HomeMy WebLinkAbout791"Article taken from the Pickering News, June 29, 1961, written by W.C. Murkar.
We have noted in other articles that Pickering, Ontario County and others along the north
shore of Lake Ontario, were among the first to be settled by Old Country Immigrants,
and Pickering Township saw its most active settlement in the 1880's.
The Scots, the Irish, Welsh, and English each appeared to have picked out a corner or
area of the township for themselves, and we today still have the descendants of those
early settlers living on or near the farms settled by their ancestors.
The trip from the Old Country at that time was one of from five to seven weeks,
to New York City or Quebec. Those coming by way of Quebec, were able to continue by
other boats up to near Prescott, and from there on by coach or small boats on the lake.
A steam propelled vessel sailed Lake Ontario as early an 1818.
In 1800, a township census shows the township population as: 180—40 men, 35 women,
61 boys and 54 girls all under sixteen years.
The first land grant may have been that of 1200 acres to a Catharine McGill in our Lots
16 and 17, 1st Concession. Timothy Rogers appears to have been instrumental in a
substantial settlement program when he brought a party up from Vermont late in the
1700's, and again in 1810 he brought another party of Friends (Quakers) from the New
England States, the descendants of whom we have in our community to-day. Timothy
Rogers, in recognition of his services by the government, was given several hundred
acres in the neighborhood of Pickering Village, and he, in turn gave the Society of
Friends, land on which they built their church—the site of the Masonic Hall property today.
Mr. Rogers is now believed to have built the first mill in the area—on Duffin's Creek.
At the same time many of these settlers in the area went west us far ns the Rouge River,
and travelled by boat, up the same to the Markham, Stouffville and Newmarket areas.
The Rogers family, who are credited with the erection of the old Pickering College,
on the hill, the site of the E. L. Ruddy home, in the village of Pickering, are also thought
to have been responsible to some degree, at least, for having the new Pickering College
moved to and erected at Newmarket, following the destruction by fire of the local college
in December 1905.
The writer, well remembers that fire and being present, to see one, who later became
President of the defunct Farmers (or was it the Traders) Bank, heave an upright piano
out through a second-storey window to the ground below."