Search results

25 plaques found that match your criteria

Search again

• Founding of Hanover, The
  A tavern established here about 1849 by Abraham Buck provided the nucleus around which a small settlement began to develop. Strategically located at the intersection of the Durham Road and a branch of the Saugeen River, the community grew quickly as settlers, many German in origin, flocked to the area. A town plot was surveyed in 1855 and the next year the hamlet, known as Buck's Crossing, then Adamstown, was renamed Hanover. By 1867 it...

• Newash Indian Village 1842, The
  Following the Indian treaty of 1836, a Reserve along the western shore of Owen Sound was set aside for the Band headed by Chief Newash. In 1842, the Indian village of Newash, established here previous to the founding of the adjacent community of Sydenham (now Owen Sound), was rebuilt by the government. It contained fourteen log houses, a school and a barn. Wesleyan Methodist missionaries ministered to the Indians, and in 1845, a frame chapel...

• David Vivian Currie, V.C., 1912-1986
  A much-honoured World War II army officer, Currie, who is buried in Owen Sound, was born and raised in Saskatchewan. He enlisted in 1939 and was sent overseas with the 29th Canadian Armoured Reconnaissance Regiment (the South Alberta Regiment) three years later. On August 18, 1944, Currie, leading a small force in Normandy, was ordered to help seal the Chambois-Trun escape route to the German forces cut off in the Falaise pocket. He met fierce...

• Agnes Campbell MacPhail 1890-1954
  The first woman elected to the parliament of Canada was born on a nearby farm in Proton Township. In 1919, women had received the right to sit in the federal house, and in that year Agnes MacPhail joined the United Farmers of Ontario. Elected as a Progressive for Grey in 1921, she retained her seat until 1940. A strong and eloquent speaker, she always maintained her independence from party policies, and was concerned mainly with...

• Beautiful Joe
  Born in Milton, Nova Scotia, Margaret Marshall Saunders (1861-1947) taught school briefly before starting her career as a novelist. Her second book, "Beautiful Joe," achieved international recognition. Inspired during a visit to Meaford about 1892, it is based on the story of a dog rescued from a brutal master by a local miller, William Moore. This novel, first published in 1894, appeared in several editions and enjoyed phenomenal success. It was printed in at least...

• Charles Rankin 1797-1886
  This pioneer surveyor was the pathfinder who opened much of this region to settlement. Born in Enniskillen, Ireland, Rankin came to Upper Canada with his family at an early age. He was appointed a deputy provincial surveyor in 1820 and at first worked in the southwestern section of the province. In 1833, he began surveying the Nottawasaga Bay area and settled on some 200 acres of land west of the present town of Thornbury. His...

• Craigleith Shale Oil Works 1859, The
  A growing demand for artificial light led to the establishment, in 1859, of a firm headed by William Darley Pollard of Collingwood. He erected a plant here to obtain oil through the treatment of local bituminous shales. The process, patented by Pollard, involved the destructive distillation of fragmented shale in cast-iron retorts heated by means of wood. The 30 to 35 tons of shale distilled daily yielded 250 gallons of crude oil, which was refined...

• Daniel Knechtel 1843-1936
  Born in Waterloo County, Daniel Knechtel came to Hanover in 1864. Two years later, he began producing handcrafted furniture and, in 1874, opened a factory on this site. By using local timber resources and applying the latest techniques in furniture manufacturing, Knechtel built a successful business. Under his direction, subsidiaries were established in Southampton and Walkerton, and markets expanded into the Canadian West. A fire destroyed Knechtel's factory in 1900, but another was built the...

• Founding of Durham
  In 1842, Archibald Hunter, a Scottish immigrant, led a party northward on the Garafraxa "colonization road" to the banks of the Saugeen River. The resulting settlement was first called Bentinck and later Durham, probably to honour the English birthplace of George Jackson, the first local Crown Land Agent. The establishment of flour and grist-mills in 1847 made the town the major agricultural centre of the district. The Durham Road, another settlement route, was constructed through...

• Founding of Meaford
  In 1837, inhabitants of St. Vincent Township petitioned the government requesting that land at the mouth of the Bighead River be reserved as a landing place. The land was set aside, a town plot of "Meaford" laid out in 1845, and lots subsequently offered for sale. As early as 1841, a sawmill and a grist-mill had been built on adjoining land, several roads constructed to the landing and a post office called "St. Vincent" established...

• Founding of Owen Sound, The
  In November 1840, a town plot in Sydenham Township was surveyed as the terminus of the Garafraxa-Owen's Sound Road. John Telfer, government agent, completed his house by November 21 and a shelter for settlers by the following spring. Four private buildings were finished by July 1842. "Sydenham" by 1846 contained a sawmill and grist-mill and about 150 people. A post office, opened in 1847, was named "Owen's Sound" after the settlement along the Garafraxa Road...

• Frederick Stanley Haines 1879-1960
  One of Ontario's outstanding artists and teachers, Haines was born in Meaford and educated at this school. In 1896, he moved to Toronto where he attended the Central Ontario School of Art. He later studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. Working in the realistic style as painter, etcher and printmaker, he tended to specialize in idealized Ontario pastoral landscapes. In 1928, he was appointed a curator at the Art Gallery of...

• John Muir 1838-1914
  Born in Dunbar, Scotland, this famous naturalist, whose books and articles played a significant role in the early development of the United States National Park Service, emigrated with his family to Wisconsin in 1849. Intensively interested in botany and geology, Muir set out in 1864 on a walking tour of Canada West, during which he travelled much of what is known in Ontario today as the "Bruce Trail". His brother Daniel, employed since the previous...

• Loss of the "Jane Miller"
  The "Jane Miller," a wooden-hulled freight and passenger vessel, was built in 1879 at Little Current. A screw-propelled, 210-ton ship 78 feet in length, she was owned by her skipper, Andrew Port of Wiarton. On November 25, 1881, at Owen Sound and Meaford, she loaded a heavy deck cargo destined for Michael Bay, Manitoulin Island. Not obtaining enough wood at Big Bay dock (North Keppel) to reach his destination, Captain Port attempted to reach Spencer's...

• Major Charles Stuart 1783-1865
  Son of a British army officer, Stuart was born in Jamaica. After fourteen years' service as a commissioned officer in the service of the East India Company, he came to Upper Canada in 1817. Devoutly religious, Stuart found an outlet for his humanitarian zeal in vigorous anti-slavery activity. Although most of his written works are polemical tracts denouncing slavery, his "The Emigrants Guide to Upper Canada" is a useful summary of the progress of areas...

• Nellie L. McClung
  This outstanding suffragette, author and teacher was born near Chatsworth in 1873 and moved with her family to Manitoba in 1880. Ten years later she commenced her teaching career in Manitou, where she became an active member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and began the writing of "Sowing Seeds in Danny", the best known of her published works. An indomitable fighter for equal rights, Nellie McClung was a militant member of the Winnipeg Political...

• Old Mail Road, The
  For some years prior to the by-law that established it as a public road in 1846, this route had been travelled by settlers destined for the newly-opened townships of Osprey, Collingwood, Euphrasia and St. Vincent. From its junction near Duntroon with an extension of the Sunnidale Road, it ran some 21 miles northwesterly to Griersville. Though it was entitled to maintenance by statute labour, the road was chronically in poor repair. Nevertheless, it remained an...

• Right Honourable Sir Lyman Poore Duff 1865-1955, The
  One of the Commonwealth's most eminent jurists, L.P. Duff was born in Meaford and educated at the University of Toronto and Osgoode Hall. Called to the bar of Ontario in 1893, he practiced law in that province and in Victoria, B.C., until he became a judge of the Supreme Court of British Columbia in 1904. Appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1906, he was an expert in the field of constitutional law, particularly...

• Sinking of the Mary Ward 1872, The
  On the night of November 24, 1872, the steamer "Mary Ward" ran aground on Milligan's Reef, two kilometers offshore. Recently purchased by five Owen Sound men, the vessel was making the trip from Sarnia to her new home port of Collingwood with twenty-seven aboard, including a Canadian Pacific Railway survey party when the accident occurred. The first lifeboat safely reached shore, then a fierce gale sprang up, delaying rescue operations. After a perilous journey the...

• Thomas William Holmes, V.C. 1898-1950
  Born in Montreal, Holmes moved with his family to Owen Sound in 1903. He enlisted in the 147th Infantry Battalion C.E.F. in 1915, but later transferred to the 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles. In October 1917, his unit took part in the violent opening assault on the German position at Passchendaele. During this action Sergeant Holmes, under heavy enemy fire, captured single-handed an important "pill-box" strongpoint which had been holding up the right flank of the Canadian advance. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for his valour in this battle.

• Tom Thomson 1877-1917
  One of Canada's most distinguished painters. Thomson was born at Claremont, Ontario County, but two months later moved with his parents to Leith where he lived until the age of twenty-one. After working in Toronto as a commercial artist until 1913, he supplemented his limited income from painting, and fulfilled his love for the Canadian wilderness by serving as a guide and fire ranger in Algonquin Park. An exponent of a distinctive style of Canadian...

• Tommy Burns
  Noah Brusso was born near Hanover in 1881. He took up professional boxing under the name of Tommy Burns, and although standing only 5 feet 7 inches and rarely heavier than 170 pounds, was a leading heavyweight. In 1906 by defeating Marvin Hart, he became the first Canadian to win the heavyweight championship of the world. Defeated by Jack Johnson in Australia in 1908 he did not retire from boxing until 1920. Brusso's methods of training were used by later athletes, and he wrote a book on scientific boxing. He died in Vancouver in 1955.

• Toronto, Grey and Bruce Railway
  This pioneer railway was chartered in 1868 and the first sod was turned at Weston on October 5, 1869, by Prince Arthur, third son of Queen Victoria. Constructed under direction of chief engineer Edmund Wragge, the main line from Toronto to Owen Sound was completed in 1873 and a branch line from a point near Orangeville to Teeswater was finished about a year later. Freight and passenger service was begun on the section from Toronto...

• Toronto-Sydenham Road, The
  The northern terminus of this early "colonization road" was located near here at its junction with the "Garafraxa Road". In 1848 the government ordered Charles Rankin, P.L.S., to survey a road from Melancthon Township through the present counties of Grey and Dufferin which would attract settlers and provide a more direct connection between Sydenham (Owen Sound) and Toronto. Free grants of 50 acre lots were given to persons fulfilling the required settlement duties, and by...

• William Avery Bishop, V.C. 1894-1956
  Born in Owen Sound, "Billy" Bishop was attending the Royal Military College when war was declared in 1914. He first joined a cavalry unit, but in 1915 transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. Courage and marksmanship made him one of the war's greatest fighting pilots, credited officially with the destruction of 72 enemy aircraft. When hostilities ended, he was the youngest lieutenant-colonel of the air force and had won the Victoria Cross, the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Cross. During World War II he became a director of recruiting for the R.C.A.F. with the rank of air marshal.