Newmarket, one of the oldest communities in Ontario, was founded on the Upper Canadian frontier in 1801 by Quakers from the United States. Fur traders, entrepreneurs, millers, and many others were soon to follow, some seeking independence, some seeking wealth, and some even seeking freedom from creditors. The community was at the heart of the 1837 Rebellion, found prosperity when a stop on the colonys first railway, and has sent military personnel to every war in Canadas history since the War of 1812. Once a terminal on the street railway from Toronto to Lake Simcoe, Newmarket also bears the remnants of an aborted 19th-century barge canal. It was the seat of the York County government and today is the headquarters for the Region of York. Behind these events and many others that have shaped Newmarket's history are the people. Tradespeople, the core of the community, aspiring or experienced politicians including Family Compact members, rebels, war heroes, and even a frontier doctor who lived to the age of 118. Here are their stories, all illuminating the early history of Newmarket.
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It’s been over four hundred years since the first white man paddled up the Holland River. He was a French adventurer who, at Samuel de Champlain’s behest, had come to live among the Huron in their villages around Georgian Bay in order to learn their language and their way of life. Étienne Brûlé was a farm boy of sixteen when he left his parents, peasant farmers living on the outskirts of Champigny, a small town south of Paris, to join the ship Champlain was outfitting at Honfleur for a voyage to the New World. It is not known how this teenage farm boy came to be chosen as one of the crew of adventurers who were preparing to sail off to the unknown wildernesses of the vast new continent beyond the sea. They left in April 1608.
Champlain settled at Quebec that winter and built his famous Habitation. During this period Brûlé had ample opportunity to become acquainted with the Montagnais people and found he could easily learn their tongue. It was probably there that young Brûlé began the loose relations with Native women and girls that would later bring him such ill repute. However, his facility for languages and smooth relations with the First Nations people were to lead him to his greatest adventures and, ultimately, to his death.
By the summer of 1610 Champlain and his small band of adventurers were thoroughly involved in the wars between the Huron, Algonquin, and Montagnais, the groups with whom they had built their fur-trading relationships, and their hereditary enemies, the Iroquois, who lived to the south. Champlain sent the eighteen-year-old Brûlé to winter with the Huron chief Iroquet. His mission, according to Champlain’s journal, was “to learn what the country was like, see the great lake, observe the rivers, and what tribes lived on them, explore the mines and the rarest things among the tribes in those parts, so that on his return we might be informed of their truth.”1
Brûlé spent the next twelve months living with the Huron. He adopted their dress, their food, and their customs, and thoroughly enjoyed himself. Although the records are unclear, the young Frenchman apparently returned to Quebec, had a falling out with Champlain, then came back to Huronia with his new friends and lived among them for the next four years.
From the beginning of his relationship with the Huron, Champlain promised to aid them against the Iroquois, an act that also benefited the French in their territorial ambitions, and, on a number of occasions, went into battle with them. On his return from France in the summer of 1615, the Huron again reminded him of his promise and pointed out that Iroquois warriors were constantly lying in wait for them along the trails between Huron country and Quebec. Intertribal warfare was one thing, but when it endangered his hard-won fur trade, it became quite another for Champlain. That July he set out from Quebec for Huronia. Once there, the French governor agreed to lead an expedition against the Iroquois town of Onondaga, south of Lake Ontario. He needed the assistance of the Huron allies, the Andastes who lived on the banks of the Susquehanna River in what is today eastern Pennsylvania. Étienne Brûlé, always eager for adventure and the chance to see new territory, volunteered to go with the mission. A date was set for the attack. Brûlé’s role was to recruit the Andastes and have them at Onondaga at the appointed hour. The journey took him through the heart of Iroquois country.
He left with twelve Huron warriors on September 8, 1615. They travelled down Lakes Couchiching and Simcoe and up the west branch of the Holland River, making Brûlé the first white man on record travelling that river. From the Holland, the party shouldered canoes for the twenty-nine-mile portage to the mouth of the Humber River, following the long-established Carrying Place Trail south through present-day King Township.
This “bad boy” of early exploration had many other adventures, and it probably never occurred to him that one of his marks on history would be this short trip up this shallow river, which led him to that tortuous portage. Records of those days are sketchy but, according to J.H. Cranston, Brûlé may have lived among the Huron for twenty-three years until, reaping the rewards of his own treachery and debauchery, he ultimately lost their friendship. According to long-held speculation his end was a sticky one. The Huron were not kind to those they considered enemies. As the oft-told tale goes, Brûlé was tortured and killed, his remains put into a pot, boiled, then eaten. Perhaps there was nothing quite so lurid. It is likely he was murdered “for political reasons, possibly because of his dealings with the Seneca or another tribe feared by the Huron.”2
The Mystery of Our First Settlers
Who got here first? Who were Newmarket’s founding citizens? Many are well-known, but there is evidence to suggest that there were more than we know.
Timothy Rogers was one, of course. He brought the early Quaker settlers from Vermont and upper New York State to Yonge Street in 1801. But he didn’t live in the village. Timothy and his family farmed on Yonge Street at Lot 95, King Township, today the southwest corner of Yonge Street and Davis Drive.
Joseph Hill, who dammed the Holland River and built the first gristmill for the area in 1801, seems almost certainly to have been the first citizen. He built a large frame house for himself and his family, and a store shortly after he constructed the mill. However, Hill returned to Pennsylvania rather than support the British side in the War of 1812, for reasons that will be shared later.
By Christmas 1801, James Kinsey, the miller at Hill’s establishment, had ground the first bushel of wheat. It is safe to assume he lived near the mill. His family was still in the community in 1847 when his daughter, Hannah, helped fight an epidemic, possibly typhoid, as noted in a story related in the History of the Town of Newmarket by Ethel Trewhella.
William Roe, born in the United States (his father was last British mayor of Detroit), recorded that when he arrived from York in 1814 to establish his fur-trading post, Newmarket, then known as Beman’s Corners, consisted of two frame houses and several log buildings. One of the frame houses (formerly the Joseph Hill home) belonged to twenty-nine-year-old Peter Robinson and the Bemans (Elisha Beman was his stepfather). The other belonged to Timothy Millard, after whom Timothy Street is named, and who was Robinson’s miller at the time. James Kinsey may have had one of the log cabins. It is not known who else was living nearby.
Joseph Hill had built the Robinson house, but sold it to the Beman-Robinsons in 1804. Elisha Beman, an American, married Christopher Robinson’s widow. Christopher, a United Empire Loyalist from Virginia,3 had been one of Simcoe’s Queen’s Rangers and later became surveyor general of Woods and Forests in Upper Canada.He died, almost broke, in 1798, leaving six children — three boys and three girls.The boys, Peter,William, and John Beverley, all became prominent members of the Family Compact and played a major role in the history of Upper Canada. Beman took on responsibility for them all when he married their mother and moved the family from York to Newmarket. The only son not to live in Newmarket was John Beverly, as he was attending school in eastern Ontario at the time.
The house was moved from its original site by the mill pond to a location farther west on Eagle Street in the 1850s. Interestingly, the house remains in its second site on Eagle Street and today is rental accommodation. Unfortunately, despite several attempts, the building is not designated as a heritage site.
It is not known where Hill lived after he sold the Robinson house, but it must have been nearby as he still had a tannery and other interests. In 1804, a man named Morris Lawrence (or Laurence) had settled here and became Hill’s partner, which, as shall be seen in a later story, proved to be Hill’s undoing.
Robert Srigley, born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, originally had immigrated with his parents to Pelham Township, Niagara District, Upper Canada. In 1802, by then an adult, he brought his family to the area to establish a farm east of today’s Main Street.
As noted, Elisha Beman established himself and his family here in 1804. His family included his wife, the former Esther Robinson, and her six children. The Beman stepsons Peter and William Robinson, then aged seventeen and five respectively, and their sisters, Mary (fifteen), Sarah (thirteen), and Esther (seven) lived in Newmarket,4 while the middle son, John Beverley (aged eleven) had been sent away from 1800–03 to attend John Strachan’s Grammar School in Cornwall, Upper Canada.
The Robinson boys became major figures in early Upper Canada. Peter Robinson was a War of 1812 hero, fur trader, Family Compact government post holder, militia officer, mill owner, founder of Holland Landing, and head of an emigration scheme for the British government, which resulted in founding of Peterborough. John Beverley Robinson, a protégé of Bishop Strachan’s, was a lawyer and staunch Family Compact member. He became acting attorney-general at age twenty-one when the then officeholder, Colonel John Macdonell, was killed at Queenston Heights (John Beverly had worked in his office). By the time of the 1837 Rebellion, John was chief justice of Upper Canada, and, in 1854, he became Sir John, a baronet. William Benjamin Robinson was a fur trader and businessman who, in 1828, was elected in the Family Compact interest as the first member of the Legislature from Simcoe County. He held the seat until 1857, except for one term.
North Richardson, the son of an aristocratic English family, settled in Newmarket in 1805. He was a notary public, unofficial postmaster, and provided other services to the fledgling community. He may have occupied one of those early log cabins.
Both William Laughton and Andrew Borland arrived in Newmarket in 1810, ahead of Laughton’s cousin and Borland’s future partner, William Roe. Laughton was a fur trader and eventually captained boats on Lake Simcoe. Borland, also a trader, moved north to establish trading posts in Muskoka and farther afield.
Newmarket was growing. In his 1820 published reminiscences, John McKay wrote, “There were three stores, one owned by Peter Robinson, which was managed by W. Sloane; one by William Roe and one by John Cawthra; one hotel (on Eagle St.), one blacksmith, John White; one saddler, S. Strogdale; one carpenter, Jacob Gill; one tailor, R. Russel; one tanner, W. Hawley; one shoemaker, Mathew Currie; one frilling and carding factory, Eli Gorham; two flouring mills, Peter Robinson and Mordecai Millard.”5 In 1829, according to Thornhill resident Mary O’Brien’s journals, Newmarket had grown to fourteen houses, three of which were stores. “It boasts a comfortable inn, a doctor’s house, a blacksmith, a hatter, a shoemaker, with a mill near at hand and a small meeting house of some description.”6
Eli Gorham, a woollen miller from Connecticut, had landed here in 1808. By 1811 he was operating a mill south of what is now Gorham Street, well to the east of the little village and the Yonge Street settlement. Hill’s mill was also in operation, so Mrs. O’Brien probably missed Gorham’s in her count.
Dr. Christopher Beswick, a retired British Army surgeon who had settled here in 1808, would account for the doctor’s house; the inn was a successor to an Eagle Street building erected by Elisha Beman around 1822 and known as Dye’s Inn (now an office building) because it was run for Beman by Daniel and Michael Dye. Records show the merchant partners Borland & Roe (Andrew Borland and William Roe) built a hotel on the southeast corner of Timothy and Main Streets in 1825. Elijah Hawley (origin not known) started a tannery in 1810. Timothy Millard arrived in 1813 from Pennsylvania — his farm ran from Yonge Street east to the Holland River. His frame home faced Main Street, north of Timothy Street.
That leaves the blacksmith, hatter, and shoemaker unaccounted for — our lost pioneers. Today, the descendants of at least three of these founding families can be found in Newmarket: the Rogers, the Millards, and the Richardsons.
