After the American War of Independence, the fur traders in Montreal gave the business of portaging their goods on the west side of the Niagara River to Robert Hamilton. Around 1785 he built a house and a shop at what would one day become Queenston. The two-storey Georgian mansion built of stone sat high on the Niagara Escarpment and overlooked the village on one side and the river and the American shore on another. Over the years, Hamilton and his wife entertained many visiting dignitaries at their impressive home.
The wealthy Hamilton was Queenston’s most prominent citizen and the biggest landowner. He owned a distillery and a tannery in the village and was involved in other businesses both there and in Chippawa. A leading public figure in the Niagara district, he was appointed by Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe to the first Legislative Council of Upper Canada. Even up until the time of his death in 1809, Hamilton held military contracts with the British to supply and carry provisions to their upper posts at Detroit and Michilimackinac.
Thomas Ingersoll hired his wife Sally’s brother, Charles Whiting, to survey his township, and Whiting began to lay out concessions and sideroads using Thomas’s log house on Lot 20 as the base for his work. Thomas himself built the settlement’s first road. Today there are two creeks in the area named Ingersoll and Whiting, in honour of these pioneers.
In October 1796, as soon as the survey was complete, other settlers began to arrive and at once started to clear their land. Brush was burned, log homes built, and the land between trees too large to take down was cultivated.
For the first couple of years in Upper Canada the tavern in Queenston provided Thomas a roof over his family’s head and a means to support them. Taverns were an important part of life in those early days and were often family-run enterprises. Not only did these establishments offer food and drink, they also provided rooms for weary travellers and were regular meeting places for the community. The Ingersoll Tavern in Queenston, most likely located on the south side of the landing, was occasionally used for meetings of an early Masonic lodge, and in 1796 Thomas himself became a Mason.
Operating the tavern gave the Ingersoll family the opportunity to meet many people in the Niagara region, and they soon became well-known and respected. Every Ingersoll old enough to help out worked at the tavern, particularly the older girls. Their father was often out of town, either building the log house or on one of his trips to the United States, where he continued to work at persuading more Americans to move to Upper Canada.
Late in 1796, Thomas was finally able to move his family into the log house at Oxford-on-the-Thames.
Under Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe’s plan, the government of Upper Canada made land grants of whole townships available, but the conditions of the grant had always been a little fuzzy. Early on, Thomas was dismayed to learn that he might never receive clear title to his land.
Some locals were suspicious of the politics of American settlers like Thomas Ingersoll, calling the newcomers to the province “late Loyalists.” Representations were made to the government suggesting these settlers might actually do more harm to the country than good. Thomas and his settlement of close to ninety families suddenly found themselves facing an uncertain future.
Government policy changed after Simcoe’s term was over and he returned to England in 1796. Arrangements had already been made to bring a thousand settlers up from New York, when growing opposition to Simcoe’s plan resulted in its being phased out.
No longer would whole townships be granted, and Thomas’s contract was cancelled. The reason given for this action was that he hadn’t fulfilled his part of the agreement. Although he had delivered the required number of settlers, he had run out of money for the building of roads in the township.
To have the settlement taken away in this manner, after the years he had spent working on it, seemed grossly unfair, and, understandably, Thomas Ingersoll felt he had been cheated. He had staked his entire personal fortune on Oxford-on-the-Thames. Although he had been appointed justice of the peace while he lived there, he abandoned the settlement in 1805 and moved his family to the Credit River.
In his new location ten miles west of York (Toronto), Thomas signed a seven-year lease to operate an inn called Government House. The inn had originally been built by the government of Upper Canada to accommodate judges and other government officials having business at York. The town was a long way from anywhere in those days.
When war between Britain and France had broken out in 1793, Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe had been faced with the possibility of an American attack on Upper Canada, France having been an ally of the Americans in the War of Independence. Simcoe established a naval base at York, and on February 1, 1796, the capital of Upper Canada was moved to York, a less vulnerable location than Newark had been.
In the Ingersolls’ day, many travellers found a warm welcome at Government House, whether they came by horse or stagecoach, or by boat on Lake Ontario or the Credit River. In return, the inn gave the Ingersoll family a comfortable living, and with the help of his wife and children, Thomas ran the establishment until his death in 1812 at the age of sixty-three.
Thomas and Sally Ingersoll’s son James, who was born in 1801, had been the first white child born in Oxford-on-the-Thames. He was four years old when the family moved to the Credit River. His sister, Sarah, was yet to be born. She would arrive in 1807, the last child for Thomas and Sally Ingersoll.
After Thomas died, his widow Sally and their eldest son, Charles, applied to renew the lease on the inn. Because Charles was by that time involved in the War of 1812, Sally operated the inn herself. Later the Ingersolls moved from the Credit River, although Sally continued to live there until her death in 1833.
In a stroke of irony, in 1817 Charles purchased, at a sheriff’s sale, his father’s old farm in Oxford-on-the-Thames. He and his younger brother Thomas, born in 1796 most likely at Queenston, built a new house there, as well as a sawmill, gristmill, store, potashery, and a distillery. They called the new village “Ingersoll” in honour of their father.
Charles moved his own family to Ingersoll from Queenston in 1821. He became a magistrate and was the first postmaster of Ingersoll, succeeded in that position by his younger brother James.
In 1834, Charles was a commissioner in the Court of Request. As well as being appointed lieutenant colonel of the 2nd Oxford Militia, he was a Member of the Canadian Parliament in 1824, and was twice returned, in 1829 and 1832. Charles Ingersoll died of cholera in 1832, at the same time as his eldest son.
James Ingersoll died August 9, 1886, at the age of eighty-six. For over forty years he had been Registrar of Oxford County.
Thomas would have been proud.
3
James Secord, United Empire Loyalist
Laura was not with the Ingersoll family when Thomas pulled up stakes and moved Sally and the children to the Credit River in 1805. Nor had she gone with them in 1796 when they first left Queenston for the log house in the settlement of Oxford-on-the-Thames. Laura had remained behind because she’d met a handsome young man by the name of James Secord and fallen in love.
William Kirby, in his book Annals of Niagara (1896), listed among the ladies who stood out in Niagara Society from 1792–1800, “belles of the day,” one “Miss Ingersoll.” No doubt this was Laura, the eldest of the Ingersoll girls.
She was an attractive twenty-one-year-old in 1796 and part of the area’s social scene, with frequent invitations to people’s homes, community functions, dances, and parties.
James Secord, who had become a Freemason in 1795 when he was twenty-two, often came into