The Capital Years: Niagara-On-The-Lake, 1792-1796

1790s.

CHAPTER

ONE

BUILDING A TOWN

Plans, Surveys, and the Early Years of

Niagara-on-the-Lake

Joy Ormsby

As the principal inhabitants of Niagara waited, on 26 July 1792, for the Onondaga carrying John Graves Simcoe, first lieutenant governor of the new province of Upper Canada, to dock near Navy Hall, the group of four buildings erected in 1765 for the use of the Provincial Marine, many of them were no doubt pleased that, no longer part of Quebec, they would henceforth use English customs and law. At the same time, however, they were likely apprehensive about the effects the new administration might have on their possessions and their status in the community.

Chief among these early inhabitants were Lieutenant-Colonel John Butler, deputy agent of Indian affairs and former commander of Butler’s Rangers, the loyalist corps whose disbanded members formed the nucleus of the Niagara farming community, and Robert Hamilton, a prominent merchant. Butler, who had begun the settlement in 1780 under the aegis of Governor Frederick Haldimand and had shaped its development, retained at age sixty-seven the role of elder statesman. Hamilton, a newcomer by comparison but a rising star in Niagara, was Butler’s colleague in the Court of Common Pleas, Court of Quarter Sessions, and land board, a local body responsible for issuing certificates for land. Both men were uneasy about whether they would retain these appointments — made by the governor general in Quebec before the establishment of Upper Canada in November 1791 — under the new administration. Surveyor Augustus Jones, who had completed a survey of the town plot only a month earlier, and Walter Butler Sheehan, John Butler’s nephew, who had been appointed sheriff in August 1791, also had concerns about retaining their positions. Other members of the community included farmers such as Adam and Isaac Vrooman, Peter and David Secord, John P. and Joseph Clement, Jacob Servos, and Jacob, George, and Joseph Ball. Merchants George Forsyth, Archibald Cunningham, William Dickson (cousin of Robert Hamilton), Joseph Edwards, John McEwen, and Daniel Servos also waited, as did Robert Kerr, surgeon to the Indian Department in Niagara, and James Muirhead, former surgeon’s mate.

These men with thirty others from the Niagara district, had, the previous February, signed a statement prepared by Butler and Hamilton which under the guise of a welcome address to Simcoe set forth the major concerns of the entire community. Their settlement, they noted, had made rapid progress and had emerged from indigence and obscurity; their possessions had at last become valuable; and their latest crops were abundant. Yet they lacked deeds to confirm ownership of their land. Reasons for the long delay in issuing these vital proofs of ownership are made clear by plans, surveys, and associated documents which illustrate the state of flux in the early years of the settlement on the west bank of the Niagara River from its beginning in 1779 as a government-sponsored farming community to its capital period from the autumn of 1792 to 1796.

In its first stage from 1779 to 1783, the settlement was officially a temporary arrangement, designed to provide food for Fort Niagara, which during the War of Independence had become a staging ground for Butler’s Rangers. From this base the Rangers and their Indian allies made raids against American posts in the border area, ravaging the country in order to destroy their enemy’s food supply and eating most of the captured cattle. Some refugees had followed the Rangers to Fort Niagara. More came as a result of the Rangers’ scorched-earth policy, and finally, as American troops advanced north, dispossessed loyalists and Indians made for the fort seeking refuge. They put such an enormous strain on the resources of the fort, whose provisions had to be shipped from England via Montreal at great expense and difficulty, that Lieutenant-Colonel Mason Bolton, commanding officer at Niagara, wondered at one point whether maintaining the post was not costing old England more than it was worth. In order to reduce the expense, Governor Frederick Haldimand suggested to Bolton in October 1778 that he encourage and assist some capable people to cultivate the land about the fort in order to supply entirely the post with bread.¹ After consulting several gentlemen Bolton advised Haldimand in March 1779 that both from the soil and situation, the West side of the river was by far preferable to the East.² At that time, the gentleman most familiar with soil conditions on the west bank was Major John Butler, who, in order to alleviate overcrowding at Fort Niagara, had moved his Rangers’ headquarters across the river and had built barracks in the fall and winter of 1778 and additional log houses and a hospital in the spring of 1779 at the considerable cost of more than £2,500. Butler’s input no doubt influenced Bolton’s recommendation, a recommendation that resulted in Haldimand’s approving, without waiting for authorization from Britain, the sending of three or four refugee families to farm the west bank.³

This very small-scale initiative was expanded after Haldimand had received approval from Britain in March 1780 and had consulted, in June, with John Butler, by then promoted to lieutenant-colonel, about the mechanics of establishing and operating a settlement. Haldimand’s plan, outlined in a letter to Colonel Bolton in July 1780, called for the reclamation of a strip of land formerly granted by the Mississaugas to Sir William Johnson . . . opposite the Fort⁴ and the distribution of that land to loyalist refugees willing to farm it until they could be restored to their former homes in the American states. The land (some of which had already been cleared by Butler’s Rangers by the summer of 1780) remained the property of the crown and crops could be sold only to the garrison, whose commanding officer set their prices. In essence, then, the first loyalist settlers were squatters occupying land under military direction.

The Haldimand project was put in charge of Lieutenant-Colonel Butler. Before the end of 1780, Butler reported that he had established four or five families who had built themselves houses. The head of one of these, Peter Secord, a former Ranger, was later allowed an extra grant of 100 acres for having been the first to have settled his family on the west bank in 1779.⁵ Another, John Secord, in 1780 was host to Elizabeth Gilbert, one of a family of fifteen captured by Indians who brought her with them to Butlersburg to get provisions. Other heads of families who claimed to have reached Butler’s barracks by 1780 included Mary De Peu (petition of 21 April 1797), Catherine Clement (petition of 27 July 1797), and James Secord (petition of his sons of 3 August 1795). In May 1781 the purchase of the strip of land from the Mississaugas was completed at a cost of 300 suits of cloathing.⁶ By mid-summer 1782, sixteen farmers, whose names were recorded by Butler in the settlement’s first census, had settled their families and cleared 236 acres. All were producing food. Peter Secord, for example, produced 200 bushels of corn, 15 of wheat, 70 of potatoes, and 4 of oats on 24 acres of land cleared at the foot of the escarpment near the present St Davids. John Depue grew 200 bushels of corn and 50 of potatoes on 16 acres cleared near Queenston, and Michael Showers produced 40 bushels of corn, 6 of oats, and 15 of potatoes on 12 acres cleared along the river a few miles south of Navy Hall. In addition, the Rangers had prepared a block of land known as the Government’s Farm in order to plant Indian corn⁷ and several of them had got their families from the frontiers and had shown interest in settling after discharge.⁸

During 1783 the temporary status of the young community ended as a result of the signing, on 30 November 1782, by Great Britain and the United States of a treaty of peace which established the Niagara River as an international boundary. The Treaty of Paris also recommended an amnesty for the loyalists and the restitution of their property, but left implementation of that recommendation to the legislatures of the individual states, many of which preferred confiscation to restitution and execution to amnesty. By the spring of 1783 it was clear that land would soon have to be found on the Canadian side of the boundary for those unable to regain their former homes.

For Lieutenant-Colonel Butler’s settlers, tenure of the land now became a pressing issue. Their spokesmen, Isaac Dolson, Elijah Phelps, Thomas McMicking, and Donald Bee, all of whom but Bee had been included in Butler’s first census, asked for leases or some other security⁹ so that their farms could not be taken by the commanding officer at Fort Niagara for the benefit of potential new settlers. Butler and eight of his officers who were also farming shared this interest in establishing tenure or, at the very least, obtaining some documented proof of occupation prior to 1783. Perhaps to supply this evidence, Butler employed Allan Macdonell to survey the settlement without waiting for official approval.¹⁰ This first survey, completed before 3 May 1783, drew a mixed response from Governor Haldimand, who, though pleased that Butler had made a beginning, charged that he had exceeded his authority by marking out seventy lots of land, thirty of which were nominated for different persons.¹¹ Nominated, meaning the endorsement by the surveyor in the name of a specific settler, suggested tenure, which was not part of the Haldimand plan of settlement.

In the Haldimand papers there is an undated, unsigned plan of the New Settlement, Niagara which marks out lots on the west side of the river, thirty of which are nominated mostly in the names of Rangers and former Rangers. This may be the Macdonell survey. It shows the extent of the temporary settlement and its concentration along the river bank and in a block of smaller lots north of the Due West Line — now called the East-West Line — on land that would be reserved for the crown in 1784. The latter group, with the Rangers’ barracks nearby, probably constituted the village of Butlersburg. Although the plan is not to scale — in particular the Four Mile Pond is located too close to Mississauga Point and the path of the Four Mile Creek is not correct — the eastern boundary of the block of smaller lots does coincide approximately with the Garrison Line, which later became the western boundary of the town, dividing it from Butler’s land and cutting off a large corner of the planned town plot.

The New Settlement Niagara, Haldimand Papers 85, 71-2, probably c. 1783. (British Library)

When Haldimand dismissed the Macdonell-Butler plan as unauthorized, he promised to send a surveyor to Niagara to make an official survey that would be in accord with instructions from the British government, which had by then acknowledged that the settlement had entered a new permanent stage of development. These instructions encompassed several new rules. Land was to be laid out in seigneuries, as befitted an area that was still part of the province of Quebec, on which loyal subjects would be settled according to a set formula, ranging from 1,000 acres for a field officer to 100 acres for a private or head of family and 50 acres for each family member. Settlement of officers and privates was to be contiguous and, therefore, 100- acre lots were to be drawn for randomly; and, in each seigneury, between 300 and 500 acres were to be reserved for the clergy. In the spring of 1784 two further directives were issued. The high ground from Navy Hall to the Four Mile Creek was to be reserved for the crown and, on 24 June, major troop reductions (which would lead to increased demand for land) were to be implemented.

A week or two before the troop disbandment, Lieutenant Tinling, the surveyor promised by Haldimand, arrived in Niagara with orders to mark off the crown reserve, to survey the area of the Niagara seigneury, to conduct a draw for its 100-acre lots, and to enter names of individual drawers on certificates.

Tinling, an assistant engineer at Cataraqui (Kingston), had problems, especially with the early settlers, who had already cleared land and naturally wanted to keep it. By the time he arrived, there were, according to Lieutenant-Colonel Butler’s list of May 1784, forty-six farmers in the area, including a few on the land about to be reserved for the crown. Among these were four or five officers of the Rangers and Butler himself (though he was not included in the list of forty-six) who had already declared that, having cultivated and built good farm houses on the land between Navy Hall and Four Mile Creek, they intended to stay there.¹² These were men that the surveyor could not challenge with impunity. In addition, Tinling had difficulties with the influx of newly disbanded Rangers, about eighty of whom had grabbed land preferably with water frontage and had begun to clear it before the process of drawing for lots began. Moreover, neither the surveyor’s parcel of certificates of possession nor all his required tools arrived in Niagara.

Indeed, Tinling’s problems were such that Philip Frey, who superseded him as surveyor in December 1785, suggested, in a letter to Deputy Surveyor General John Collins, that Tinling never completed a survey and that plans he submitted were possibly spurious: The person who had been employed in the surveying business previous to me had made few and very erroneous surveys, having only laid out a few lots for particular people, many plans may have been transmitted, which may not have been effectively executed.¹³ Augustus Jones, Frey’s successor as surveyor at Niagara, was also critical of Tinling’s expertise, though he charitably attributed disparities in his lines to an instrument very imperfect called a plane table.¹⁴

Whether Tinling’s work or not, several similar plans survived from his relatively short and frustrating period of duty at Niagara. One of these, included in the papers of Shubbal Walton, who farmed in Niagara Township near the present village of Virgil, and dated 1784 or earlier, generally observed the government’s instructions of 1783-84. It showed a township laid out in 100-acre lots, with part of the river frontage of some lots in the first tier severed in order to make all the lots uniform and to leave the river bank a crown reserve; five lots were set aside for the clergy; and the ground north of the Due West Line between the river and Four Mile Creek was reserved for the crown. Within the latter area, blocks were nominated for Lieutenant-Colonel Butler, John Secord, and F. (Francis) Pilkington. Not fortunate or influential enough to be named on the plan was William Pickard, a private in the Rangers, who complained in a petition of 10 October 1796 that, though he was one of the first settlers on the Four Mile Creek when the land was all vacant about him, he had been deprived of this acreage east of the creek after 1784 because he lacked acceptable proof. A rectangle marked the location of the village shown on the 1783 survey but the Rangers’ barracks were located much nearer to Navy Hall than in the earlier plan, so much nearer that one wonders if they had been moved.¹⁵ Most lots south of the Due West Line were nominated; some of them were also annotated ticket given, signifying authorized occupation; some were labelled D (Disputed?); and some had already had more than one occupant. Very few undisputed lots were still vacant. A few of the nominees were not on the list of existing settlers, disbanded Rangers, Joseph Brant’s volunteers, and loyalists which was submitted to Governor Haldimand in July 1784 by Lieutenant-Colonel A.S. DePeyster, commanding officer at Fort Niagara since November 1783, and may have been post-1784 additions to the plan. Nevertheless, the plan is evidence of substantial development in Township no.1 in 1784. Many of the settlers already held land in blocks of 300 or 400 acres that were obviously not acquired by random draw. They included Peter, Stephen, and David Secord, Adam Chrysler, Samson Lutes, John, Joseph, and James Clement, Christian Warner, Walter Butler Sheehan, and Cornelius Lambert, as well as Samuel Street, whose store at the fort across the river was prospering. Robert Hamilton, who also had a store at the fort, had at this point only one lot but it was in a prime location on the river at the Landing (Queenston).

Plan of Niagara, c. 1784, hand-copied from the Shubbal Walton Papers in the National Archives on 22 January 1909 by J. Simpson. Mr Walton’s farm was at the corner of Four Mile Creek and the Due West Line on township lot 111. (Niagara Historical Society Museum, 986.003)

An eyewitness account of the settlement during Tinling’s Niagara period confirms that the community had made considerable progress in the first few years after the revolution. In a letter to his son, St John de Crevecoeur wrote that, having dined at Ellsworth’s house (at the Falls), we mounted our horses and after riding some miles in the woods we came to a fine cultivated country interspersed with good farms . . . After a ride of eighteen miles we arrived at Butlersburg, so called from Colonel Butler who had barracks for his Corps of Loyalists and another for the Savages. There are several good buildings here and an appearance of civilization.¹⁶

De Crevecoeur’s savages, the Indians, were one of the sources of John Butler’s power. As acting superintendent of the Six Nations Indians from May 1782 to his death in 1796 — except for a short period when he was absent in England — the lieutenant-colonel was in charge of negotiations for the purchase of Indian land as well as the distribution of presents of food, clothing, and rum provided by the British government for the Indians in order to retain their loyalty. Later Lieutenant Governor Simcoe, jealous of Butler’s control over the Indians, tried to divest him of these distribution rights, believing them to be the main source of his influence.

The growth and prosperity of the settlement made an accurate survey essential and so, in the summer of 1786, the government in Quebec commissioned Philip Frey to make a new survey of the whole Niagara settlement to correct the irregularity allowed of amongst the first settlers upon Government lands.¹⁷

Like his predecessor, Frey found the task frustrating. A man not given to diplomacy, he responded to criticism by his superiors with complaints of his own, especially about settlers changing property so often that he had to alter his book of locations three or four times a week and about the shortage and expense of paper. Perhaps to emphasize his point about the paper shortage, he wrote many of his tickets of possession on the back of playing cards which he gave to the settlers merely to provide them with the satisfaction of knowing the numbers of their lots. The plan of Township no.1 that he belatedly submitted to Deputy Surveyor John Collins on 18 September 1787 was not appreciably different from the 1784 Shubbal Walton document except in the layout of the first-tier lots along the river. Here Frey followed the original lines made by Allan Macdonell, leaving land on the east side of the road to Queenston to the widows Field and Van Every and to Michael Showers, Charles Depeu, and Peter Millar,¹⁸ and changing the boundaries of Elijah Phelp’s lot to the advantage of the more influential Robert Hamilton. Possession of these desirable river-front lots remained contentious for several years. The original lines as made by Allan Macdonell in 1783 were confirmed in 1790 in order not to derange the whole settlers¹⁹ and reconfirmed by a partial survey in 1792.²⁰ Yet Lieutenant Governor Simcoe was able to challenge Samuel Street’s claim to part of a front lot at Queenston in November 1792, a lot Street argued he had possessed since early 1784 and in which he had invested more than £2,000.²¹

In 1787 and 1788 Lord Dorchester, who had succeeded Haldimand as governor in April 1786, instituted several new directives in order to reduce the complaints of the farmers wanting, among other things, more control of the interior management of their settlement, speedier confirmation of their rights to specific lots, and above all, a change in the system of tenure from French seignorial to English freehold.²² Thus Niagara became part of the District of Nassau (one of seven new administrative divisions in the province of Quebec), a local land board was appointed to oversee the issuing of lots (superseding a committee of the Executive Council in distant Quebec), and lands were granted in free and common soccage, as in the English tradition.²³ In addition, to allay the jealousy of former officers of Butler’s Rangers, the size of their grants was increased to match those allowed to former officers of the 84th Regiment.²⁴

Section from an 1892 copy of the official plan of 1788–89, showing the proposed location of the town site at the centre of the township’s waterfront and reservations for the crown (A), public squares (C,G), public buildings (H), church, parsonage, and schoolhouse (B,C), and markets (F). This plan was not followed in Niagara. (Niagara Historical Society Museum, 987.017.2)

A new stage in the development of the community began when Dorchester decided that it was time to foster the establishment of towns in order to provide local administrative centres for the agricultural settlements. In August 1788 he sent to Frey a plan of a town and township approved by the governor in council and ordered him to use it in future. This plan, with the town site at the centre of the waterfront lots, would not, however, be followed exactly in Niagara, because its approval had come far too late. The relevant lots in Township no.1 had already been settled, one of them for six years, the others for at least four. Besides, as Frey reported on 2 May 1789, the settlers at Niagara wanted a say in the process: Our community is as yet divided in opinion with respect of the place most fit for the town and Public buildings, it seems to be the general opinion it had better be voted for.²⁵ Before the matter of the town site could be settled, Frey grew tired of petty criticism from John Collins (whom Simcoe later described as a man of neither strength nor intellect) and departed, despite having been refused permission, to visit his family in the United States. He never returned, and so the problem of the site was left to the land board and the diplomatic Augustus Jones, his successor as surveyor at Niagara.

The Niagara land board, composed of the commanding officer of Fort Niagara, Lieutenant-Colonel Butler, Robert Hamilton, Peter Tenbroek, Nathaniel Petit, and Benjamin Pawling, held its first regular meeting in January 1789, but did not deal specifically with the issue of the town site until March 1790. Then, at the last of a series of meetings held at Walter Butler Sheehan’s house in the Rangers’ barracks, it was decided that the centre of this township on the bank of the Niagara River is the proper place for a town and other Public Buildings and that the lots No. 15, 16, 17 and 18 in the centre of this township are at present in the possession of Gilbert Fields, Wm. Baker, Richard Wilkinson and Nathaniel Fields which the Board will endeavour to obtain from these proprietors for that purpose.²⁶

In June, the combined power of Butler, Hamilton et al. having failed to convince the occupants to give up their land, the board adopted Frey’s suggestion that the site should be voted for at meetings of the militia. They offered the choice of: first, the crown lands near Captain McDonnell’s farm; second, the centre of Township no.1 on the banks of the Niagara River; third, the rise of Mount Dorchester above the Landing; fourth, the glebe lands on Mount Dorchester.²⁷

Government approval for the chosen option, the crown lands near Captain McDonnell’s, situated on the river at the Due West Line, came in February 1791, when instructions from the surveyor general’s office in Quebec ordered Augustus Jones to engage ten chain bearers and axe men at a rate not exceeding one shilling and sixpence per day each man, with an allowance of one shilling and three pence per day to yourself and party for provisions . . . And immediately proceed with all diligence to survey and mark a town plot for a county town of the district to be called Lenox on the west side of the Niagara River at such place and according to such plans and dimensions as the Land Board . . . may direct.²⁸

Progress was not exactly smooth. Three months elapsed before the board (by then enlarged to please the local populace who had entertained great jealousy of the prevailing majority of the previous board²⁹) instructed Jones to proceed in laying out the town according to the plan issued by Surveyor General Samuel Holland. There was, however, a further problem with the site because Holland had miscalculated. After the reservation needed for the high ground behind Navy Hall had been accounted for, the front left for a town was not three-quarters of a mile plus 140 feet as he had projected, but a mere 800 yards. To remedy the error, the board directed that each front lot be divided into two to leave as many lots as were originally intended.³⁰ Four days later, on 24 June 1791, the board changed its mind in favour of a second option offered by the surveyor general, that the town site be located to the northwest of Navy Hall. Again there were difficulties. Part of this site was already occupied by people who had settled there before 1784 by agreement with the commanding officer of Fort Niagara and had built houses and planted crops. Peter Tenbroek, for example, had been there since 1782 on land near