Waterloo County did not remain a purely Mennonite community for very long. As Preston, Doon, Berlin, and Waterloo developed into centres of enterprise and trade, non-Mennonite German immigrants were attracted to the area, and Mennonite land-owners began to sell parts of their lots to these outsiders, who set up inns and shops and other businesses.
By the mid nineteenth century, there were more non-Mennonites than Mennonites in Waterloo Township, and it was the second most densely-populated area in Upper Canada after Toronto. With the arrival of the railroad in the 1850s, the area became a major industrial and manufacturing centre, with “Made in Berlin” quickly becoming a signature of quality. And Mennonites were heavily involved in milling grain, brewing beer, distilling spirits, manufacture of woolen fabrics and felt and buttons, and many other products and services needed in the growing communities.
Rev Elias Snider (a grandson of our ancestor Christian Schneider), for example, bought Abe Erb’s milling and distillery businesses in Waterloo (the distillery eventually became Seagram’s Distillery). His son E W B Snider expanded the enterprise with mills in St Jacobs, Waterloo, Berlin, New Dundee, and German Mills (now in south Kitchener), as well as a foundry and farm equipment factory in Waterloo. E W B, as he was known, had interests in a local branch-line railroad, introduced more efficient milling equipment and processes, and eventually installed generators to electrify his St Jacobs mill. He was, with Sir Adam Beck, one of the founders of Ontario Hydro. He served as MPP for Waterloo North for 13 years.
All of this commercial activity drew more and more non-Mennonites, who brought their own cultures and religious beliefs and practices, which couldn’t but have an effect on the Mennonites. One of the greatest impacts of the nineteenth century, other than industrialization, was that of the so-called “Great Awakening,” the revivalistic, pietistic, spiritualistic fervor that spread across the continent like a wild-fire.
Tent meetings arrived in Waterloo County, with fire-and-brimstone Bible-thumpers preaching the need for a personal conversion and spiritual awakening in order to escape eternal damnation in Hell and secure a place in Heaven for eternity (for an example of revivalist preaching, see Jonathan Edwards’ classic sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God“). This evangelism produced a lot of trouble amongst the Mennonites in Canada, as well as in the United States.
With these Methodist-inspired preachers came new ideas like interdenominational Sunday schools, evening prayer meetings, and extended series of tent revival meetings. Many in the Mennonite community, while they didn’t necessarily disagree with the theology behind the preaching (salvation by grace through faith), felt that the whole spirit of these innovations was too assertive and “showy” and individualistic: there was a bit too much braggadocio in testifying about your salvation and your spirituality, and there was too much emphasis on the individual and none on the importance of community. This wasn’t the quiet, humble faith and worship in a unified community that the Mennonites traditionally embraced.
Others in the community must have found this new excitement and fervor and personal religious expression a welcome relief from the tedious worship services and the emphasis on expressing your faith by living a simple and humble life of back-breaking work. Many Mennonites were attracted to the revival meetings, bible studies, prayer meetings, and Sunday schools of more evangelical denominations and drifted away from the Mennonite churches. Thus, there was increasing pressure in the Mennonite community to adopt similar forms of worship and religious education and even to use English in the worship services, primarily as a means to keep the young people interested in the Mennonite faith and way of life.
In the 1870s, two Mennonite preachers raised a great deal of tension and conflict in the Mennonite community in Waterloo County. Solomon Eby, a minister from the short-lived Mennonite settlement in Port Elgin on Lake Huron, had a conversion experience sometime in the late 1860s and began to preach the need to be born again. He also began serving communion and baptizing new believers, sacraments that were to be performed only by bishops. Around the same time, Rev Daniel Brenneman arrived from Indiana, where he had already stirred up a lot of conflict in the Elkhart area by preaching personal salvation, holiness, and evangelism. He conducted a series of evangelistic meetings around the area, without permission of the Mennonite ministers and often in cooperation with preachers from other churches.
These two preachers were frequently admonished by the other leaders in the Mennonite community for sowing discord, but they simply carried on. Because of their defiant refusal to submit to the main body of the church, Eby and Brenneman were excommunicated in 1874. They and their followers became known as the “New” (or “Reforming”) Mennonites and, after joining with a Brethren in Christ (Tunker) splinter group from Ohio, they called themselves the Mennonite Brethren in Christ. In the twentieth century, this group renamed itself the Missionary Church and then the Evangelical Missionary Church. Bethany Missionary Church in Kitchener is part of this denomination.
After the 1874 New Mennonite split, the rest of the Mennonites were known as the “Old Mennonites” and later the “red-brick Mennonites,” the “Ontario Conference Mennonites,” or just the “Mennonite Church,” depending on who was talking about them. We will call this line of the church the Conference Mennonites.
Sources:
Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (https://gameo.org).
Martin, Andrew C. Creating A Timeless Tradition: The Effects of Fundamentalism on the Conservative Mennonite Movement. Thesis, University of Waterloo. 2007.
Martin, Andrew C. “Humility and Gelassenheit: Old Order Mennonite Spirituality in Monastic Perspective.” Journal of Mennonite Studies, volume 31 (2013).
Martin, Donald. Old Order Mennonites of Ontario: Gelassenheit, Discipleship, Brotherhood. Kitchener: Pandora Press, 2003.
Weber, Urias. New Beginnings: A History of the Old Order Mennonites of Ontario. Wallenstein: Vineyard Publications, 2018.
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.
Site of a Black Cemetery on the 4th Line of Peel 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.
Queen’s Bush Settlement Plaque in Glen Allen
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.
Site of the British Methodist Episcopal (“Negro”) Church 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.
Wellesley David Martin Meeting House
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.)
John W and Leah Martin’s Farm
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.”
The Small Farm as it is Now
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.
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.
For the first decade and a half after Mennonites started settling in Blocks 2 and 3 of the Haldimand Tract, there was no local administration other than the Mennonite Church’s deacons, ministers, and bishop. The area was part of the British colonial province of Upper Canada, but the colonial administration in York (later Toronto) didn’t have much impact on daily life in the community. Land transfers had to be registered in York, and John Erb of the Preston area was appointed Justice of the Peace, but that was about the extent of it.
When the German Company’s two blocks of land were surveyed, there were no allowances made for roadways or any other public purposes. The settlers either used First Nations trails or created their own paths from farm to farm. These paths were improved into roads as settlement intensified; hence the lack of any semblance of a grid in the area’s basic road network.
John Erb established a saw mill in 1806 and a grist mill in 1807 on his property on the Speed River near its junction with the Grand (across from the Bechtels’ place). Sometime after 1807, Joseph Schneider built a sawmill on Schneider’s Creek and cut a road from his farm to the edge of his property, then eastward toward his brother-in-law Benjamin Eby’s place. In 1809, John Erb’s brother Abraham built a sawmill on Beaver (now Laurel) Creek a few miles northwest of Joseph Schneider’s land, and, in 1816, opened a gristmill there as well. In 1812, the first Mennonite meeting house was built on Benjamin Eby’s land about a mile to the southeast of Schneider’s place.
As these centres developed within the mosaic of isolated farms scattered across Block 2, the community got together to build roads: from Abe Erb’s mill in the north to Schneider’s to Ben Eby’s, then east to the bridge across the river at Freeport and on down to John Erb’s. From there, a road was constructed through the Beverly Swamp to Dundas at the head of the lake, the closest market to buy supplies and to sell goods.
In 1816, the colonial government of Upper Canada created the townships of Dumfries, Waterloo, and Woolwich (Haldimand Blocks 1, 2, and 3 respectively). They were included in the District of Gore, part of Halton County. Public business was then supervised by magistrates in Hamilton; landowners met periodically for township meetings and appointed such officials as clerks, assessors, and tax collectors. With the approval of district magistrates, the local authorities were then able to build roads and bridges, funded by locally levied taxes.
As early as 1820, Schneider sold some land at the intersection of his road with the main road to Phineas Varnum, who built a blacksmith shop and a roadhouse there. Within a decade, others (mostly immigrants from Germany) had set up various small industries and shops along what came to be known as King Street, and the community came to be known as Sandhills. In 1833, the residents adopted the name Berlin.
In similar fashion, communities slowly grew up around the Erb brothers’ mills and in various other locations in Waterloo township. Waterloo had the first post office in the township about 1831, while Preston’s post office was established in 1837. Preston was incorporated as a village in 1853, Berlin was incorporated in 1854, and Waterloo in 1857. In 1857, Waterloo county was created to include Dumfries, Waterloo, Woolwich, Wellesley, and Wilmot Townships. Berlin was named county seat, which brought county offices, courts, and a jail to the town.
Development in Woolwich followed similar patterns, but lagged by a decade or more. In Woolwich, development started in Conestogo with a couple of mills in the early 1840s and a post office in 1852. Elmira started to develop in the 1840s as well, with a post office opened in 1849, while the first mill in St Jacobs was built in 1852. Heidelberg had a post office by 1854.
From a few dozen isolated clearings in the forest connected by meandering paths, the county slowly developed into a network of small communities linked by public roads and managed by elected councils. We can begin to see the skeleton of what is now Waterloo Region emerging from the wilderness.
When the Mennonites came to Waterloo County from Pennsylvania, the vast majority belonged to a unified Mennonite Church. They had the same faith and practice and worshipped together in a growing number of meeting houses as the community spread up through the county. And their core beliefs came down over several hundred years from the old Anabaptists, from Menno Simons.
The early Anabaptists and Mennonites believed in a radical discipleship to Jesus, as exemplified in his teachings (the Sermon on the Mount, for example) and his dealings with people. Fundamental were his humility and his service to others: he fed the hungry multitudes, he washed his disciples’ feet, he gave himself as a sacrifice to others. He called his followers to self-sacrifice, brotherhood, and communal service.
Donald Martin, a historian of the Old Order Mennonites and a distant relative of mine, suggests that their faith is grounded in the concept of Gelassenheit, which he defines as “an attitude that is ready to yield, abandon, or surrender personal desires before God and the community” or “non-assertive humility.” He argues that this principle shapes the understanding not only of religion, but of every aspect of daily life.
The community of the believers was at the core of everything, and to follow Jesus was to serve and submit to the community, to maintain peace and serenity. Also important was the notion of living a plain and non-ostentatious life, to get the work done without drawing attention to oneself or the community. This was, perhaps, a reaction against the revolutionary activities of some early Anabaptists, such as those in Münster, but it was also an interpretation of Jesus’ mission and ministry.
The church organization was remarkably democratic for the age. A community of Mennonites would meet together for simple worship in a home or a meeting house, with (admittedly only male) deacons, ministers, and bishops nominated from the membership of baptized believers and chosen by lottery (with the belief that God’s designated choice would be selected).
The fellowships held communion (with foot-washing and other rituals of humility and service) only a few times a year, but before communion there was always a service of preparation, in which individual members could voice concerns and troubles to the ministers of the church. If there was dissension or conflict within the community, communion was cancelled, and the ministers held conferences to address the concerns and to try to find agreement, compromise, and peace. If peace couldn’t be reached in the local community, the issues were taken to a conference of the ministry from the entire region, in order to access the wisdom of a broader community. In all of this discussion, the over-riding principle was humility and submission to the teachings and example of Jesus and the consensus of the community.
Andrew C. Martin (a 4th cousin and friend of mine) has studied and written extensively about traditional and Old Order Mennonite theology and spirituality. He calls traditional Mennonite religion an “embodied spirituality” and argues that it is very similar to medieval Benedictine monasticism in its attempt to manifest faith through discipleship in a simple life of humility, submission, pacifism, quiet worship, and service. It is a non-cloistered and non-celibate monasticism, but the focus, spirit, and intention are the same: to follow Jesus in humility, discipline, and service to others in a community of like-minded believers.
When the Mennonites came to Canada and for decades afterwards, they worked hard, dressed plainly, used simple technologies, and worshipped in simple buildings. The Mennonites didn’t really stand out from anybody else of that period: all pioneer women wore bonnets and simple long dresses, all pioneer men wore simple sturdy clothing, nobody wore neckties, and everybody drove horses and buggies and helped their neighbours. But the Mennonites stuck together (mostly marrying only within the church), built meeting-houses, worshipped and worked together, helped each other on their farms and in their businesses.
There were in fact two groups of immigrants who were separate from the main body of Mennonites: 1) The Tunkers (or River Brethren) believed in baptism by immersion (rather than sprinkling or pouring) and were already heavily influenced by Methodist revivalism in Pennsylvania in the 1780s. They stressed a crisis conversion, personal holiness, baptism by the holy spirit, and aggressive personal evangelism. Otherwise, their beliefs and practice were similar to the Mennonites. This group was very successful in the Niagara region and drew many members away from the main Mennonite Church; in Waterloo, they always had a presence, but their growth was much slower. After 1863, they became known as the Brethren in Christ; in 2018, they changed their name to Be in Christ Church Canada. For more information on the Tunkers, see “River Brethren / Tunkers / Be in Christ“.) 2) The Reformed Mennonites were a group that separated from the main body of Mennonites in Pennsylvania in 1812 and subsequently immigrated, first to Niagara, then to Waterloo County. This is a conservative group that has strong notions about what defines separation from the world and stresses the ban and shunning. Because they think they are the “true” church, they avoid all interaction with other Mennonites. They practice no sort of evangelism and wear plain clothing, but have adopted cars, electricity, and telephones. In 1948, there were 6 congregations in Ontario, with 3 in the Waterloo area: New Hamburg, Wellesley, and North Easthope. Today, only Stephensville (in Welland Township) and North Easthope are still functioning. The North Easthope congregation was organized in 1844; their meeting house is on Erbs Road east of Amulree.
It isn’t clear how devout the majority of the early Mennonite settlers were, how seriously they took or even understood their Anabaptist faith. What comes down to us are the various judgements from later groups with different emphases. The “awakened” Mennonite Church in the later nineteenth century deemed their forebears to be lax in their devotion and spirituality, focusing on legalistic lifestyle issues rather than personal piety and religious devotion. The Old Orders, on the other hand, thought the earlier immigrants were lax in church discipline, allowing members to become too worldly both in lifestyle and in religious beliefs.
We do know, however, that the first meeting house (Eby’s) was built in what is now Kitchener in 1813, and the second (Hagey’s) in Preston in 1814: before this, congregations met in homes. Our ancestor Joseph Bechtel was ordained minister in Preston in 1804 (when there were still only a few families in the community) and Benjamin Eby was ordained minister in Berlin in 1807 (at the beginning of the great wave of people who arrived after the German Company purchase); he was ordained bishop in 1812.
In 1831, the Martin’s meeting house was built on land donated by Henry Z Martin, son of old Peter Martin. Our ancestor John W Weber was ordained the first minister of the congregation in 1833, and Samuel Weber was the third minister. Our ancestor Peter Burkhard, who was the first deacon, donated the New Testament that was kept in the pulpit and is still in the possession of the congregation.
Martin’s Meeting House at King St North and Country Squire Rd
By 1837, when the Wanner meeting house was built on ancestor Henry Wanner’s land near Hespeler, there were congregations, if not meeting houses, throughout Waterloo and Woolwich, with a roster of deacons and ministers and bishops to lead worship services and minister to the membership.
Worship services weren’t held in every area every week, but sometimes only once a month or once every 6 weeks, in a regular rotation. It seems this was a pragmatic necessity, as ministers were few, communities and farms were scattered through the forests, and roads were non-existent in the beginning and pretty poor throughout the early decades. Families were expected to “go visiting” on weeks when there weren’t meetings in their area. (Nowadays, when their home congregation doesn’t have services, Old Order families frequently attend services in another meeting house and visit their relatives who are members of that congregation).
Worship services were simple, ritualized, and in High German. We have to remember that all the ministers of the church were simple farmers with only rudimentary education. By all indications, preaching consisted of practical homilies of encouragement in hard times or exhortations to live simply and humbly, based on a selected biblical text. Close biblical study (exegesis), theorization about God (theology), and precise definitions of abstract beliefs (doctrine) were not in their repertoire. There was no instrumental accompaniment to the singing and no four-part harmony (which the Mennonites have become famous for). It seems the few hymns were sung very slowly, with a designated song leader choosing the tunes to be used. The prayers were silent meditations, rather than spoken aloud by the minister.
Sources:
Martin, Andrew C. “Humility and Gelassenheit: Old Order Mennonite Spirituality in Monastic Perspective.” Journal of Mennonite Studies, volume 31 (2013).
Martin, Donald. Old Order Mennonites of Ontario: Gelassenheit, Discipleship, Brotherhood. Kitchener: Pandora Press, 2003.
Like Richard Beasley, William Wallace sold some of his Block 3 land east of the Grand River, but he soon found himself in financial difficulty, unable to pay his mortgage to the Trustees of the Six Nations. As mentioned previously, the original Mennonite investors in Block 2 realized they had a good thing going and, in 1807, purchased the 45,000-acre portion of Block 3 that lay to the west of the Grand River.
In 1808 alone, 26,600 acres of the German Company Block 3 tract was sold. Initially this was all just investment, mostly farmers in Block 2 buying lots for their children to settle when they married. Because settlement in Block 2 was from south to north, the lands in Block 3 were very remote and barely accessible in the early years, but as we’ve seen, lots on the northern boundary of Block 2 were being settled by 1816. People started moving in to what became known as Woolwich Township in the early 1820s. By the 1830s, dozens of families were flooding in, and there was pressure on the province to open up the Queen’s Bush Anglican clergy lands to the west for settlement.
The rest of our immigrating ancestors were among the people who settled on lots in the German Company Woolwich Tract. Most of them arrived from Pennsylvania as children and settled with their parents on Block 2 lands, then moved to Block 3 lots when they married. A few settled in Block 3 directly upon immigration.
To open the map of Block 3 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.
In 1823, Daniel Z Martin (son of Peter) married Veronica Schneider (daughter of Joseph Schneider of Berlin) and settled on Woolwich German Company lot 18. This farm is an irregular plot northeast of his father’s farm, running across both King and Weber Streets north of the county line (Country Squire Rd) and up as far as Wagner’s Corners. The St Jacobs Farmers Market stands on the southwest corner of their land. Daniel and Anna are ancestors of Lovina through their daughter Anna, who married Rev Sam Weber (as mentioned previously).
In 1825, four ancestor families settled in Woolwich:
Christian G Martin (son of David) married Anna Bauman (who probably immigrated with her widowed mother “Old Betty” and/or her brother Henry around 1818). They settled on a farm (lot 2 Woolwich) just north of his parents’ place, a mile south of the present-day village of Conestoga on what is now Glasgow Street. I believe this was one of the two farms facing each other near the crest of the hill overlooking the Conestoga River. Ancestors of Elias.
Rev John and Catherine (Gehman) Weber immigrated and also settled on lot 2 along Glasgow Street, perhaps on the farm facing Christian and Anna’s. Rev John was the first minister at Martin’s Meeting House. Christian G was one of the executors of his will when he died in 1854. Ancestors of Lovina on her father’s side.
Rev John W Brubacher came to Canada at the age of 22, allegedly walking all the way from Mifflin County, Pennsylvania. In 1827, he married Catherine G Martin (daughter of David and Maria), and they settled on lot 17 in Woolwich, west of present-day St Jacobs, on the north side of Hawkesville Road, west of the Conestoga River bridge and running all the way to the township line. John was ordained a deacon in 1847 and helped to build the Conestogo Meeting House on Three Bridges Road (the first meeting house in Woolwich). Ancestors of Peter.
Henry H and Maria (Mosser) Bauman immigrated and settled on lot 13 Woolwich, one mile east of present-day Heidelberg on the north side of the road, somewhere around 2477 Lobsinger Line. They are great grandparents of Elias, through their daughters Elizabeth and Esther, and of Peter, through their daughter Maria, as well as great-great grandparents of Lovina through their daughter Esther.
In 1828, John S Brubacher (known as “Cooper John”) arrived in Canada and married Elizabeth Burkhard (daughter of Peter and Barbara Burkhard). They settled on Woolwich lot 40 west of St Jacobs, just across the old bridge by the dam, within the loop of the Conestoga River. Cooper John built the old stone farmhouse that still stands at 1599 Three Bridges Road. Ancestors of Elias.
Cooper John and Elizabeth Brubacher’s House
In 1839, Joseph D Bauman (son of David S and Mary) and Elizabeth Bauman (daughter of Henry H and Maria) were married and settled on lot 8 Woolwich, the northwest corner of King Street and Heidelberg Road, where the Wagner’s Corners gas station is now located. Joseph and Elizabeth’s daughter Maria married Christian B Martin; they are ancestors of Elias.
In 1840, John C Weber (son of Rev John and Catherine Weber, commonly known as “Indian John,” I don’t know why) married Mary “Polly” Clemens (daughter of Nathan and Veronica Clemens). John C came from Pennsylvania with his parents when he was 7 years old. John and Polly lived with his parents for 2 years, then settled on Woolwich lot 50, at the corner of present-day Hemlock Hill Drive and Steffler Road (the township line), east of Hawkesville, and later to an unidentified farm in North Woolwich. John was an auctioneer from 1851 to 1872; they retired to West Montrose. They had 14 children; their daughter Catherine married Rev David B Martin, Lovina’s grandfather.
In 1844, Peter G Martin (son of David and Maria) and his wife Maria (daughter of Rev Henry H and Maria Bauman) settled on lot 37 Woolwich, a half mile northwest of St Jacobs on the south side of old King Street after it curves to the west (the old farmstead is at 1801 King St N). In the 1880s, the farm was bisected by the railroad tracks, and old Peter always said the railroad company stole his best land. Grandparents of Peter.
Peter G and Maria Martin’s Farm
In 1849, Jacob Zapf Brox (or Brooks) emigrated from Germany to Buffalo, NY, where he married Katherina Ziegler, who was also from Germany. Together they moved to Waterloo County, where, after living 2 years somewhere near the St Jacobs Farmers Market, they settled in North Woolwich at what is now 54 Sandy Hills Drive (north of Elmira, between Arthur Street and Northfield Drive). They lived on this farm for 37 years, then moved to Elmira. They were Lutheran all their lives. Grandparents of Chris’s mother, Annie.
Jakob and Katherina
Jakob and Katherina Brox’s Farmstead
Louis Brox, the 8th child of Jacob and Catherine, married Caroline Randall in 1885. Although they moved around a lot, living in rented places, they owned the farm at 1205 Tilman Road, one road south of his parents’ farm. Caroline was the only child of Thomas Randall (an immigrant from England) and his second wife, Eva Margaret Schaefer (an immigrant from Germany). Caroline’s mother died when she was three and her father when she was seven; she was raised as a Mennonite by Henry S and Leah (Good) Martin, a childless neighbour couple. Louis and Caroline were Annie’s parents.
Louis and Caroline with uncle Bill
Louis and Caroline’s House
Between 1802 and 1849, these dozens of our ancestors immigrated to Canada and settled land throughout Waterloo and Woolwich Townships from the southern border of Block 2 to just a few miles shy of the northern apex of Block 3. They were early settlers in or near the emerging villages of Preston, Blair, Doon, Hespeler, Berlin (Kitchener), Waterloo, Conestogo, St Jacobs, and Elmira. A number of them were deacons, ministers, and bishops in the Mennonite church, and not a few of them owned mills and other industries besides their farms. In subsequent generations, their descendants spread throughout those first two townships and into the townships of Wellesley and Peel (now Mapleton in Wellington County).
It is quite a heritage we have in this motley crew of migrants.
Sources:
Uttley, W. V. “Woolwich Township: Its Early Settlement.” Waterloo Historical Society Annual Report, volume 21 (1933).
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.
Less than a century after their parents and grand-parents had arrived in Pennsylvania from war-torn Europe, our ancestors began the difficult trek to Upper Canada. Most came with their goods and kids packed in Conestoga wagons, but some came on horseback, and others walked the entire 500-or-so miles. It was an arduous journey of 4 to 8 weeks through the margins of European settlement and over the Allegheny Mountains in northern Pennsylvania and through the devastated homelands of the Six Nations in upstate New York. (I. C. Bricker, in another article in the 1934 Waterloo Historical Society Reports, details the route, mile by mile.)
To open a map of the journey from Pennsylvania in a separate tab, click here.
Depending on the route they took from the present-day Batavia, New York, about 80 km east of the Niagara River, they crossed the river either from Lewiston to Queenston or from just north of Buffalo to Fort Erie. At both of these crossings, there was already a regular ferry service by 1805. Those who arrived in Fort Erie traveled along the west side of the river, past the falls, to Queenston.
From Queenston, they traveled west to The Twenty, then on to Dundas at the head of Lake Ontario. They then followed the Governor’s Road west to the juncture of the Nith and Grand Rivers (present-day Paris), where they turned north along the east bank of the Grand on what was a well-used First Nations trail roughly widened to accommodate their wagons. (There is no evidence that anyone before the War of 1812 crossed the Beverly Swamp between Dundas and the confluence of the Speed and Grand Rivers, as described so romantically by Mabel Dunham in her Trail of the Conestoga.)
My Mennonite grandparents—Chris’s father, Elias Martin, and Leah’s parents, Lovina Martin and Peter Martin—are descended from Mennonites who immigrated from Pennsylvania and, for the most part, settled in Block 2 (later known as Waterloo Township). They arrived in the period of highest immigration, between 1802 and 1820. We know very little about their journeys, but we do know where they settled when they got here.
It was, of course, all forest, with no roads or communities that we would recognize. All of the roads and villages mentioned in the following are simply to help us orient these people’s properties within the present-day Waterloo Region.
Great-Great-Grandfather Joseph B Snyder Clearing Land circa 1900
To open the map of Block 2 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.
In 1802, Joseph and Magdalena (Allebach) Bechtel were the first of our ancestors to arrive and the only ones who came before the German Company purchase. They settled on the east side of the Speed River where it joins the Grand in what is now Preston in the city of Cambridge. Part of their land (at the end of Westminster Drive South) is now a park called Settlers’ Fork, which is a lovely spot that is frequented by birders. Joseph Bechtel was ordained a minister in the Mennonite church in 1804 and served as the first minister of the Preston meeting house (known as Bechtel’s or Hagey’s, built by John Erb around 1814, and located at the top of the Kress Hill on the road to Berlin, now Kitchener). The Bechtels are ancestors of Chris’s father, Elias, and of Leah’s mother, Lovina.
Site of the Bechtel’s Homestead
In 1807, two years after the German Company purchase, Christian and Elizabeth Schneider purchased 177 acres from John Biehn near the junction of Schneider Creek with the Grand River, in what would eventually become the village of Doon. Elizabeth was a sister of the Erb brothers who were instrumental in forming the German company, as well as founding the villages of Waterloo and Preston. Christian and Elizabeth’s house no longer exists, but it was situated near 1314 Doon Village Rd, close to the intersection of Homer Watson Blvd and Doon Drive. There is a monument to them at the back of Doon Presbyterian Cemetery. They are ancestors of Leah’s mother, Lovina.
Old Photo of the Christian Schneider House (KPL photo)
In 1807, Christian’s brother Joseph Schneider and his wife Barbara Eby purchased lot 17 of the German Company Tract, which runs mostly west from King St in downtown Kitchener on both sides of Queen Street. Their land included what is now Victoria Park (my property on Heins Avenue is just on the other side of their back fence). They first built a log cabin where the Barra Castle Condos now stand on Queen Street, then,in 1816, the large Georgian house that is now the Joseph Schneider House Museum. Schneider had mills on Schneider Creek and sold much of the east end of his property to merchants along what came to be King Street. Barbara was sister to Bishop Benjamin Eby, who lived on lot 2 just to the east and started the first Mennonite church in the County (now First Mennonite), as well as one of the first schools. Their daughter Veronica married Daniel Z. Martin (son of Peter Martin); they are ancestors of Lovina.
Joseph and Barbara’s House: the Schneider Haus Museum
In 1809, Abraham Clemens and his second wife Mary “Polly” Custer bought 100 acres southeast of Preston from Mrs Catherine Gingerich. This land was part of lot 1 in Concession 1 of Beasley’s Lower Tract (land Beasley didn’t sell to the German Company). In 1818, they moved to lots 9 and 10 in the third Concession: this is the land where the downtown of Hespeler village developed. The Clemenses are ancestors of Lovina (and, it is suggested, distant relatives of Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain).
Nathan Clemens (son of Abraham and his first wife Rebecca Miller) was 19 years old when he arrived in Canada with Abraham and Polly. He married Veronica Bechtel (who immigrated in 1802 with her parents Joseph and Magdalena Bechtel) and settled on the eastern half of his parents’ lot 9, just northeast of old Hespeler village. Nathan was struck by lightning and died on his farm in 1832. Nathan and Veronica are ancestors of Lovina through their daughter Mary (also known as Polly).
I was surprised to discover that the Clemens family can be traced back to Clement of Toft, who was born around the year 1500 in Lincolnshire, England. His great-grandson, Gregory Clement, was a Puritan who was one of the signatories to the warrant for the execution of King Charles I in 1642. Gregory was beheaded in 1660 when the monarchy was restored. His son Jacob and his wife Maria, also Puritans, fled England for Holland, where they changed the name to Clemens. Their son Gerhardt Clemens married a Mennonite woman, Anna Reiff, and emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1709. Abraham Clemens, who came to Canada, is Gerhardt and Anna’s great-grandson. So, we have some quantity of English blood in our veins.
In 1810, Henry and Anna (Mosser) Wanner settled on lots 10 and 11, Concession I of the Lower Tract. This land is west of Hespeler, on both sides of Maple Grove Road, from Speedsville Road to Beaverdale Road, including the land where Wanner Mennonite Meeting House and cemetery stand. The Wanners are ancestors of Leah’s father, Peter, through their son Tobias.
Arriving with the Wanners was Arnold Stricker—and perhaps his second wife Barbara Hershey (who, at 16, would have been 43 years younger). The Stryckers (as they came to be known) settled on lot 12, Concession III of the Lower Tract, which is along River Road north of Hespeler right on the river near the intersection with Townline Road. Arnold Strycker is an ancestor of Peter, through his daughter Catherine, who married Tobias Wanner in 1820 (see below).
In 1812, David S and Mary (Bechtel) Bauman bought part of lot 15 of the German Company Tract (originally owned by Abraham Erb). This land lies east of King Street and south of William Street in present-day Waterloo. The intersection of Union and Moore lies on what was their land and the old railroad (now a trail) runs across the corner of it. Mary was the daughter of Joseph and Magdelena Bechtel. The Baumans are ancestors of Elias.
From June 1812 to December 1814, the United States and Britain were at war. America declared war on Britain for several reasons: the British were commandeering American merchant ships in their blockade of France during their war with Napoleon; and the British were actively supporting First Nations’ resistance to American westward expansion beyond the Allegheny Mountains. Between 1812 and 1815, no Mennonites immigrated from Pennsylvania.
Britain exempted the Mennonites, Quakers, and Tunkers from combative service in exchange for an annual fine (as they had done in Pennsylvania prior to the Revolution). In 1813, however, about 20 young men from Waterloo County were impressed as teamsters to transport materiel in General Proctor’s retreat from Detroit.
When the British were attacked and defeated (and their Shawnee ally, Chief Tecumseh, was killed) in the Battle of the Thames near Chatham in October 1813, the Mennonites abandoned some of their horses and all of their equipment as they fled from the Americans (they later received payment from the government for their losses). All escaped unharmed, though Adam Shupe was briefly held by General Harrison. Mennonites in the Niagara region suffered more through confiscation and looting of property and enforced housing of troops.
Memorial to Tecumseh at the Site of the Battle of the Thames
In 1816, Rev Joseph O and Maria (Baer) Bauman bought lot 6, Beasley’s Old Survey in the Lower Tract, which is one of the lots originally purchased by Samuel Betzner Jr in 1800. This land is west of Blair on both sides of Fountain Street west of Dickie Settlement Rd. The farmstead was probably on Old Mill Road. Joseph had been ordained as a preacher already in Pennsylvania, and he served at Hagey (now Preston) meetinghouse after they came to Canada. Their daughter Salome married Henry H Weber, and their daughter Mary married Joseph E. Schneider, son of Christian Schneider of Doon. They are ancestors of Lovina.
Also in 1816, Rev Henry H Weber arrived in Canada and stayed with his brother Abraham until he married Salome Bauman (daughter of Joseph O and Mary Bauman) on March 11, 1817. They settled on lot 66 of the German Company Tract, which is mostly east of Northfield Drive and south of Country Squire Road (the northern boundary of the township). Part of the Blackberry Tech Park and all of the RIM Park Community Centre and Arena lie on their land. I believe the old homestead was located at 100 Solstice Way, where Hospice Waterloo Region is now located. Henry was the first minister of Schneider’s (or Snyder’s) Meeting House across the Grand River near Bloomingdale (named for and located on the land of Jakob Yost Schneider, brother of Christian and Joseph).
Henry and Salome’s son Rev Samuel Weber married Anna Martin (daughter of Daniel Z and Veronica Schneider), and they also lived on this property. Their daughter Veronica married Joseph B Snyder, grandson of Joseph E. Schneider (see below) and lived on the property next door. Sam Weber was the second minister at Martin’s Mennonite Meeting House on King St N at Country Squire Road. Sam had a roofing tool fall on his head from the roof of the Waterloo Hotel in 1885 and died at the age of 64. Henry and Salome, Samuel and Anna, and Joseph and Veronica are ancestors of Lovina.
In 1819, Joseph H Bauman arrived as a single man and worked as a cooper for Abraham (Abe) Erb, the founder of the town of Waterloo. In 1825, Joseph married Elizabeth Hoffman (his second wife), and they settled 3 miles northwest of present-day Waterloo on lot 27, which they bought from Abe Erb. This property is on the south side of Benjamin Road (the northern boundary of Block 2/Waterloo Township) straddling Westmount Road, as far south as Northfield Drive. It is not clear when Elizabeth came to Canada, as both her parents seem to have remained in Pennsylvania. Joseph and Elizabeth are ancestors of Lovina.
Also in 1819, Peter and Anna (Zimmerman) Martin and their large family, the first Martins in the county, settled on lot 10, immediately east of Joseph Bauman’s land. The land straddles Weber Street North (formerly Albert Street) from Benjamin Road down to Northfield Drive. Their house, which stood on the height of the hill on Weber Street, is now in Doon Heritage Village. Peter and Anna’s descendants are known amongst Mennonites as the “big feet Martins,” and he was known as a friendly, easy-going fellow. Ancestors of Lovina, through their son Daniel Z. Martin.
Peter and Anna Martin House on old Albert Street
In 1820, Peter and Barbara (Guth) Burkhard settled on part of lot 12 north of Waterloo. Their farm lies from present-day Columbia Street north to Bearinger Drive, between Philip Street and Hagey Blvd. Their property is now part of the University of Waterloo’s North Campus; their house was probably somewhere behind the Optometry building in the middle of the sea of parking. Ancestors of Elias.
In 1820, Joseph E and Mary (Bauman) Schneider, son of Christian Schneider of Doon and daughter of Joseph O and Mary Bauman of Blair, settled on lot 63, immediately west of Rev Henry Weber’s place. They built a log house, which has been moved to the grounds of the St Jacobs Farmers Market.
Joseph and Mary’s son Christian B Snyder and his wife Barbara Bauman took over the farm at some point and built the large brick house that still stands at 305 Northfield Dr (where Timeless Café is located).
Christian and Barbara’s son Joseph B Snyder and his wife Veronica Weber (daughter of Sam and Anna, who lived next door), were parents of Lovina’s mother, Leah Snyder, who was born in this farmhouse. My mother Leah remembers visiting her grandparents here as a child.
It is unclear exactly when some Schneiders started spelling their name “Snyder” or “Snider,” while others kept the original spelling and pronunciation. It appears that, in some cases, different siblings in the same family chose different forms.
My Mother Leah at Joseph and Mary Schneider’s Log House, at the St Jacobs MarketChristian and Barbara Snyder’s Brick House on the Original Homestead
Also in 1820, David and Maria/Magdelena (Guth) Martin and their large family settled on lot 65, immediately east of Rev Henry Weber’s place and running down to the Grand River, on what is now called the Elam Martin Farmstead (a city-owned property) on Park Road behind RIM Park. Grey Silo Golf Club is also on David and Maria’s land. David was a cousin of Peter Martin, though they apparently did not get along well; his descendants are called the “smart (or big brain) Martins,” and he was known as a difficult and cantankerous old bugger. Four of their children—Jacob, Christian, Catherine, and Peter—are our ancestors. Maria was sister to Barbara Guth Burkhard, wife of Peter Burkhard, who immigrated the same year. Maria died just a few months after their arrival in Canada, and David subsequently married her cousin Catherine Guth.1 David and Maria are ancestors of Elias, Peter, and Lovina (we are thus both big brain and big feet Martins; some of us are friendly and easy-going, while others are a bit cantankerous).
In 1835, David and Maria’s son Jacob G Martin and his wife Esther Bauman (daughter of Henry H. and Maria Bauman, who immigrated in 1825) took over the farm after they married and David retired. Jacob built the large brick farmhouse that still stands on the site. Their descendants (not our ancestors though) occupied the farm until the city bought it in 1999. Jacob and Esther are ancestors of Elias and Lovina.
The Elam Martin Farmstead: David and Maria’s Farm
Also in 1820, Tobias Wanner (son of Henry and Anna ) and Catherine Strycker (daughter of Arnold and his first wife, whose name is unknown) were married and settled on the easternmost lot of Beasley’s Middle Block, northeast of Hespeler village. Their home was on the south side of Black Bridge Road west of Townline Road and west of the bridge that crosses the Speed River. Tobias and Catherine are ancestors of Peter.
These are all of our immigrating ancestors who settled in Block 2 of the Haldimand Tract (Waterloo Township).
Notes:
1 Many family trees suggest that Catherine Guth was a sister of Maria Guth, but I do not find that credible because it would put Catherine’s birth date within 9 months of Maria’s sister Barbara Burkhard’s. Many other family trees suggest Catherine and Maria’s fathers were brothers, Samual and Christian Guth, respectively. Interestingly, both of those brothers married women with the surname Brandt (hence some of the confusion, I suppose), but I haven’t yet found the relationship between them; they don’t appear to be sisters.
Sources:
Bricker, I. C. “Trek of the Pennsylvanians to Canada, 1805.” Waterloo Historical Society Annual Report, volume 22 (1934).
Bricker, I. C. “Waterloo Township History to 1825.” Waterloo Historical Society Annual Report, volume 22 (1934).
Panabaker, D. N. “Historical Sketch of the Clemens Family.” Waterloo Historical Society Annual Report, volume 9 (1921).
Uttley, W. V. “Berlin, Now Kitchener, In the Beginning.” Waterloo Historical Society Annual Report, volume 20 (1932).
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.
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.
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).
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.
The thousands of Mennonites who emigrated to Pennsylvania from Europe in the early 1700s flourished in the following 80 years, buying up and clearing the land, taking over large swathes of Lancaster, Berks, and Bucks counties. Towards the end of the century, they needed more land and so looked west to Ohio and north to Upper Canada, where land was being opened for European settlement.
Furthermore, after they had lived in relative peace for almost a century, the revolutionary war (1775 to 1783) tested their commitment to pacifism and brought back nightmares of the endless wars that had overwhelmed their ancestors for so long in Europe. Because the British had made their home in Pennsylvania possible, many of them instinctively felt some loyalty to the British.
For whatever reasons, Mennonites started crossing the Niagara border in the 1790s looking for land. A number of families settled at “The Twenty” around present-day Jordan and Vineland, and one family ventured as far west as the Hamilton mountain area. Soon, word of land for sale deep in the heart of the forests along the Grand River reached these settlements.
In the spring of 1800, two Pennsylvania Mennonites, Joseph Shoerg (Sherk) and his brother-in-law Samuel Betzner Jr, and their families arrived on the banks of the Grand from The Twenty, where they had over-wintered, and started the laborious process of clearing the land. The Betzners’ place was just east of where the village of Doon developed, while the Shoergs’ land was directly across the river, near where the Pioneer Memorial Tower now stands. A few weeks later, Betzner’s parents and other members of the extended family arrived from Pennsylvania.
Later that summer, a group of seven inter-related families arrived. John Biehn (Bean) purchased 3,600 acres from Beasley, stretching west from the Grand River at what is now the village of Doon (the Biehn Tract), as well as several other lots near Blair, while George Bechtel purchased 3,150 acres just to the north of that (the Bechtel Tract). All seven families settled on this land, with the remainder subdivided and later sold to other immigrant families.
By the end of the year 1800, about a dozen families, most of them Mennonites, had purchased land and started settling in the Lower Block. (See “The First Settlers” for more details on the immigrants of the year 1800.)
This was the beginning of a speculation and flipping frenzy. In the following 2 years, many other lots were purchased, and many lots were flipped to new owners, or subdivided and sold on. By 1803, there were some 25 to 30 Mennonite families who had started to clear the forests and build simple log homes and out-buildings, who were actually living in the Lower Tract. Many more lots had been sold, but were not yet settled.
Sources:
Bricker, I. C. “Trek of the Pennsylvanians to Canada, 1805.” Waterloo Historical Society Annual Report, volume 22 (1934).
Bricker, I. C. “Waterloo Township History to 1825.” Waterloo Historical Society Annual Report, volume 22 (1934).
Before we continue with the story of our ancestors in Canada, we need to have some understanding of the history of the land they settled on. And that history is First Nations history.
The Haudenosaunee (“people of the long house”) are a confederacy of Iroquoian speakers who occupied all of what is now upstate New York when white Europeans showed up in the early 17th century. The confederacy was originally made up of 5 distinct nations: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. In 1722, the Tuscarora (who fled north from North Carolina) joined the confederacy, and the group became known in English as the Six Nations. The Haudenosaunee territory stretched from the Hudson River Valley in the east to the Niagara River in the west, but their influence went much further.
Until the late 16th century, these Iroquois nations continually fought with each other over land and resources, but according to their tradition, sometime between 1570 and 1600, Dekanawidah (the Peacemaker), a Huron (Iroquoian Wendat) from north of Lake Ontario, crossed the lake in a stone canoe and persuaded the 5 nations to make peace and form a confederation. Each nation had its own council composed of clan and village chiefs (appointed by the clan mothers), with representatives sitting on a confederate council to resolve inter-national issues. At this level, decision making was by consensus, with unanimity required. The Six Nations claim they are one of the world’s oldest participatory democracies.
This confederacy was highly successful in warfare against neighbouring nations and in negotiations with European settlers. They expanded their control eastward into the Hudson Valley, southward along the Atlantic coast to South Carolina, and westward into southwestern Ontario, Northwestern Pennsylvania, and Ohio. They gained control over, and demanded tribute from, the Mohican, Neutral, Tionontati (or Tobacco), and Erie peoples. They traded with the Dutch and the English and allied with the English in their conflict with the French in the late 17th century, while their traditional enemies, the Huron and the Algonquins, allied with the French.
After the Haudenosaunee destroyed the Huron confederacy in southwestern Ontario in 1648-50, they launched attacks on the French settlements along the St Lawrence into the 1690s (the Mohawks captured Pierre-Esprit Radisson as a boy near Trois Rivieres in 1651/52, and he was adopted by one of the clan mothers; he became a Mohawk warrior and later an important European explorer of the Great Lakes basin and a founder of the Hudson Bay Company). By forming a buffer between the French and English colonies, the Haudenosaunee were able to maintain their independence until the American War of Independence.
First Nations Peoples in 18th Century New York and Upper Canada
In 1763, Britain defeated France to end the Seven Years War (of which the French and Indian Wars were the American theatre) and win control over France’s North American colonies, as agreed in the Treaty of Paris. In those wars, the Haudenosaunee fought for the British cause. Just over a decade later, in 1776, when the American colonies rebelled against Britain, the Haudenosaunee again were caught between the warring parties, and again the British pressed them for support. For their help, the British promised that they would protect the Haudenosaunee homelands no matter what the outcome of the war.
In the end, the Oneida and Tuscarora sided with the rebellious colonists, while the Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca sided with the British, causing a rift in their confederacy. The Mohawk war chief Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant) and other war chiefs fought alongside the British in many skirmishes in the Mohawk Valley, and in 1779 George Washington ordered the Sullivan campaign in retaliation. General John Sullivan and Col Daniel Broadhead marched their troops across upstate New York, destroying Haudenosaunee villages and farms, burning everything in their path.
When the British lost that war, they forgot to include their Haudenosaunee allies in their negotiations with the victorious Americans and forgot their promise to protect their lands. The British surrendered all of upstate New York to the new country, and the Six Nations were left to negotiate with the Americans for land to live on. In the treaties of Fort Stanwix in 1784 and Canandaigua in 1794, they were forced to cede almost all of their land to the Americans. They moved the central fireplace of the confederacy to a small reservation on Buffalo Creek at the head of Lake Erie.
In the meantime, Chief Joseph Brant went to Quebec City to ask the Governor of Quebec, General Sir Frederick Haldimand, for a homeland in Canada as acknowledgement of their help during the war and the loss of their traditional lands. Eventually, Haldimand purchased a large tract of land in the Grand River valley from the Mississauga Ojibway (Anishinaabe) and gave it to the Six Nations in what is known as the Haldimand Proclamation of October 25, 1784. This proclamation gave all of the land 6 miles on each side of the river from its source to its mouth to the Six Nations for “them and their posterity to enjoy for ever.” It was subsequently discovered that all of that land hadn’t actually been sold by the Mississauga, so the Haldimand Tract reached only about as far upriver as present-day Fergus.
After receiving this title to their new homeland, Brant brought a group of about 2000 refugees from New York to settle in the territory (many of their people remained in New York state). Brant chose the land near the present-day Brantford (Brant’s Ford originally) for his Mohawk people, and the remnants of other nations settled in villages down toward the mouth of the river. Many of the people were war-widows and orphans; all were completely destitute. Brant realized that without capital to get them on their feet, the settlement would fail. He therefore decided that it was in their best interest to sell or lease some of the land to raise some cash.
He had several blocks of land north of Brant’s Ford surveyed so they could be sold, but the Crown said he couldn’t sell or lease the land without their permission. Brant argued that if it really was Haudenosaunee land, if they really had sovereignty, they could do with it what they wished. The Crown patronizingly countered that they could sell land only if all transactions were approved and overseen by a Crown-appointed committee of trustees and if the funds from the sale would be administered by the trustees.
Brant had no choice but to agree to the Crown’s conditions. The Six Nations began selling and leasing land around 1796, and by 1798, the following blocks had been sold:
Block 1: Township of North Dumfries, Waterloo County
Block 2: Waterloo Township, Waterloo County
Block 3: Woolwich Township, Waterloo County, and Pilkington Township, Wellington County
Block 4: Nichols Township, Wellington County
Blocks 5 and 6: Townships in Haldimand County south of the current Six Nations Reservation
Of most interest to our family history are Blocks 2 and 3. Block 2 was purchased by Richard Beasley of Burlington Heights and two short-lived partners, James Wilson and John Baptiste Rousseau. Block 3 was purchased by William Wallace of Niagara.
As soon as he acquired Block 2, Richard Beasley had the tract surveyed into two parts called Wilson’s Upper and Lower Blocks, then had portions of the Lower Block (about a third of the total) surveyed into lots. Even though he was not allowed to sell until he had paid off his mortgage to the trustees for the Six Nations, he was deeply in debt, so he started selling in order to make his payments.
The Haldimand Tract (current Six Nations Reservation shown in yellow)
Sources:
Bourrie, Mark. Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. Windsor: Biblioasis, 2019.
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).
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.
500 Years of Migration 