Читать книгу Quest Biographies Bundle — Books 31–35 - Rosemary Sadlier - Страница 22

Prior to the American War of Independence there had been no white settlement west of the Niagara River. By the time that war ended in 1783, the population of Niagara had grown to ten thousand. Those early settlers were the Loyalists, who’d fought on the side of the British and had fled the tyranny of the colonies south of the border. Settlement at that point was largely along a narrow frontier bordering the Niagara River.

In 1791 the Constitutional Act divided the province of Quebec into Upper and Lower Canada. Colonel John Graves Simcoe, once a commander of Loyalist troops himself (the Queen’s Rangers) was appointed the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada.

Simcoe recognized the need for more settlers if the young province was to thrive. He issued a proclamation inviting Americans to move to Upper Canada — Americans who were British at heart, who were fed up with the lawlessness and corruption that was rampant in the United States at the time — Americans like Thomas Ingersoll. Although some Loyalists and members of his government warned against it, Simcoe was confident that he was on the right track.

Lured by glowing reports of fertile land, abundant forests, and teeming rivers in Canada, Thomas Ingersoll felt ready to return to the pioneering life his ancestors had led 150 years earlier, even if it meant living under British rule again and swearing allegiance to King George III.

About this time, while he was in New York on business, Thomas was introduced to the celebrated chief of the Six Nations, Joseph Brant, who along with his sister Molly Johnson, had persuaded his people to fight on the side of the British in the American War of Independence. Chief Brant had already selected land along the Grand River in Upper Canada as a home for the Six Nations people, and he offered, if and when Thomas came to Canada, to show him the best place for a settlement.

Thomas Ingersoll and four associates, including the Reverend Gideon Bostwick of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, drew up the necessary petition asking Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe for a township grant in Upper Canada. In order to present the petition in person, Thomas, as the group’s representative, journeyed in March 1793 to Newark (the name Simcoe gave Niagara, today’s Niagara-on-the-Lake), which was then the seat of government for Upper Canada.

Two months later, the government granted Thomas and his associates sixty-six thousand acres (twenty-seven thousand hectares) of land. The township chosen was in the Thames Valley, and the new settlement was to be called Oxford-on-the-Thames. It is today the site of the town of Ingersoll, near London, Ontario.

It is possible that Laura, then almost eighteen, accompanied her father on an initial journey to Upper Canada to see for herself their future home, before making the trek with the whole family. She was accustomed to helping Thomas with his business accounts, and it seems reasonable that he would seek the approval of his trusted eldest child on this latest, and boldest, enterprise.

If she did go with him on one of his early expeditions, Laura may have been able to allay the fears back home somewhat. What would life be like in a new country where the Ingersolls would suddenly be thrust into the role of pioneers and farmers?

At the very least, Laura could assure the younger ones that their father would be with them in their new home, not away fighting wars or tending to his magisterial duties.

As he’d promised, Chief Joseph Brant sent six of his men to escort Thomas through the woods to show him the choicest piece of property, where there was already a small clearing, once part of a Native summer camping ground.

In return for the land grant the petitioners agreed to bring forty additional families to the township within seven years. Each of those families would receive two hundred acres (eighty-one hectares) for the nominal fee of sixpence per acre. Within one year of the date of the assignment, they would be expected to make improvements on their land, which included clearing five acres, beginning cultivation, building a house, and opening a road across the front of the property.

The remainder of the sixty-six thousand acres that comprised the township was to be held in trust by Thomas Ingersoll and Associates to be sold at the same price. Unfortunately, Gideon Bostwick, one of the four members of the group of petitioners, died just three months after the petition was granted.

It was another two years before Thomas could wind up his business affairs and sell the family home in Great Barrington. Laura’s name appears as a witness on a document for the sale of some of her father’s property as early as January 11, 1793. Her signature appears again on documents dated April 21, 1795, in which she witnessed the relinquishment of her stepmother, Sally Backus Ingersoll, to her rights in her husband’s property.

Laura Ingersoll was nearly twenty when the time came to move to Upper Canada. No doubt she had a hand in choosing the few possessions the family could take with them and helping to dispose of the rest. A large chest packed with clothing, bedding, and some of the fine china and glassware, the mantel clock, Betsy’s rocking chair, and the four-poster bed would go on ahead. There was much preparation for the long and arduous journey they were about to embark on. For one family that made the same trek seven years after the Ingersolls had, the journey reportedly took an entire month.

Two more babies had been born since Laura’s father decided to leave the country — Charlotte in 1793 and Appolonia (Appy) in April the following year.

The first part of their journey took the Ingersolls and all their bundles by wagon, west to the Hudson River. They may have stayed overnight along the way at the home of a relative or at an inn, and the next day they boarded a small boat for the sail up the Hudson to Albany, New York. From there it was overland again by wagon, ten miles to Schenectady. Ahead was the one-hundred-mile trip north on the Mohawk River in a Durham boat.

Durham boats — large, flat-bottomed vessels with high vertical sides — were mainly used to transport freight because they could carry heavy loads and displaced very little water. They were powered by a small crew, two on each side, that walked back and forth on “walking boards” built into the sides of the boat, either rowing or using ten-foot-long, iron-tipped “setting poles” to move the boat along. If the boat were going downstream, the poles could be used to steer it, but if it were going upstream, as it was on the Ingersolls’ trip on the Mohawk, the poles were used to push the boat against the swift current.

After a portage — and there was a total of thirty miles of portages — the family crossed Oneida Lake and travelled up the Oswego River to the southeastern shore of Lake Ontario.

There, at the port of Oswego, the Ingersolls boarded a schooner for the final voyage to Upper Canada. It must have been a relief for everyone to know this was the last leg of their journey. Four-year-old Charles may well have been pestering his parents and older sisters long before this with questions of “Are we there yet?” and “How much farther is it?” And little Charlotte would be delighted now to have space to toddle about on this larger vessel.

At some point during the crossing, after an ominous calm that had emptied the ship’s sails, a violent thunderstorm struck the lake. High winds whipped up huge waves and tossed the vessel about like a toy boat. Everyone feared the ship would capsize. The children were crying and many passengers were seasick by the time the captain managed to get the ship into a sheltered bay, where they could wait out the storm.

Laura would have been among the first to comfort the little ones and assure them that the worst was over. Or was it? Provisions were running low on the ship and too lengthy a delay would cause more suffering, especially to the youngest passengers, and to Sally, who was expecting another baby.

The captain put some of the crew ashore to try to find enough food to last for the rest of the voyage. Fortunately, the sailors encountered a group of hunters who directed them to the home of a lone settler willing to share what he had. The men returned to the ship with bread and milk for everyone, and when they were able to set sail again, the remainder of the journey went smoothly.

It isn’t known exactly where the Ingersoll family disembarked in Upper Canada, but it was likely that the ship docked at either Niagara or Queenston. Sally and the young Ingersolls would have been relieved that Thomas had arranged for their accommodation at an inn in the town. Once he saw that they were comfortable, Thomas continued on to the Thames Valley to claim his land and to make sure that the family’s furniture that had been sent ahead had arrived.

Before any settlement was possible, the township had first to be surveyed and roads had to be built. While he waited for this to be accomplished, Thomas Ingersoll took over the operation of a tavern back in Queenston, returning whenever he could to his property to work on the log house he was building for the family and to clear more of the land.

The bustling town of Queenston, also called “The Landing,” was an ideal place to run a business. It was at the northern end of the Portage Road that had been built to bypass the rapids in the Niagara River and Niagara Falls. Merchandise and food such as salt pork and flour moved in one direction over the portage, and furs from the upper Great Lakes travelled along the same route in the opposite direction.

Niagara (Newark) was the area’s social and military centre, but Queenston was the head of navigation. Every day a long line of wagons could be seen waiting for freight to be unloaded off boats from York, Kingston, or Montreal that had docked at the busy Queenston wharf. Drawn by teams of horses or oxen, the wagons would then transport the goods along the Portage Road to Chippawa, three miles beyond the falls.

Queenston had been founded to provide a port on the western side of the Niagara River after the treaty that ended the American Revolution gave the eastern side to the United States.

The town’s founder was Scottish-born merchant Robert Hamilton, who was instrumental in the building of the Portage Road. In 1780, Hamilton went into partnership as a shipping agent with Richard Cartwright at Niagara, and there they established a firm trade with the British army and the Indian Department. Although Cartwright established himself in Kingston in 1785, their partnership continued until the end of the decade.

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.