Among Accomplished Gentlemen and Honest Sons of Poverty

Located on the north shore of Lake Ontario, midway between Kingston and Toronto, Hamilton Township rises from a flat, fertile, low-lying plain near the lake to an undulating ridge of glacial deposits in its centre. Northward it falls towards the steep bluffs that mark its northern boundary on Rice Lake. This is beautiful country. Late in the eighteenth century, a hardwood forest of maple covered most of the township. On the uplands grew oak and pine; ash, cedar, and hemlock thrived where the ground was moist. Here the growing season averages between 188 and 195 days, and the frost-free period varies from 140 days along the lake to 120 or so inland. With the fertile grey-brown soils that predominate, this is an environment well suited to farming.

Hamilton Township, situated on the main artery into western Upper Canada, was settled rapidly. Among those who came was Robert Wade, who migrated from County Durham in north-eastern England in 1819. He was forty-two, married, and the father of eight children. A relatively successful tenant farmer in England, he came to the New World with capital enough to buy a 200-acre (80-hectare) farm on the Hamilton lakefront. One of the seven hundred or so who entered the township in the decade after 1810, he quickly established himself. Settling his family into the two log houses that stood on his new property, he stocked it with six cows, eighteen sheep, ten pigs, two horses, and a foal, and began to cultivate and extend its 30 cleared acres, about half of which were in grass. Within a year he had also acquired land, by grant, in Otonabee Township, north of Rice Lake. In 1821 Robert Wade had one of the better mixed farms in Hamilton Township.

His fellow settlers were a diverse group. Members of Loyalist families who had settled elsewhere in the colony trickled into Hamilton through the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Americans crossed Lake Ontario to join relatives who had been among the first arrivals. Others came from Britain. At least eight were former naval officers whose half-pay pensions provided them with a steady and valuable income. Some, like Robert Wade, came with considerable sums of money. Many had little but the strength of their muscles and a willingness to work, and for most of them the road to success in the New World was far longer, more difficult, and more uncertain than that followed by Robert Wade.

Fewer than 200 families (1,250 people) lived in Hamilton in 1821. But no Crown land remained open for settlement there. Most of the Crown land set aside to endow the church and government—the reserve lands—was already under lease, and well over half of still heavily forested Hamilton was in the hands of speculators. Such speculative land-holding ensured that newcomers needed a good deal of capital to acquire property in this highly desirable location.

Compared with the cost of Crown land (available beyond Hamilton for about 5 pence an acre), farms in the township were expensive. Prices were highest near the lakeshore, and varied according to the extent and quality of improvements, but cleared land sold for an average of 15 shillings an acre in the early 1820s. Uncleared land could be had for half that price, but another ?80 or ?100 would then be needed to buy tools, stock, and seed, to build a house and barn, and to clear several acres. In short, settlers needed at least ?150 to establish themselves on one hundred acres. Without such a sum they had to rent or accept wage labour. The consequences were clear. In 1821, a third of Hamilton’s farmers leased reserve lands, and almost half of those who held land in the township were tenants. Well over a third of the assessed wealth in the township belonged to a tenth of its people.

By the 1840s, twenty years or so after Robert Wade’s arrival, the average value of cleared land had almost tripled, that of uncleared land had more than doubled, and rents were five times the level of 1819. For those with land, such inflation brought large capital gains; in 1834 Robert Wade valued his property at ?1,600. Farms were subdivided to realize the profits, and as new families established homes the forest was pushed farther and farther back. Many farms near the lakefront now had substantial houses and barns amid their fenced fields. Roads had improved and after 1842 stagecoaches connected Cobourg, a thriving commercial centre, with the back country. But the continuing influx of immigrants had flooded the local labour market, and as land prices rose wages fell. This quickly imparted a distinctive, divided cast to Hamilton society. For migrants of modest means, from the British Isles or elsewhere.

“Nothing can be more comfortless than some of these shanties, reeking with smoke and dirt, the common receptacle for children, pigs and fowls,” commented Catharine Parr Traill, but she admitted that this was “the dark side of the picture.” Note the characteristic snake-fence, and the “corduroy road” made of logs laid across the track in swampy places. Bush Farm Near Chatham: watercolour (c. 1838) by Philip J. Bainbrigge.

The township was a place to pause, to gain experience of the New World and make a little money, before moving on to continue the struggle for modest comfort and independence. On the other hand, for those with capital or connections or initial advantage enough to acquire their own properties, Hamilton was a place to settle and to develop the trappings of English country life. Before mid-century the township had an agricultural society, a lending library, an amateur theatrical society, a cricket club, and a hunt. Charles Butler, who emigrated from Middlesex in the 1830s with his wife and family and a stake of approximately ?1,000, responded to just such attractions when he elected to live in the vicinity of Cobourg. To settle in Peterborough, barely 40 kilometres (25 miles) away across Rice Lake, he concluded, would be to “totally seclude myself and Family from Society....”

Rather sourly, Robert Wade looked on these newcomers as “broken down gentry.” Quite typical of their sort were Dunbar and Susanna Moodie. Dunbar was an Orkneyman and soldier who had found his half-pay insufficient to keep him, in England, in the style to which he aspired. Susanna, the sister of Catharine Parr Traill And the author of two anti-slavery tracts before she left England, was the daughter of a well-to-do, articulate, literary family whose children were widely read and well schooled in the arts of poetry, painting, and nature study. For financial reasons the Moodies came to Canada after their marriage in 1831, and settled briefly on the fourth concession of Hamilton Township. Twenty years later, Susanna’s Roughing It in the Bush undertook to portray “what the backwoods of Canada are to the industrious and ever to be honoured sons of honest poverty and what they are to the refined and accomplished gentleman.” Drawn with rather more fictional latitude and dramatic vision than Susanna acknowledged, these sketches often border on the fanciful. Yet in them the gifted modern Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has discerned something of the obsessive compulsion, fear, tension, and toil that ran through the oft-repeated encounter of settlers and forest on the pioneer fringe of Upper Canada. No excerpt can do full justice to the insight of Atwood’s sequence of poems The Journals of Susanna Moodie, but there is surely no more evocative an encapsulation of what pioneering meant to thousands of men and women than “The Planters”:

They move between the jagged edge of the forest and the jagged river on a stumpy patch of cleared land

My husband, a neighbour, another man

Weeding the few rows

Of string beans and dusty potatoes.

They bend, straighten; the sun lights up their faces and hands, candles flickering in the wind against the

Unbright earth. 1 see them; 1 know none of them believe they are here.

They deny the ground they stand on, pretend this dirt is the future.

And they are right. If they let go of that illusion solid to them as a shovel,

It took half a century of unremitting work—clearing forest, maintaining fields, raising buildings, and tending stock—to create this serene landscape. The sense of achievement must have been tremendous. View on the Road from Windsor to Horton by Avon Bridge at Gaspreaux river, watercolour (1817) by J. E. Woolford, one of a series of Nova Scotia views painted for Lord Dalhousie.

Open their eyes even for a moment to these trees, to this particular sun they would be surrounded, stormed, broken

In upon by branches, roots, tendrils, the dark side of light as I am.