Jun 16 2019

Frederick Hodgson: The man who helped build Collingwood.

Downtown Collingwood in 1914. The Arlington Hotel, built by Fred Hodgson in 1900, is visible on the far left.

Frederick Thomas Hodgson was a builder and architect who spent much of his life and career in the Collingwood area. Operating around the turn of the century, he contributed many buildings to the growing town that can still be seen and appreciated there today.

Hodgson was born on September 19, 1832, in the town of Selby in Yorkshire, England. In 1847, at the age of 15, Hodgson emigrated to Canada with his uncle, William McDonald, and his aunt and cousins. Initially, Hodgson settled with his relatives at Duntroon, in the township of Nottawasaga. In 1851, at the age of 19, he struck out on his own, moving to the village of Hurontario – what, in a few years, became the town of Collingwood.

As a young man, Hodgson found work as a contractor during the extension of the Northern Railway into Collingwood, erecting some of the houses and sheds that sheltered the workers building the railway line. In 1853, at age 21, Hodgson built his first permanent building on Hurontario Street in Collingwood, on what is now the site of the Globe Hotel.

In 1859, at age 27, Hodgson moved to St. Catharines to take up a job as Superintendent of Rolling Stock for the Welland Railway. He remained there for 17 years.

In 1877, at age 44, Hodgson moved to New York City to take up a job as associate editor of the magazine American Builder. He became managing editor the following year and remained at the helm of the magazine for 12 years.

During this time, Hodgson began publishing a prolific number of guides to practical building and construction techniques, which by the end of his life numbered as many as 144 titles. Hodgson’s best-known book was The ABC of the Steel Square, a practical guide to the use of the carpenter’s square published in 1881. Eventually, the book was published in 20 editions, one as late as 1972, and sold in six countries.

In 1890, at age 56, Hodgson finally returned to Collingwood, where he set up his own business as an architect and builder.

At the time of his return, the town was booming thanks to the arrival of the railway in the 1850s and the beginnings of the local shipbuilding industry in the 1880s. As an architect, Hodgson’s contributions to the growth of the town included the West Ward School and the “Armadale” residence of local cookie company magnate Herbert Y. Telfer on Third Street, both built in 1890. Hodgson also designed “Tornaveen”, the 10,000 square-foot, three-story Queen Anne Revival-style mansion of Herbert Telfer’s older brother Frank, built directly across the street from the younger Telfer’s far more modest home and completed in 1892.

Hodgson also made extensive alterations to the residence of Midland tycoon James Playfair in 1894, as well as an addition to the Globe Hotel, a major expansion of the General and Marine Hospital, and a new gymnasium building for the Collingwood Collegiate Institute, all built in 1895. In 1900, he built the Arlington Hotel on Hurontario Street, as well as a home for local politician and founder of the Collingwood Enterprise John Hogg at Third and Oak Streets.

Throughout the rest of his career, Hodgson worked as editor of National Builder, the Chicago-based magazine that had absorbed his old magazine, American Builder. He also contributed to journals like Canadian Architect and Builder, based in Toronto; Carpenter and Builder and Architect’s Magazine, both based in New York; Dixiein Atlanta, and Craftsman in Cleveland. Hodgson worked mostly by long distance, sending editing suggestions and articles to each journal by mail.

After decades of work contributing to the built landscape of Collingwood and to the professions of architecture and construction in general, Frederick Hodgson died on July 15, 1919, at age 87. The books and magazine articles he wrote can still be found today, and several of the buildings he built are included in heritage walking tours throughout the Town of Collingwood.

Written by John Merritt, SCHA

May 16 2019

The life of Thomas Roberts Ferguson, 1818-1879

Thomas Roberts Ferguson was born in a rural part of County Cavan, Ireland, in December 1818. He and his family were just some of the hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants who crossed the Atlantic Ocean to Canada in the 1830s. Thomas’ father, Andrew, died during the journey.

After a brief stay in Montreal, in 1842 the Ferguson family joined the large Irish-Canadian community around Cookstown, and Ferguson became a farmer. Later, after buying up some additional land in the area, Ferguson established each of his brothers on their own farm and moved into Cookstown, where he became a merchant.

Ferguson joined the Orange Order in 1847, at age 29. In 1852, he became master of his local Orange Lodge and later a deputy grand master of the order.

In 1856, Ferguson married Frances Jane Gowan, daughter of Orange leader Ogle Robert Gowan. The couple eventually had three sons and six daughters.

Ferguson was elected to the township council of Innisfil in 1852 and served for 21 years, 18 of them as reeve. Ferguson also served as warden of Simcoe County in 1858 and again from 1862 to 1867.

During the 1858 election, Ferguson ran against fellow Conservative William Benjamin Robinson, defeating him to become representative for Simcoe South. He kept his seat through two subsequent elections, in 1861 and 1863.

At that time, what are now Ontario and Quebec were joined together in one province, and both had equal representation in the legislature, even though Ontario’s population was larger and growing faster than Quebec’s. Throughout his time in the legislature, Ferguson was a strong advocate for instituting representation by population, which would give Ontario more seats than Quebec. The issue, however, remained unsettled until Confederation in 1867.

Ferguson had served as an officer in the Cookstown company of the provincial Sedentary Militia since 1847. In 1862 he was promoted to captain and placed in command of the company.

In 1866, during the Fenian Raids, Ferguson and his men were called out along with tens of thousands of other Canadian militiamen to defend the province against Irish Catholic veterans of the US Civil War who hoped to occupy Canada and trade it with Britain for Irish independence.

Ferguson’s company was stationed at Toronto during the crisis. After a successful raid into Canada in June, many Fenians were arrested by US authorities as they were re-crossing the border. Once the threat to the province had largely passed, Ferguson and his men, like other Canadian militiamen, returned home to a grand reception.

Following the crisis, the Cookstown company was joined together with the other Simcoe County militia companies to form the 35^th Battalion (Simcoe Foresters). Ferguson was appointed temporary second-in-command of the unit in 1869.

Upon Confederation in 1867, Ferguson was elected by acclamation to represent Simcoe South in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, at the same time that he was elected a Conservative member for Cardwell (an early federal riding comprising parts of what are now Peel Region and Simcoe and Dufferin Counties) in the new federal House of Commons.

During his career in the Ontario legislature, Ferguson served on various committees, including the standing committees for railways and for privileges and elections. Ferguson also served on the board of the Northern Railway.

In 1872 Ferguson did not run again for a seat in the House of Commons but was re-elected by acclamation to his seat in the provincial legislature. That same year, however, Ferguson was attending a political meeting in Bradford when a fight broke out between supporters and opponents of the government. In the process of allegedly attempting to stop the fight, Ferguson suffered a severe blow to the head that left him with permanent physical and mental injuries. As a result, he resigned from the Simcoe Foresters, the Northern Railway board, and the provincial legislature in 1873.

After his retirement from politics, Ferguson’s government connections helped ensure his appointment to a civil service position as a customs collector at Collingwood. He was dismissed from that position two years after the Liberal government of Alexander Mackenzie took power in 1874.

Ferguson spent his remaining years at his home in Cookstown, where he died on September 15, 1879, from paralysis. He was 60 years old.

Written by John Merritt, Simcoe County Historical Association

Photo: Thomas Roberts Ferguson.

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.

Simcoe County Historical Association Land Acknowledgement