The original settlers of the region about Bowmanville are celebrated rightly for their fortitude and imagination in choosing to relocate from the United States. But their long term role in the creation and evolution of the town are overrated dramatically in all local histories. Bowmanville’s physical growth is of greater significance to present day residents than even the role of first settlers, for it shapes not only memory but the everyday experience of the town.
The first settlers were a second generation of United Empire Loyalists,2 people as much concerned with acquiring virgin lands as with using them as collateral in their eventual assumption of a privileged position in what remained of British North America. They encountered hardship and strife, but in the main theirs was to be a life of advantage and opportunity in which the fortunes of the future community were of either limited or no import.
The Conants or Conats (the spelling depending on the source) and Trulls played only a minor role in Bowmanville’s eventual story. However, the Burks or Burkes were somewhat more significant assuming on 31 December 1798, after completion of survey, Lot 13 Concession 1 as well as Lot 13 Broken Front, an area totalling four-hundred acres.3 This contained within it the swift flowing creek on which a succession of mills most notably Vanstone’s would be built. A tannery, carding mill, and other businesses would appear below this site on the west bank of the creek marking it as the area’s first significantly settled and developed site.
The town, however, would not grow here despite the Belden Atlas’ designation in 1878 of several streets, Coleman, Chapel and Clinton, below the millpond.4 Today it is an uninhabited conservation area, but its westerly orientation is finally being realized in the strip highway development sprouting along Highway 2.
By 1820 John Burk had added a store to the grist mill and saw mill on his site. He sold the store about this time to a Lewis Lewis, a man of whom so little is known that it may be that his first or last name was used for both purposes.
In 1824 the business empire of Charles Bowman purchased the store. Bowman, a Scotsman based in Montreal, was an early dry goods entrepreneur and financier with interests throughout Ontario. Robert Fairbairn was sent to represent Bowman’s interest and a year later a teenager, John Simpson (1812-1885), was hired as clerk. Simpson may in fact have been Bowman’s illegitimate son. Bowmanville perhaps numbered about 118, but the personalities who would play key roles in its future were now in place.5 Fairbairn left Bowman’s employ to become Darlington’s postmaster in 1829, the office having been relocated to Bowmanville two years before. Simpson, despite his age, now assumed a leading role in protecting Bowman’s interests.
The small community which had begun life in the valley south of the present Vanstone Mill, was at first known simply as Darlington Mills. Here in the 1830s, according to Hamlyn, Lunney, and Morrison “. . . the settlement of Darlington and the adjoining townships got seriously underway, hundreds of immigrants coming in, mainly from the British Isles.”6 It was in this period that locals started to refer to the town by the name of the man whose store gave credit in times of need. Thomas Rolph’s Descriptive and Statistical Account of Canada (1841) refers to “Bowmansville . . . as likely to be a large place.”7 Squair suggests the spelling was in error, but it seems more likely that by the 1830s people were calling Darlington Mills by the informal title of Bowman’s village, and gradually over the next few years and with several interpretations, the more formal and present spelling was accepted as the preferred name.
Bowman himself had only limited contact with the village and eventually returned to England to pursue his interest in collecting European art. He died in the late 1840s, perhaps unaware of his legacy in the new world.
So homogeneous is the earliest European settlement of Bowmanville that Fairbairn devotes a paragraph to the first non-white, other than native, resident. “The first barber shop,” he says, “was opened in a little hole dug out under the first hotel, occupied by Hindes. The professor of the tonsorial art was a colored man named Smith. He was tall, straight and muscular, something of a pugilist, and up to all kinds of circus performances. He was here, off and on till well up in the sixties. The only other colored family resident at this time was called Campbell.”8 Smith married one of the Campbell daughters and their son came back to Bowmanville many years later as an itinerant Methodist preacher.
Turn of the century postcard scene of Bowmanville from the west.
In the area of Bowmanville, development at first seems to have been mainly on the western hill in the valley south of the present Vanstone Mill where, three or more stores, a large tavern and a cooper’s shop were located.9
Of that first community, David Morrison Sr. wrote in 1939, “There were several houses down that way (in the valley) and today they are all gone except one lone brick dwelling which was then known as Williams’ home . . . (the valley) was the principle business section of this corporation where besides an oatmeal mill there was also the Jacob Nead’s Foundry..a woodworking shop, and a machine shop. All those works got their power from the dam below the bridge . . . Then there was Gifford’s Tannery . . . The Milne Distillery with its long rows of cattle sheds . . . The soap making works . . . The old pottery works on the west part to the Vanstone Pond. The big departmental Burk Store, and the Squair Grocery Store.”10
The second piece of major importance for the future appearance of Bowmanville was the land transportation system. The first major east-west road in Upper Canada, as has been noted, was contracted to an American, Asa Danforth, in 1798 for a roadway forty feet wide between Kingston and Burlington. It cut across the future site of Bowmanville a short distance south of the present Highway 2. Absentee landlords on much of its progress throughout Ontario soon ensured the road’s general decline. Following the War of 1812 a new highway, the Kingston Road, was built from Kingston to present day Toronto following in many cases the old Danforth road.
In Bowmanville it crossed at an angle somewhat north of the older road, perhaps to take advantage of better crossing points on the east and west creeks. The layout of streets, parallel and in line with the Kingston Road and others in line with the north-south/east-west grid, parallel to Liberty and Concession streets, created Bowmanville’s distinctive layout of irregular sized blocks of land and street directions.11
The third piece was the ownership of Lot 11. According to Squair, in 1828 the Crown granted the University of Toronto this four-hundred acre strip of land, a quarter mile wide, bound on the east by Liberty Street running from Lake Ontario to present day Concession Street.12 This land conforms to Bowmanville’s core and its sale to raise funds for the university made possible the town’s eastward growth.
A similar scene of Bowmanville from the west. This time a very interesting shot of the town from afar, copied from what might have been a panoramic camera print. Presence of town hall in skyline, and other features, indicates the picture was taken between 1905-1910.
The final piece of importance to the eventual town was the arrival of Leonard Soper in Darlington. A year later he built a flour mill on part of Lot 9, Concession 1, purchased from Augustus Barber after whom the town’s creek system was named initially. The eastern waterway would eventually be known as Soper Creek, by which several mills arose, including MacKay’s—the latest version of which was built in 1905 and produced Cream of Barley. Today that building is occupied by the Visual Arts Centre. These four significant pieces of property, along with lots 12 and 10 continue to define the boundaries and layout of the town.13
In 1853 Bowmanville was incorporated as a village,