The land to the west of Waterloo and Woolwich Townships all the way to Lake Huron was known as the Queen’s Bush. These were Clergy Reserve lands, set aside by the Crown in 1791 for the benefit of the Anglican church (the semi-official Church of Canada, as Canada was still a British colony). The land was managed by the colonial government, with revenues from leases given to the church, until 1819, when an appointed committee called the Clergy Corporation was set up to manage the lands and the revenues from them.
In 1826, with revenues from the Clergy Reserves pretty lackluster, the Canada Company was formed to sell off both the Reserves and Crown land within Upper Canada. However, Rev John Strachan, rector of York (Toronto) and chairman of the Clergy Corporation, resisted, and the Canada Company was given 1.1 million acres in the Huron Tract instead. In 1827, Strahan received permission to sell off one quarter of the reserves to support Anglican clergy.
The Queen’s Bush had never been surveyed, but starting in the early 1820s, so-called “squatters” began to settle in, clearing farms, building homes and roads, and starting churches and schools. The great majority of these settlers were escaped slaves and free black people from the northern USA, but others were impoverished immigrants from Great Britain. It is estimated that, at its height in the late 1840s, there were over 2,000 black people living in what is now the northeastern section of Wellesley Township and the southeastern corner of Peel Township (now Mapleton). There were black settlements where the villages of Wallenstein, Hawkesville, Yatton, and Glen Allen now stand.
Northwest of Yatton
The few accounts remaining seem to indicate that relations between these black settlers and their Mennonite neighbours in Woolwich were generally good. Several accounts mention that Mennonites and black people exchanged labour on each other’s farms, that some black people learned to speak German from the Mennonites, that Mennonites supplied seed on credit, that a black woman taught Mennonite children how to crochet, and so on.
Indeed, there had been black people in Waterloo Township pretty much from the beginning. There is some suggestion that part of the motivation to immigrate to Canada for early Mennonite settlers, like Schoerg and Betzner, was their dislike of the slavery in other possible destinations, such as Virginia. Several settlers, including Abraham Erb and Abraham Weber, may have brought free black men with them from Pennsylvania and employed them in their mills and other enterprises. And over the decades, black immigrants fleeing the USA would show up in Berlin and settle down. One man was a barber, another ran a school for a few years.
But politics in the colony ensured that the communities in the Queen’s Bush did not stand a chance. There was immense pressure from immigrants and developers for more settlement lands. Indeed, one of the issues that sparked the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837 was disagreement over what was to be done with the Clergy Reserves. After that uprising was quashed, the colonial government realized it had to do something about the Reserves, and, in 1850, they divided the Queen’s Bush into counties and townships, then sent surveying teams to divide it all into lots that could be sold. The surveyors ran roughshod over settlers’ farms, with many of them being split between multiple lots.
Although the government offered settlers the option to buy their properties, almost none could afford it because they were living in a cashless, subsistence economy. From the early 1850s, the settlers started to disperse, leaving two decades of labour behind them. Some stayed in the area, working as labourers for other farmers, many moved to developing urban centres in Canada, some moved back to the USA, especially after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and a few moved to Haiti and Liberia.
Thus, one of the largest early settlements of black people in Upper Canada was dismantled. The newly surveyed lots in Wellesley and Peel were sold, and many of them were purchased by Mennonites, always hungry for farms for their children. My uncle Amos, growing up in Wellesley township around Hawkesville and Wallenstein in the 1930s and 40s, never saw a single black person as a young man. His wife, my aunt Lorna, who grew up in Peel between Yatton and Glen Allen, was aware of black people (the Aylestock family lived in Glen Allen for years) and knew of the old black church just off the 4th Line of Peel.
on the 19th Sideroad in Peel
Today, there is nothing left of these communities but a few historical markers and two old graveyards, one on the 4th Line of Peel and the other on the 19th Sideroad just south of the 4th Line. But there are prosperous Mennonite farms and plain white meeting houses all over these lands. One of the first to buy up land in Wellesley was our old progenitor Jacob G Martin, who acquired a farm for his son, our ancestor David B, sometime before 1861.
To open the map of Queen’s Bush settlement in a separate tab in your browser, click here. You can then refer to the map to see where each of the families settled. Homesteads are numbered in the order the families arrived, as follows.
David B Martin was born in 1838 and married Catherine Weber (grand-daughter of Rev John Weber) in May 1864. They settled on the lot purchased by Jacob G just west of the Woolwich-Wellesley town line east of Wallenstein. The Wellesley-Peel line, formerly Highway 86 and now Line 86, forms the north boundary of their lot. The farm is still there at 7180 Line 86 (with their son David W Martin’s farm across the road). In 1901, David B became the first minister of the South Peel Old Order meeting house, a mile or so west of Wallenstein, just off Line 86. The Wellesley Dave Martin Mennonite Meeting House is on the corner of his property; we’ll find out how that came to be in a later post. David and Catherine are Lovina’s paternal grandparents.
David and Catherine’s son, John W Martin and his wife, Leah Snyder (great grand-daughter of Joseph E. Schneider), were married in December 1901. They lived for awhile on the Moses Martin homestead in Woolwich, a few miles south of Elmira on the east side of what is now called Arthur Street. The house (which was demolished in the early 1990s) was across the road from where Crossroads Restaurant is now, at the Elmira bypass intersection; it stood very close to the road, with its doorstep pretty much on the gravel shoulder. This is where grandmother Lovina was born in 1905.
Sometime before 1912 (when my friend Geoff Martin’s newly married great-great grandparents moved onto the Moses Martin farm), John W and Leah and their family moved to a place on the south side of the Ament Line in Wellesley Township, between Hawkesville and Linwood. This is the farm where my mother Leah and her siblings went as children to visit their grandparents and aunts and uncles. Mom has a lot of memories of this farm up until the time she was 8, though I have none, despite the fact that my great-grandfather John W lived until I was 11 years old. (My sister, Sherri, remembers visiting there with our mother and grandparents and thinks I was along, but I don’t remember it.)
My maternal grandparents, Lovina and Peter, also lived around Hawkesville in Wellesley in the early years of their marriage (between 1925 and 1935), before they moved to Woolwich. Their story is outlined in a later section.
In 1915, after my paternal great-grandfather Isaiah B Martin married his second wife, Judith W Martin, they moved from a farm in Woolwich to a 12-acre farm south of Hawkesville (now 3140 Empey Road), which came to be known in the family as the “small farm.” My grandparents, Elias B Martin and Annie Brox, who were married that same year, took over Isaiah’s farm in Woolwich (the “big farm”), which is on the north side of Hawkesville Road where it meets Kressler Road, just west of Rev Daniel Brubacher’s farm. In February 1927, as the Great Depression was looming, Elias and Annie lost the big farm (thanks to such hardships as the loss of their entire herd of purebred Holstein cattle to bovine tuberculosis) and moved onto the small farm, where they grew produce to sell at the Kitchener market. My father Christian B Martin was born on the little farm in June 1927, just months after the move. For more about Elias and Annie, see “Conference Mennonites in Woolwich and Wellesley.”
When I was a boy, my dad’s sister Elizabeth and her husband David S Bauman lived just around the corner from the small farm at 3240 Boomer Line in Wellesley. I have very good memories of staying on this farm and learning to milk cows and drive the tractor.
Directly behind David and Lizzie’s farm, in the middle of the section, was a farm owned by my father’s cousin, Elam H Martin and his wife Salome Sauder. The lane to the farm is off Lobsinger Line, halfway between Heidelberg and St Clements. I worked as a hired hand for Elam and Salome in the summer of 1967, and though they were very kind to me, I was so homesick that I left after a month.
Maybe all of these ancestors and relatives didn’t benefit directly from the labour of black (and white) refugee settlers who came to the land before them, but the ghosts of displaced people haunt the boundaries between the Haldimand Tract and the Queen’s Bush. There were a lot of people here before us. And there are other ghosts haunting these boundaries for me and our family, ghosts of ancestors and cousins whose stories I do not know. We’ll get into the reasons for that in another post.
Sources:
Epp, Timothy. “Anabaptist-Black Interaction in Upper Canada: An Initial Reconnaissance.” Journal of Mennonite Studies, Volume 31, 2013.
Fahey, Curtis. “Clergy Reserves,” The Canadian Encyclopedia (https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/clergy-reserves).
Martin, Geoff. “Baked Clay.” The Common, issue 18, Oct 28, 2019 (https://www.thecommononline.org/baked-clay/).
Martin, Geoff. “Slave Days in the Queen’s Bush,” for Hamilton Arts & Letters (read in draft form). 2020.
“Queen’s Bush,” Wikipedia” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen%27s_Bush).
Schantz, Orpheus Moyer. “Hawkesville, a Pioneer Village of Waterloo County.” Waterloo Historical Society Annual Report, volume 22 (1934).
Waterloo Region Generations: A record of the people of Waterloo Region, Ontario (https://generations.regionofwaterloo.ca/). Main source for genealogical information, as well as information about where each family settled.
500 Years of Migration 