In 1788 Lord Dorchester proclaimed four German-titled districts, named after branches of the Hanoverian dynasty, to administer the largely unpopulated region of what is now Ontario. One of those four districts, Nassau, later named the Home District, included the land on which the future town of Bowmanville grew.1 Three years later the future province would gain its independence with the creation of Upper and Lower Canada.
The naming process was a powerful tool of Empire. In 1792 counties were set out bearing the names of English counterparts, but they had little real authority though they did contain within them the township system of survey within which orderly settlement could occur.
Districts remained the primary form of local government through the first half of the 19th century, but even they were realigned to conform with townships and ensure that no settler was more than a day’s journey from the place in which they discharged their public duties. For the purposes of Bowmanville’s future the town’s site resided in the Township of Darlington in the County of Durham (part of the future combined counties of Northumberland and Durham) which in turn was part of the District of Newcastle.
Settlers from the United States had been entering the new territory since the American Revolution and Major Samuel Holland, Surveyor General, administered the immediate laying out and posting of frontages, or baselines, of townships on rivers and lakes. This was followed by the blocking out on paper of lands stretching back into the wilderness. Their physical realization would have to wait.2
What was significant about this grid was less the character of individual roads than the net structure formed by all of the roads in combination. This landscape was far from the rural Ontario we are familiar with today. Roads were almost impassable and the key attribute of a horse was its ability to swim. Conditions were so inhospitable that Upper Canada was described as “a vile country of low people.”3
The principle method of land subdivision reflected a desire to impose a pattern of order and rationality on an area of solitary wilderness within which the reaches of empire would be felt. Townships were laid out along Lake Ontario with the exception of those branching out from Yonge Street. Along the lake they were nine miles in width and twelve miles in depth. Such was the pattern in the range of townships surveyed in 1791 between the River Trent and the Toronto Purchase and confirmed in Simcoe’s declaration of 26 July 1792. Lots were a 1/4 mile wide and concessions a mile and a quarter mile deep to give a desired two-hundred acre lot.
Parts of Darlington were surveyed in 1793 and 1797. It was a serious business in which the surveyor recorded the quality of soil, number of rock out-croppings and types of timber. Anyone who pulled down or defaced a survey monument was subject to “death without benefit of clergy.”4
There was nothing arbitrary about the mile and a quarter separation. It came from English mathematician Edmund Gunter’s original chain measuring device created in the early 17th century which in turn derived from the old Roman rod measurement of sixteen and half feet. A hundred links added up to one chain of sixty-six feet (four Roman rods) and one-hundred of these chains conformed to the concession separation. A mile was eighty chains. A highway grant was laid out as one chain with a roadbed of usually forty feet in the middle. The standard length of a section of rail fence was eleven feet, or one-sixth chain. A canal way was a chain in width, telegraph poles would later be one or two chains apart and a city block was three chains to a block and one to a street. In the layout of townships a sideline road was placed at forty chain distances allowing for the provision of two two-hundred acre lots within the boundaries of a concession road and sideline, an acre being ten square chains.
A later view of the Four Corners, showing buildings which with the exception of the Town Hall in the background have now been demolished.
Aerial view of Bowmanville.
Each township had a base line as the preliminary building block to allow the territory to escape the meandering natural boundary of the lake. It was a vision of empire in which the formality of the grid and town replaced the anarchy of wilderness. In the original visions a town would grow in the centre of each township along this baseline and further roads would be spaced at mile and quarter postings from the original baseline.
This was the perfect pattern upon which the region that included Bowmanville was supposed to grow. But the intention of a town on the baseline was impractical, perhaps because the baseline was not far enough from the lake, and because of its associated topographical peculiarities and swampy conditions. Asa Danforth’s east-west road was closer to the second concession and along this second front the entrepreneurial imagination of first arrivals founded many of the major towns east of Toronto including Pickering, Whitby, Oshawa and Bowmanville.5 A river, a mill and a fordable site for the road combined to create the conditions for Bowmanville’s establishment.
The rise of important 19th century Ontario towns was furthered by the School Act in 1846 and then the Municipal Act in 1849 which replaced District government with that of counties. These acts led to a building boom of new courts, town halls and schools which were the necessary infrastructure, along with the first crude industrial buildings and stores, for the creation of town permanence.
Eventually money from wheat production in the rural hinterland brought builders, bricklayers and carpenters to small towns like Bowmanville and created the varied economy of rural Ontario. Wheat growing was in turn replaced by a more diversified farming economy as the century advanced. Ultimately small patchwork-like divisions of land into ten to twelve acres with hedgerows, treelines, and wooden snake fences created the distinctive appearance and pattern found in country areas.6
Most significantly in 1850, Northumberland and Durham Counties were united and assumed their legal place. Until 1974 Bowmanville’s important political ties would be with eastern neighbours. This orientation influenced the future development of the town which left the valley of the Bowmanville Creek and began to follow the Kingston Road on its march to Port Hope and Cobourg.
Notes
1 George W. Spragge, “The Districts of Upper Canada 1788-1849,” Ontario History XXXIX. (1947), pp. 91-400.
2 Don Thomson, Men and Meridians: History of Surveying and Mapping in Canada. (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1966).
3 Edwin Guillet, The Story of Canadian Roads. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), p. 51.
4 W.F. Weaver, Crown Surveys in Ontario. (Ontario Department of Lands and Forests, 1962, revised 1968).
5 John van Nostrand, “Roads and Planning: The settlement of Ontario’s Pickering Township, 1789-1975”, City Magazine, 1975.
6 Blake and Greenhill, Rural Ontario. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969).
Chapter Four
Few More Picturesque Spots in Ontario
“. . . there are very few, if any, more picturesque spots in the Province of Ontario. The principal part of the town is built upon a high ridge of land running north and south overlooking Lake Ontario and the lovely valley that intervenes. There are two streams—one to the east and one to the west thus affording good natural drainage.”
– J.B. Fairbairn, History and Reminiscences of Bowmanville
Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe first proclaimed the basis of survey, land ownership and purpose for Upper Canada on 7 February 1792. He desired the establishment of a landed aristocracy which would lead new settlement in the ways of loyalty to the institutions and ideals of Great Britain.