wards of the very Crown now called upon to resolve the land issue. The Williams Commission appointed in 1923 “negotiated” the purchase of disputed lands in Ontario including those of Bowmanville for a mere half million dollars and natives gave up all “right, title, interest, claim, demand or privileges” to the areas in dispute.11 Obviously this represented only a fraction of the 1923 value of the land, but with the signing of various treaties native interest in the land on which Bowmanville sits was finally resolved.
Notes
1 J.B. Fairbairn, History and Reminiscences of Bowmanville. (Bowmanville News Print, 1906), p. 3.
2 The Canadian Statesman, 26 June 1958.
3 J.B. Fairbairn, History and Reminiscences of Bowmanville. p. 3.
4 J.T. Coleman, History of the Early Settlement of Bowmanville and Vicinity. (Bowmanville: 1875), p. 4.
5 Ibid, p.5
6 Ibid, p. 5–6
7 From The Observer, 1878, as quoted in The Canadian Statesman, 4 February 1948.
8 Leo Johnson, History of the County of Ontario 1615-1875. (Whitby: Corporation of the County of Ontario, 1973), p. 20–21.
9 Ibid, p. 23
10 Ibid, p. 31
11 Ibid, p. 34
Chapter Three
The Building Blocks of Settlement
“No mapping has ever so profoundly affected the physical appearance of land as did the township surveying method.”
– William Least-Heat Moon, Prairyerth
The Four Corners of Bowmanville, at King and Temperance Streets, before 1900. The grid layout of streets and alignment of King Street (Highway 2) shaped the streetscape of Bowmanville. The Town Hall is over stores in centre of picture, with Market Square, Fire Hall, and bandshell in background.
Ontario (1867-present) which has had so many identities as Canada West (1841-67) and before that Upper Canada (1791-1841), was, in its first European interpretation, a part of the province of Québec (1763-91). Restrictions on freehold land ownership and a Gallic-based Civil Code of justice marked this region as a quasi-colony of a largely French speaking territory following the cession of Québec to British Authority in 1763.
In 1788 Lord Dorchester proclaimed four German-titled districts, named after branches of the Hanoverian dynasty, to administer the largely unpopulated region of what is now Ontario. One of those four districts, Nassau, later named the Home District, included the land on which the future town of Bowmanville grew.1 Three years later the future province would gain its independence with the creation of Upper and Lower Canada.
The naming process was a powerful tool of Empire. In 1792 counties were set out bearing the names of English counterparts, but they had little real authority though they did contain within them the township system of survey within which orderly settlement could occur.
Districts remained the primary form of local government through the first half of the 19th century, but even they were realigned to conform with townships and ensure that no settler was more than a day’s journey from the place in which they discharged their public duties. For the purposes of Bowmanville’s future the town’s site resided in the Township of Darlington in the County of Durham (part of the future combined counties of Northumberland and Durham) which in turn was part of the District of Newcastle.
Settlers from the United States had been entering the new territory since the American Revolution and Major Samuel Holland, Surveyor General, administered the immediate laying out and posting of frontages, or baselines, of townships on rivers and lakes. This was followed by the blocking out on paper of lands stretching back into the wilderness. Their physical realization would have to wait.2
What was significant about this grid was less the character of individual roads than the net structure formed by all of the roads in combination. This landscape was far from the rural Ontario we are familiar with today. Roads were almost impassable and the key attribute of a horse was its ability to swim. Conditions were so inhospitable that Upper Canada was described as “a vile country of low people.”3
The principle method of land subdivision reflected a desire to impose a pattern of order and rationality on an area of solitary wilderness within which the reaches of empire would be felt. Townships were laid out along Lake Ontario with the exception of those branching out from Yonge Street. Along the lake they were nine miles in width and twelve miles in depth. Such was the pattern in the range of townships surveyed in 1791 between the River Trent and the Toronto Purchase and confirmed in Simcoe’s declaration of 26 July 1792. Lots were a 1/4 mile wide and concessions a mile and a quarter mile deep to give a desired two-hundred acre lot.
Parts of Darlington were surveyed in 1793 and 1797. It was a serious business in which the surveyor recorded the quality of soil, number of rock out-croppings and types of timber. Anyone who pulled down or defaced a survey monument was subject to “death without benefit of clergy.”4
There was nothing arbitrary about the mile and a quarter separation. It came from English mathematician Edmund Gunter’s original chain measuring device created in the early 17th century which in turn derived from the old Roman rod measurement of sixteen and half feet. A hundred links added up to one chain of sixty-six feet (four Roman rods) and one-hundred of these chains conformed to the concession separation. A mile was eighty chains. A highway grant was laid out as one chain with a roadbed of usually forty feet in the middle. The standard length of a section of rail fence was eleven feet, or one-sixth chain. A canal way was a chain in width, telegraph poles would later be one or two chains apart and a city block was three chains to a block and one to a street. In the layout of townships a sideline road was placed at forty chain distances allowing for the provision of two two-hundred acre lots within the boundaries of a concession road and sideline, an acre being ten square chains.
A later view of the Four Corners, showing buildings which with the exception of the Town Hall in the background have now been demolished.
Aerial view of Bowmanville.
Each township had a base line as the preliminary building block to allow the territory to escape the meandering natural boundary of the lake. It was a vision of empire in which the formality of the grid and town replaced the anarchy of wilderness. In the original visions a town would grow in the centre of each township along this baseline and further roads would be spaced at mile and quarter postings from the original baseline.
This was the perfect pattern upon which the region that included Bowmanville was supposed to grow. But the intention of a town on the baseline was impractical, perhaps because the baseline was not far enough from the lake, and because of its associated topographical peculiarities and swampy conditions. Asa Danforth’s east-west road was closer to the second concession and along this second front the entrepreneurial imagination of first arrivals founded many of the major towns
