The German Company Purchase

In December 1802, when the newly arrived Sam Bricker attempted to register the land he had purchased from John Biehn, he discovered that there was an unpaid mortgage on all of Beasley’s land, and the Mennonites’ titles were probably not valid. All of the settlers were very worried; some started making plans to move on. Word quickly got back to The Twenty and Pennsylvania, and for two years new immigrants settled around the village of Markham, north of Toronto, instead of coming to the Grand River area.

In the meantime, Sam Bricker met with Richard Beasley to see what was up and what could be done. It turned out that Beasley had not been able to make payments and was in a pretty tight corner. He’d used the money he’d received for lots sold to pay off other debts, and he could make payments on the mortgage only if he sold more lots, which he wasn’t allowed to do and now wasn’t likely to do. It seems that they came to some kind of agreement that Bricker would try to raise enough investment to cover Beasley’s mortgage and thus clear the deeds on lots already purchased, as well as purchase more land.

In early 1803, Sam Bricker and his brother John travelled to their old home in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, to try to interest their father and other relatives to invest in Beasley’s block of land, but they had little luck. They travelled on to Lancaster County where they got a much better reception from John’s brothers-in-law, John, Jacob, and Daniel Erb. By late summer, they were back in Upper Canada negotiating with Beasley. They were able to reach an agreement that on or before June 1, 1804, Beasley would sell 60,000 acres of Block 2 (excluding the lands he had already sold and surveyed) to Daniel Erb and Samuel Bricker for the sum of 10,000 pounds (the amount of his mortgage).

This agreement was filed with the government and approved by the Executive Council and by the Trustees of the Six Nations on May 15, 1804, with Erb and Bricker putting down 4,692.10 pounds. The remainder was to be paid by May 23, 1805, so the Brickers and Erbs headed back to Pennsylvania to secure more backers. They managed to round up a total of 26 investors in the scheme, all putting up different amounts, with the Erb and Eby families investing about 75% of the total. The Upper Block was divided into 128 lots of 448 acres, and a parcel of land in the Lower Block into 32 lots of 83 acres each. Parcels were assigned randomly to the investors, according to the amounts of their investments. While the group came to be known as the German Company, it wasn’t really formalized as a corporation.

The story goes that the Brickers and Ebys (armed with rifles) travelled back to Canada in a buggy and on horseback, with the money in silver coins packed into a barrel. One night they were accosted by a group of men, but they managed to scare them off. They delivered the money to the Trustees, and clear title for the land was issued to John and Daniel Erb, as trustees for the German Company, on June 29, 1805.

The huge tract of land they’d purchased was surveyed into the required number of lots, and the lots were assigned to the investors. Immediately, there was a flurry of subdivisions and re-sales. Many of the original investors divvied their lots out to their children who wished to settle in Canada. Others sold their lots or bought up more lots and sold them on. In a 1934 article written for the Waterloo Historical Society, I. C. Bricker documents, lot by lot, the hundreds of land sales made in Block 2 between 1805 and 1825 (the list of sales goes on for some 25 pages in Bricker’s article).

I. C. Bricker’s Map of Land Ownership in Block 2 in Sept 1805
(click here to open a full-size copy in a separate tab)

It was a speculation frenzy, but also a steady stream of settlement. On July 1, 1805, there were 33 inhabited lots in what later came to be known as Waterloo Township—probably no more than 200 people. By 1825, the population was 1640 inhabitants. Already in 1807, there was enough demand for land that Mennonite investors purchased a large portion of Block 3 from the original purchaser, William Wallace (see “Settlement in Block 3“).

While the Mennonites paid for their land in good faith that the money was to go to the Six Nations of the Iroquois, there is no evidence that the Six Nations received any of it. In fact, the Trustees invested the money in various schemes to further settle the Six Nations’ land, including companies set up to dredge the bottom end of the Grand River so settler traffic and commerce would be easier. These schemes all went broke, and the Six Nations, rather than benefiting, were increasingly crowded into a smaller and smaller fragment of the land they’d been given by the Crown “for their enjoyment in perpetuity.”

This land that has become so definitively Mennonite is the traditional homeland of the Neutral Iroquois nation, followed by the Mississauga Ojibway. It was then given to the Haudenosaunee (the Six Nations of the Iroquois) by the British Crown. Though our ancestors cleared the land, built the farms and villages and churches and schools and industries in the European manner, it is essential to remember that we were not the first people here and that the way in which this land was made available to our ancestors had a terrible impact on the First Peoples, an impact that continues to this day.

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Sources:

Cruikshank, Brig. General E. A. “The Reserve of the Six Nations Indians on the Grand River, and the Mennonite Purchase.” Waterloo Historical Society Annual Report, volume 15 (1927).

“Ezra Eby’s Introduction,” From Pennsylvania to Waterloo: A Biographical History of Waterloo Township (http://ebybook.region.waterloo.on.ca/ebyintro.php).

Martin, Geoff. “From the Banks of the Grand.” New Quarterly online (https://tnq.ca/from-the-banks-of-the-grand/).

Monture, Rick. We Share Our Matters: Two Centuries of Writing and Resistance at Six Nations of the Grand River.  Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2014.