life of the past century in every Ontario community is worth recording, and if it is to be adequately written it must be done before the participants in its experiences have all passed away.

This book is an attempt to do that task for the Township of Pickering. It does not profess to be a formal history. It is a series of sketches written with little endeavor after literary distinction, aiming to present in a simple way some true conception of the more important phases of the township’s life.

No apology is made for the task being undertaken by one not born within the bounds of the township. Had some one of Pickering’s sons undertaken it — and she has many who could have done the work well — I should have rejoiced, and gladly taken what place I might among his assistants. But none volunteered and the hour of the century’s close was about to strike, — and I have made what attempt I could.

It is to be recognized that my comparatively short residence in the township necessarily precludes my possessing that complete acquaintance with community experiences and trends of local life which are desirable

PREFACE for such a work. Some things of importance will be omitted. Some trifling things will appear to have undue prominence. This is to be regretted, but will be seen to have been absolutely unavoidable in the nature of the situation.

The book is not all mine. Many kind hearts and keen brains and willing pens have assisted me. Let this paragraph convey to every one who sent me post card or brief note, to every one who told me single incident or particular fact, as well as to those who drove many miles to oblige me, quizzed many old friends and relatives and wrote dozens of pages of data for my information, my sincere appreciation and gratitude. If any success attends the issue of the book, it is largely due to them.

The sketches are published in the hope that many of the people of Pickering, still living on its fair fields or following their vocation in other provinces or distant lands, will find it interesting and useful in recalling the days of their fathers, and that in many another township, before it is too late, the life of the pioneers may be studied by abler minds and recorded by readier pens than mine.

William R. Wood.

The Manse,

Claremont, June 1st, 1911.

Contents

Chapter Page

I. The Dawn of History 11

II. The Genesis of the Township 15

Chapter I. The Dawn Of History

The recorded history of Pickering does not extend farther back than the year 1669. For some time before that year M. Fenelon and M. Trouve, of the Sulpician Order, had been engaged in missionary labors in the Indian village of Kente (the original of the name Quinte, in what is now Prince Edward County) and had established a second outpost at Ganeraske (where Port Hope now stands). In 1669 M. Fenelon proceeded still farther westward to a third Indian village named Gandatsetiagon overlooking the waters of what is now called Frenchman’s Bay or Pickering Harbor. Here he remained through the long and severe winter of 1669-1670, and through his labors and those of others succeeding him considerable progress was made in bringing the Indians of the vicinity under the power of Christianity. Seventeen years later, when the Marquis de Denonville was returning from a campaign south of the lake, he was entertained with lavish hospitality by the Christian Indians at this place.

The Indians of Gandatsetiagon were of the tribe of the Senecas, one of the famous Five Nations or Iroquois. Their ancestral territory was south of Lake Ontario within the great forest that stretched from the Niagara to the Hudson; but a considerable portion of the tribe seem to have made permanent homes for themselves on the northern shores of the Lake, attracted doubtless by the game and fish which were there easily obtainable in rich abundance. The situation of the village of Gandatsetiagon is thus described by a facile and artistic pen in “Picturesque Canada.”

“At the dawn of our provincial history, two hundred and odd years ago, when the first light was breaking on Lake Ontario, you might have discovered an Indian village »a few miles to the west of Whitby Harbor. The village looked out upon a wide and land-locked mere which every summer was fringed anew with floating milfoil and embroidered with pond-lilies. This peaceful bayou was so little moved by the great lake that the stormiest wrath outside awoke but a soft response within. It was a welcome retreat in wild weather for lake-birds when blown about the skies. Sedges and sweet-flag and tall reed-mace so concealed the entrance that it was known only to the Seneca Indians of the village within. Out of the quiet bayou Pickering Harbor has in our day been formed and the entrance has been dredged and widened and lighted. But two centuries ago these blue waters had not yet been vexed by merchantmen and a sufficient beacon was found in the natural features of the land/’

Beautiful then, the situation still is one of Pickering’s most charming landscapes. Its present appearance is thus described by a recent paragrapher: “Crossing the Grand Trunk track southward on the 12

THE DAWN OF HISTORY

Liverpool sideroad you reach the crest of the hill in a few moments, and if at all you have eyes to see you are compelled to pause and look. Behind you on the right, half hidden in its leafy maples, lies the village of Dunbarton, with its little arch-towered brick church on the hill. On the left, a little farther removed, is Pickering Village, anciently known as Duff in’s Creek, with the world-famous College on its fine site adjacent, while beyond the view extends thirty miles north-eastwards to the Uxbridge hills. Southward on the right lies the triangular expanse of the Bay, glassy-smooth, reflecting the clouds above and the varied green of the opposite shore. On the left, rich green fields succeed one another to where beyond the Point the lake shore bends away to the eastward. In front Lake Ontario gleams shoreless to the horizon. Driving southward over the smooth firm gravel with a one-plank sidewalk threading its way through the grass by the roadside, we soon come to the neat cottages of Fairport nestling amid luxuriant hedges and dainty patches of lawn. Passing along we come into closer view of the great ice, grain, and coal warehouses by the wharf and the snowy lighthouse that sentinels the entrance to the bay. Launches, yachts and row-boats brighten the waters as they flit about. An ideal mile and yet so real as to lie hardly beyond the twentieth mile-post eastward from the Queen City of the Lakes.”

When Gandatsetiagon stood on the shore of Frenchman’s Bay, the position of the Queen City was occupied by another Indian village bearing the name Teyoyagon. This place was described by LaSalle as early as 1673, as the chief trading station of the Ottawas with the northern Iroquois. A forest trail connected it with Lake Simcoe, which at that time was called Toronto. Gradually the name came to be applied not only to the Lake but to the portage that led to the Lake and ultimately it was applied to the Southern end of the portage and superseded Teyoyagon, the name of the village which stood there.

Between Gandatsetiagon and Teyoyagon were two other points noticed in the records of the early French missionaries: Les Grandes Ecores, which later Eng-

lish settlers Tendered by the Highlands land from which they named the stream flowing through them, the Highland Creek, and Riviere Rouge, which although Governor Simcoe endeavored to superimpose the English name River Nen still retains its older French appellation. A few miles east of the village of the Senecas another stream emptied into the lake. The French explorers named it Riviere au Saumon, but for over a century it has borne the name of Duffin’s Creek.

Chapter II. The Genesis Of The Township

In 1788, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of George III., Lord Dorchester, Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief of the Province of Quebec (which at that time had no limit westward) divided the province into a number of districts. The district to which the name Nassau was applied included what is now the County of Ontario and westward as far as the meridian of Long Point on the north shore of Lake Erie. In 1791 the Constitutional Act was passed which divided the Province of Quebec into the two Provinces of Upper Canada and Lower Canada. In 1792, the districts in Upper Canada were re-named by the Provincial parliament at its first meeting at Newark (Niagara), the district of Nassau becoming the “Home District.” In the same year Governor Simcoe by proclamation divided Upper Canada into nineteen counties for representation purposes. The fourteenth county, named York, included the present County of Ontario and also the present counties of York and Peel. In 1851 an Act was passed to come into operation at the opening of 1852, dividing the old County of York into the three present counties. The proclamation creating “the Village of Whitby ” countytown of the newly created county and appointing the first meeting of council was issued by Lord Elgin on March 11th, 1852.

On February 22nd, 1791, the following instructions were issued from the Surveyor- Generals office in Quebec to Augustus Jones, Esquire.

“Sir, — You are hereby directed to engage ten chainbearers and axe-men on the most reasonable terms they can be had, not exceeding one shilling and six-pence currency per day each man, with an allowance of one shilling and three-pence per day to yourself and party for provisions or a ration from the King’s store in lieu thereof, at your and their option, and to survey and mark the front line of a row of townships from the eastern boundary of the district of Toronto and to carry the side of each township back one mile, well marked, which townships are to be designated on the charts the first adjoining the said eastern boundary by the name of Murray, and the rest as they follow in proceeding westerly in the order here mentioned, Cramahe, Haldimand, Hope, Bristol, Norwich, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dublin.”

In the fall of that year Surveyor Jones rendered his account, having among others this item :

“To actual service surveying the course of the Lake and running the front line of a row of townships in that space from the mouth of the River Trent (head of the Bay of Quinte) to Toronto from 1st July to 17th September, both days inclusive, being 79 days, £34.11s.3d.” The work of the summer of 1791, it may be presumed, constituted the first steps taken toward giving PickeriDg existence as a municipality.

It will be noticed that the names of the townships do not correspond with those now applied. There is no record of how the changes were effected, but in the

THE GENESIS OF THE TOWNSHIP earliest maps we find in place of the last five the following names: Clarke, Darlington, Whitby, Pickering and Scarboro. If one may judge from the names substituted doubtless some loyal Yorkshireman (presumably Augustus Jones, Esquire) had a hand in the decision. But had the Surveyor-General had his will we would to-day have been citizens of the township of Glasgow.

The survey of the township would seem to have been completed and some few settlers located in the township before 1796. An interesting document bearing date November 11th, of that year, of which an early copy is still extant, reads in part as follows: —

“George the third, by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith and so forth, know ye that we, of our special grace, certain knowledge and mere motion have given and granted and by these presents do give and grant to Mrs. Catherine McGill lots No. 16 and 17 in the first concession containing by admeasurement 1200 acres with the usual allowance for roads, the broken fronts, the south half number 18, in the first concession, and 17, in the second concession.”

The earliest municipal record extant is “A record of a meeting for choosing the town officers and other regulators for the towns of Pickering and Whitby held at the house of Samuel Munger in Pickering, March, 7th day, 1803.” At this meeting a Town Clerk and Collector, two Assessors', two Town Wardens, two Fence Viewers and five Pathmasters were chosen.

For Pickering Township alone there is a record of a similar meeting for the year 1811, held on the first 2 17

Monday of March. The officers chosen at this meeting were : —

Town Cleric , Thomas Hubbard.

Assessors, David Crawford., John Haight.

Collector, Abraham Townsend.

Pathmasters, Noadiah Woodruff., Thomas Matthews, John Lawrence,, Abraham Townsend.

Povfndheepers, Joseph Wixon, Timothy Rogers.

Town Wardens , John Richard, James Powell.

A census of the township taken two years earlier than this gives the population of the township as 180, there being 40 men, 35 women, 51 hoys under 16 years of age and 54 girls under 16 years of age. Scarboro in 1809 had 40 less of a total population than Pickering and Whitby 13 more.

The first considerable influx of settlers into the township dates from the early part of the second decade of the century. At this time the south-eastern corner of the township was largely taken up by a Quaker community from the Eastern States. About the middle of the first decade Timothy Rogers, a native of Vermont, brought a company of Friends to the vicinity of Newmarket. Having returned again across the border he brought another company over about 1810. They were located chiefly south and east of Duffing Creek. For his services Mr. Rogers received from the Government a grant of several hundred acres of land near the village. From one of these he gave to the Society of Friends the land on which the old Friends’ Meeting House in Pickering still stands. Among his varied activities was the establishment of a mill (in all probability the earliest at Duffin’s Creek). His family numbered “even

THE GENESIS OE THE TOWNSHIP twenty”. Two of his grandsons, Messrs. Clarkson and Rogers, are still among the residents of Pickering Yillage.

A similar town meeting was held in 1812, bnt for 1813 the following entry in the old minute book shows that the settlers of Pickering had to take their share of the confusion of a war time and that in all probability many of them were called to active service in defence of the frontier.

“Our townd ofosisors were Putin by the Qarter Secons for the year A.D. 1813, by Reason of the wor that was Decleard against us by the 'States in the year 1812.

“By the Same reason our towndmetin war omited in the year A.D. 1814, and our Town officors war Put in in the same manner.”

In 1815 and succeeding years the usual town meetings were continued.

Beside the appointment of town officers and other regulators the town meeting often passed such by-laws for the government of the township as circumstances demanded. Their legislation was always to the point and never burdened with superfluous matter, as may be judged by the following examples: —

1811. By-law (the first passed in the municipality), “voted that fences be four feet and a half high and not more than five inches between rails.”

1816. “By-law. Hogs is not run as free commoners nor horses ”

1816. ^By-law. Hogs is not to run as free commoners is to Be four feet and a half high and not more then Six Inches Between the Rails from the ground to the height of two feet.”

“Voted that hogs is not to Run on the Commons without a Yoak that is six inches above the Neck and four Below.-”

1821. “By-law. Horned cattle, that is none (known) to he Breachy, is not free commoners.”

1824 “By-law. That hogs are to run at large till they do damage and then the owner of the hogs is to pay the Same and yoke them with a croch yoke 6 Inches above the Neck and four inches below the Neck and Let them Run.”

1828 “By-law. Voted that any Person who shall knowingly allow Canada Thistles to go to seed on his Farm shall be liable to a fine of Two Pounds Ten Shillings to be laid out on the Highways in the District wherein the Said Thistles are neglected which Said Fine to be paid to the Overseers for the time being.”