Apr 12 2019

The life of William Earl Rowe, 1894-1984

William Earl Rowe was born on May 13, 1894, in Hull, Iowa, to Canadian parents. He moved to Ontario with his family when he was two years old.

Rowe grew up to become a farmer and cattle breeder in the township of West Gwillimbury, with what proved to be a lifelong passion for horses and harness racing. In 1917, at age 23, he married Treva Alda Lillian Lennox. Together they had four children, one of whom sadly died at birth.

It was around this time that Rowe first entered politics, beginning at the local level. In 1919, at age 25, he was elected reeve of West Gwillimbury. In 1923, when his term as township reeve ended, Rowe’s political career began to eclipse his agricultural one when he was elected as a Conservative Member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario for the riding of Simcoe South. In 1925 he graduated from provincial to federal politics when he was elected a Conservative Member of Parliament for Dufferin-Simcoe. Rowe remained in the House of Commons for ten years until the disastrous election of 1935, when he, like many Conservative MPs, lost his seat to the Liberals of William Lyon Mackenzie King over the Conservatives’ perceived bungling of the federal response to the Great Depression.

In 1936, Rowe returned to provincial politics when he became leader of the Conservative Party of Ontario. However, because Rowe did not then hold a seat in the provincial legislature, the former Conservative premier George S. Henry served as official leader of the opposition in the provincial parliament.

During the 1937 Ontario election, Rowe took a pro-labour stance that today seems uncommon for conservative politicians to have. Rowe opposed Liberal premier Mitchell Hepburn’s condemnation of labour unions and the attempted unionization of the General Motors plant in Oshawa, arguing that the issue was not about “law and order but the right of free association.” Rowe’s stance on the issue led George A. Drew, Rowe’s former rival for the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives, to break with the party in order to run as an “independent conservative” opposed to the mainstream party leader’s stance on organized labour.

Rowe failed to win a seat in the election and subsequently resigned as leader of the provincial Progressive Conservatives. George Drew later returned to the party to replace Rowe as leader. Drew went on to become premier of Ontario from 1943 to 1948.

Shortly after his defeat at the provincial level, Earl Rowe returned to federal politics when he was acclaimed in a by-election for the House of Commons seat he had vacated in order to run in the Ontario election.

Rowe kept his seat in the House of Commons for another 25 years. In 1948 Rowe’s former rival George Drew became leader of the federal Conservatives, and in 1954 and 1956 Rowe served as interim leader of the opposition when Drew was too ill to perform his duties. From 1958 until the end of his federal career in 1962, Rowe was joined in Parliament by his daughter and fellow Progressive Conservative MP, Jean Casselman Wadds. They were the only father and daughter to ever sit together in the House of Commons.

In 1963, Rowe left Parliamentary politics to become the 20^th Lieutenant Governor of Ontario. Over the next five years, he proved himself to be a staunch supporter of agricultural and rural affairs in the province.

Rowe retired from political life in 1968, at age 74. He died on February 9, 1984, at Newton Robinson. A public school in Bradford and a provincial park near Alliston are named in his honour.

Written by John Merritt of the Simcoe County Historical Association.

Photo: William Earl Rowe was born in 1894 in Iowa to Canadian parents. He moved to Ontario with his family when he was two years old. He grew up to become a farmer and cattle breeder in the township of West Gwillimbury.

Mar 25 2019

Order in council begins settlement of the Penetanguishene Road, April 1819

By John Merritt for the SCHA

On April 26, 1819, the Executive Council of Upper Canada issued an order in council promising free land to any citizens willing and able to settle along the strategic road linking the military outpost at Penetanguishene with the capital at York via Lake Simcoe. The order created one of the first pioneer settlements in Simcoe County.

The origins of the Penetanguishene Road began in 1793, when John Graves Simcoe, Upper Canada’s first lieutenant-governor, visited southern Georgian Bay and chose Penetanguishene as an ideal military harbour on the upper Great Lakes. The harbour was acquired by the province from the Ojibwa in 1798.

In March 1808, government surveyor Samuel Wilmot was sent to explore the land between Penetanguishene and Kempenfeldt Bay. In 1811, he returned to the area to survey the route of a road connecting Kempenfeldt Bay with Penetanguishene Harbour, as well as one concession of 200-acre lots on each side of the road and the outlines of a town plot at either end. The northern town site would eventually become the town of Penetanguishene. The southern one would become the village of Kempenfeldt, now a part of Barrie.

In the fall of 1814, after the Americans had almost severed British supply lines across Lake Huron, Lieutenant-Governor Sir Gordon Drummond and Sir George Prevost, commander in chief of British North America, ordered that an outpost be established at Penetanguishene. That December a party of Canadian soldiers and militiamen was dispatched to the area to begin constructing the outpost and the road surveyed by Wilmot in 1811. By February, when British soldiers arrived to help, only a few huts had been constructed at the outpost and the Penetanguishene Road was little more than an uneven trail pocked by stumps and made impassable when spring rain and melting snow turned it into a river of mud.

That March, news arrived that the war with the United States had ended. Construction of the outpost at Penetanguishene was halted and the site was quickly abandoned in favour of a fort on the Nottawasaga River. In 1818, the government relocated its upper Great Lakes post back to Penetanguishene and both the fort and the road came back in to use, although it can be imagined that after several years of disuse the already poor condition of the Penetanguishene Road had become even worse.

The order in council of April 1819 was meant to help improve the poor condition of the road and to develop the surrounding area. Settlers were offered grants of 200 acres along the road on condition that they quickly build a house, clear ten acres next to the road, and improve one half of the road fronting on their lots.

Notice of the settlement order was published in the York Gazette and within a few years about twenty families had settled along the road, mostly in its southern half.

Travellers from York to Penetanguishene in the early years of settlement would first see the log barracks and warehouse of the government station at Kempenfeldt as they neared the southern end of the Penetanguishene Road from across Lake Simcoe.

As they stepped onto the shore and began their journey up the road, travellers would pass by small groups of three or four or even six farms, each separated by a mile or two of wilderness.

Twelve miles or so up the road, about a day’s journey by wagon, travellers would come to the farm of Black Canadian settler William Davenport, the last farm they would see for another eleven miles.

Eventually travellers would pass a couple of solitary homesteads, separated by another mile of wilderness, before re-entering the forest. After another three or four miles, the travellers would finally see the village of Penetanguishene, where a few families had settled along the shores of the harbour in the year or two since the military post was revived.

The outpost itself lay behind a palisade another mile or so further along the shore, toward the mouth of the harbour. Like the nearby village, it remained a pretty modest affair until 1828, when the outpost at Drummond Island was shut down and its residents were relocated to Penetanguishene.

During the early years of settlement, most of the Penetanguishene Road settlers were preoccupied with clearing the land, establishing their farms, and completing their settlement duties in order to obtain full title to their property. For the most part, the only other people they saw were those travelling up or down the road: First Nations people, fur traders, soldiers, merchants, and the occasional missionary.

The settlements along the Penetanguishene Road were among the first in Simcoe County. Over the following years, the efforts of the Penetanguishene Road settlers would improve the road, clear the surrounding land, and establish the first stores, villages, churches and township councils, opening the area up for further settlement and beginning the transformation of the land to the way it looks today.

Photo: George Russell Dartnell, view of Penetanguishene Harbour from his farm, ca. 1836.

Mar 06 2019

Rev. George Hallen, a pioneer priest

George Hallen was an Anglican priest who served as the first pastor of not one but two new Anglican churches built in Simcoe County in the mid-1800s, both of which are still in use today.

Rev. Hallen was born in England in February 1794. As a young man, he studied at Oxford University before joining the clergy of the Church of England.

In 1833, at age 39, Rev. Hallen immigrated to Canada with his wife and five children, settling in the Township of Medonte two years later. There the Hallen family settled on a farm they purchased from the Bywater family at Lot 11, Concession 13, and moved into the house that had already been built there by the farm’s previous owners.

For five years Rev. Hallen served the local Anglican congregation out of his family’s home. Later, on a return to trip to England, he solicited members of his old parish for funds to help build a proper church for the area, on lands donated by his neighbours, the Hamilton and Steele families. Construction of the church had begun by 1838, using bricks trucked in from Orillia. The church was consecrated in 1842 as St. George’s Church of Fair Valley.

By this time the Rev. Hallen had relocated permanently with his family to the Penetanguishene area, where he became the first pastor of a second new Anglican church, a wood-framed clapboard building which had already been under construction for several years. The new church was named St. James on-the-Lines, referring to its position at the edge of the “lines”, or rows of barracks, of the nearby military establishment.

Located halfway between the military establishment and the town of Penetanguishene, initially St. James on-the-Lines served the soldiers garrisoned at the base and retired soldiers located on two-acre grants along the Penetanguishene Road, as well as local farmers and residents of the fledgling town of Penetanguishene. The church also served residents of Wyebridge, Midland and the surrounding townships until they established Anglican churches of their own.

When the military establishment closed in 1856 and was converted to a boys’ reformatory, the Rev. Hallen became its chaplain. In 19^th-century Canada (indeed, until our correctional system was reorganized in 1972), a boys’ reformatory was essentially a detention center for male young offenders, the idea being that removing them from the city, educating them and teaching them vocational skills would help divert them from ending up in a life of crime.

The Rev. Hallen left St. James on-the-Lines around 1876, after 36 years of service. He died in Toronto in 1882, at age 88, and was buried alongside some of his family members and many of his former parishioners in the cemetery of St. James’ Church in Penetanguishene.

According to Andrew Hunter, himself a pioneer of Simcoe County history, in addition to his significant contributions to the Anglican community, the Rev. Hallen was one of the first residents of Simcoe County to take an interest in local history and heritage preservation, commissioning some of the earliest maps of the remains of Ste. Marie Among the Hurons.

Author: John Merritt, Simcoe County Historical Association.

Photo: St. James On-the-Lines Anglican Church, Penetanguishene.

Dec 12 2018

SPIRIT OF IRON: SIR SAMUEL BENFIELD STEELE

Samuel Benfield Steele was born in the township of Medonte on January 5, 1849. Steele’s father was a former Royal Navy captain. Five of his uncles had served in the military and his father’s uncle had been a veteran of the Seven Years’ War.

Steele was educated at home on his family’s estate, then at a private school in Orillia. His father died in 1865, leaving him an orphan at age 16. Following in his family’s strong military tradition, Steele went on to study at the Royal Military College of Canada and joined the militia in 1866. Steele’s first unit was the 35^th (Simcoe) Battalion of Infantry. After moving to the Collingwood area to take a clerical job, Steele raised and trained his own company for the 31^st (Grey) Battalion.

In 1870, Steele volunteered to join the expedition to put down the Red River Resistance of the Metis led by Louis Riel. In May, he enlisted in the 1^st (Ontario) Battalion at Barrie, turning down an offer of a non-commissioned rank to serve as a private. After demonstrating exceptional strength and endurance during the gruelling march from Lake Superior to the Red River, Steele was promoted to corporal.

After the rebellion, Steele studied at the Canadian army artillery school at Fort Henry. He was working as an instructor there when, in the summer of 1873, he learned of a new federal police force. The North West Mounted Police (NWMP, later the RCMP), was about to be created to bring law and order to what is now Western and Northern Canada. Steele immediately applied to the force and became the third officer to be sworn in.

Steele arrived in the West with the first contingent of the NWMP in the fall of 1873. The following summer he was promoted to sergeant. In 1880, at age 31, Steele was promoted to inspector and given his first command at Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan.

In 1882, Steele was put in charge of policing the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, as the line progressed steadily west into British Columbia. In the spring of 1885, Steele singlehandedly dispersed a mob of striking rail workers at Beaver, BC, despite being seriously ill with a fever. As soon as the strike was over, Steele raced east to help put down the North West Resistance of Riel’s Metis.

Upon arriving in Calgary, Steele joined General Strange’s Alberta Field Force and was given command of 25 mounted policemen. After hearing news of the Metis defeat at Batoche and the surrender of Riel’s Cree ally Poundmaker, Strange’s force set out in pursuit of the last remaining rebel group, the Cree band of Chief Big Bear. Steele and his mounted force caught up with Big Bear at Loon Lake, Saskatchewan. In the resulting battle, the last ever fought on Canadian soil, the Cree used up the last of their ammunition and dispersed into the wilderness. Big Bear surrendered to Canadian authorities a month later.

Following the rebellion, Steele returned to regular police duties and enjoyed the least eventful decade of his career. In 1889, he met Marie-Elizabeth de Lotbiniere-Harwood, the 30-year-old daughter of a former MP. She and Steele got married the following January. They eventually had a daughter and two sons.

In 1898, Steele was dispatched to the Yukon to keep order, as thousands of gold-crazed prospectors flooded into the Klondike region. Taking advantage of the absence of any government oversight, Steele imposed strict rules on the prospectors, even deporting suspicious characters and banning those who did not arrive with adequate supplies. Although he certainly did not make many friends among the prospectors, Steele ensured that the Klondike Gold Rush was one of the most orderly of its kind, which in turn brought worldwide fame to the NWMP as the defenders of law and order in the North.

In January 1900, shortly after the start of the South African War, Steele took the command of a cavalry regiment privately raised by CPR tycoon Donald Smith, the Baron Strathcona. By the time Strathcona’s Horse arrived overseas that May, the conventional part of the war had ended and a guerilla war had begun. Steele’s men spent most of their time there searching out elusive Boer commandos.

Shortly after arriving back in Canada in 1901, Steele was offered a divisional command in the South African Constabulary (SAC), and he returned to South Africa that June. As the fighting wound down the SAC steadily shrunk and, by 1906, Steele was making plans to return to Canada. He returned to the Canadian West in 1907 and took up a divisional command in the militia.

When the First World War broke out, the 63-year-old Steele requested active military duty. Initially rejected due to his age, Steele was eventually allowed to command the newly formed 2^nd Canadian Division while it trained in Canada, but not while it served overseas. In 1916 Steele was offered to serve as a district commander with the British Army. He was knighted in January 1918 and retired that July.

Steele died in London on January 30, 1919, during the flu pandemic and was later buried in Winnipeg.

By John Merritt, for the Simcoe County Historical Association

Nov 21 2018

CELEBRATING 175 YEARS OF THE COUNTY OF SIMCOE, 1843-2018

This year marks the 175^th anniversary of the incorporation of the County of Simcoe.

While Simcoe was recognized as a distinct county within Upper Canada as early as 1798, it primarily existed, on paper, for military purposes. More definite boundaries were laid down in 1821, by which time most of the townships had been surveyed. By 1826, the fledgling county had become entitled to its own representative in the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada and a county registrar had been appointed. The first Simcoe County representative was elected to the Assembly in 1828.

Between 1837 and 1841, several acts were passed by the provincial legislature that moved Simcoe County even closer to obtaining formal status as a distinct district. Those acts named the townships that Simcoe District would encompass (Adjala, Essa, Flos, West Gwillimbury, Innisfil, Matchedash, Medonte, Nottawasaga, North and South Orillia, Oro, Sunnidale, Tay, Tecumseth, Tiny, Tosorontio and Vespra) and authorized the levying of taxes for the purpose of constructing a jail and courthouse.

On Jan. 11, 1843, the jail and courthouse having been duly erected, Governor General Sir Charles Bagot proclaimed Simcoe to be a separate and distinct district. Upon the incorporation, the province appointed a district judge, sheriff, jailer, clerk of the court and clerk of the peace. Governor General Bagot appointed the new district’s first warden and a district council was elected.

At that time, the district council met only three times a year. The first meeting was held at the new district court house at Barrie on Feb. 14, 1843, at which time council adopted the rules and regulations necessary for it to function. They also nominated three candidates for district clerk, to be selected by the Governor General, and struck standing committees on roads and bridges, finances and tax assessments, education, and contingencies.

In 1849, the Baldwin Act abolished the districts that had formerly administered large parts of the province and replaced them with counties that, in turn, consisted of various towns, villages and townships. The new law abolished Simcoe District and replaced it with a county with the same name and territory.

Over the following years, the composition of Simcoe County changed as various townships were added and later taken away. Between 1845 and 1851, the Townships of Artemesia, Collingwood, Osprey, Saint Vincent and Euphrasia were incorporated into Simcoe District before being transferred to Grey County, as were the Townships of Mono and Mulmur between 1863 and 1880, when they were incorporated into the newly established County of Dufferin.

By far, the biggest change to the geographical size of the county occurred in 1851 when all of the extensive territory between the Severn and French Rivers recently acquired from the Ojibway in the Robinson Treaty was added to Simcoe County. By 1869, this vast territory, which eventually consisted of 70 individual townships, had been reorganized into the present-day Districts of Muskoka and Parry Sound, but the administration of justice in both districts (and in Simcoe County as well) remained the responsibility of the county judge at Barrie. It wasn’t until 1888, after several petitions from the county council, that the province agreed to completely separate Muskoka and Parry Sound from Simcoe County, allowing the county judge to, once again, focus on matters closer to home.

The present-day composition of the county took shape within the last 60 years as some municipalities left the district, others were added and still others were reorganized. Barrie incorporated as a city in 1959, meaning that it left the jurisdiction of the county council and took on the management of its own affairs. Orillia followed suit in 1969. The Townships of Rama and Mara were added to Simcoe in 1974 following the dissolution of the County of Ontario.

The county’s various municipalities were restructured in 1991 and 1994, creating the towns and townships we live in today: Bradford West Gwillimbury, Innisfil, New Tecumseth, Adjala-Tosorontio, Essa, Oro-Medonte, Ramara, Tay, Tiny, Collingwood, Midland, Penetanguishene and Wasaga Beach. The restructuring also created three new townships by amalgamating several older municipalities. The Town of Stayner, the Village of Creemore and the Townships of Nottawasaga and Sunnidale were merged to form the new Township of Clearview; the Village of Coldwater and the Townships of Matchedash and North and South Orillia were combined to form the Township of Severn; and the Village of Elmvale and the Townships of Flos and Vespra were joined together to form the Township of Springwater.

The history of our county, of course, continues to unfold as the population, towns and townships continue to grow and develop.

This article is based on a blog post by the Simcoe County Archives. Visit simcoe.ca/dpt/arc for the original and many other county history stories. Simcoe County Archives is located at 1149 Hwy 26, Minesing. Contact them at archives@simcoe.ca or 705-726-9331.

Photo: The original county courthouse at Barrie, built in 1843. Image courtesy of the Simcoe County Archives.

The life of William Earl Rowe, 1894-1984

Order in council begins settlement of the Penetanguishene Road, April 1819

Rev. George Hallen, a pioneer priest

SPIRIT OF IRON: SIR SAMUEL BENFIELD STEELE

CELEBRATING 175 YEARS OF THE COUNTY OF SIMCOE, 1843-2018

This article was originally published by the Simcoe Review on November 7, 2018

Simcoe County Historical Association Land Acknowledgement