By Jean Turnbull Elford in Upper Canada’s Last Frontier
(1982) Sarnia’s first settlers were French. Most of them, preferring British to American rule, came from Michigan after the British surrendered Detroit to the Americans in 1796. These people, who rented land from the Indians, farmed, and made shingles and fence pickets to sell or exchange for goods in Detroit.
Mahlon Burwell, deputy-surveyor for Upper Canada, was sent into their midst in 1826, a year before the Crown made the final land settlement with the Indians. He came to lay out the reservations and to interview any settlers, that they might be reimbursed for such improvements as they might have made to the land they rented from the Indians. Burwell noted who the settlers were, where they lived, where they came from, and when they came.
He found Aeneus Cazelet (anglicized to Causley) settled on the St. Clair River north of where the Mueller plant is now. Of him Burwell wrote:
“Innis Cosley – an industrious person – lived in this place from 18 07 to 1812, left for the reason given by La Forge, and returned in the year 1815, and has lived in the place ever since – came from Montréal, encouraged to come by Puckinans, or Little Grasshopper, the father of Way- way -nosh, and since by Way-way-nosh himself.
Burwell’s notes show that Jean Baptiste Pare came from Clinton River, now Mount Clemens, in 1808 and settled in the vicinity of the present Federal Building. The next year, his son-in-law, Joseph La Forge and his family, also of Clinton River, located to the north of him.
During the war of 1812, fearing an attack by hostile American Indians, these settlers went back to the United States. The Causleys and Pare came back in 1815 and La Forge five years after them.
In 1822 Pierre G. Brandimore came from Michigan and made his home south of Causleys.
Two years later, Antoine Frechette from Grand Portage, Minnesota, joined the French community when he moved in south of Brandimore.
Priests from Sandwich, now part of Windsor, worked among these settlers. One of them, Father Fluette, stayed with Jean Pare in the 1820s. Father Fluette, it is said, performed three marriage ceremonies on February 12, 1828 at the Galineau home in Mooretown. Ignace Cazelet and Fekice La Forge, children of Sarnia’s earliest settlers, were married on that occasion as well as two La Forge brothers; Solomon, to a Miss Galineau, and Allan to a Miss Brandimore..
A glimpse into the La Forge household is given in an entry in a diary written by Julia Jones, whose father Henry Jones had a large grant in the neighbourhood of present Bright’s Grove. His wife and family came out from England in 1830. They came by steamboat from Detroit to Sarnia, but a north wind kept the vessel from going up the rapids into Lake Huron, and the Jones spent the night with the La Forge’s. Of this visit Julia wrote
“And now let my aunts and cousins picture to themselves mother seated in a small log house knitting just as usual. La Forge… has seven children, a wife and an Indian boy. There were seven of us.”
She writes of the language barrier and of a visit paid by Chief Wawanosh and his wife and goes on::
“They gave us a very tolerable tea and about 8 o’clock mother began to think about bed… Mr. La Forge told us… that he could make up three beds on the floor. There was a bed in the room where La Forge and his wife slept and the children slept on the floor. Mother was horrified when she heard this, but at last she said to Aunt Susan, ‘I shall just loosen my things and lie down, and I hope the cats will not lie on my face… We each slept very well, but were disturbed twice by a party of drunken Indians. The first party opened the door and were coming in but La Forge stopped them, and then fastened the door so that the second party could only make a noise outside. We had a very good breakfast of eggs and pancakes.”.
When this was written, the northern limits of the St. Clair Reserve at Sarnia had been set just north of Victoria Park and English speaking settlers were due to arrive. Among the earliest of them were those sent to the reservation on behalf of the Indians. William Jones, the first Indian agent, Elijah Harris, the first schoolteacher, and Rev. Thomas Turner, the first Wesleyan Methodist missionary, had all arrived by 1832. Accommodation for them was provided on the riverfront at the end of Devine Street where one building served as a school, church and council house.
That fall, Henry Jones built two wharves, a store, and the storehouse on the waterfront halfway between Lochiel and Cromwell Streets. This proved a convenience for the settlers coming in by ship from Detroit.
From the diary of Henry Jones Jr., it is learned that the King’s cutter arrived at the wharf with Lord Aylmer, governor of Lower Canada, in September 1833, and that Sam Forester was the storekeeper..
The notes of an Edinburgh botanist, John McNabb, who stopped at the wharf in August 1834, revealed that Jones had cordwood to sell and that there were apple and pear orchards back from the river.
Another entry of Henry Jones shows that John Jones owned the store and that in 1835 he was succeeding tolerably well… and had already sold about 1/4 of the goods he bought brought out for $500.
By that time, Sarnia, which lay between the river on the west, Ham Street now East on the east, and from Exmouth Street on the north to a line north of Victoria Park on the south, was divided among five people. The Crown granted Jean Pare the piece south of Cromwell Street, La Forge received the section between Cromwell and George,. Richard Vidal, for services in the Royal Navy, was granted the portion between George Street and London Road. George Durand’s father bought him the property between London Road and Durand Street. Henry Jones’s grant, of 1000 acres, extended from Durand’s property to Exmouth Street. Jones chose most of the street names in this area to honour men who, like himself, served in the Napoleonic Wars.
The first of the newcomers to take up his land was George Durand. Henry Jones, Jr. wrote of meeting him in 1833 on the road to Sarnia with two yoke of oxen and a wagon carrying a crate of goods to start a store. Durand built a log store in the middle of London Road west of Christina Street. From this store he moved to one on the riverside in front of where Seaway Towers is located. This store became Sarnia’s first post office and around the first postmaster on February 6, 1837. Until then the place depended on a post office at Desmond, now part of Port Huron, and on a runner sent up from Chatham. With the opening of the new office, a man came in on horseback from London by way of the Egremont Road.
With the idea of building a sawmill, Durand bought a strip of land along the north side of George Street from Captain Vidal for $700. To furnish water power (he had a ditch dug along it that he extended back to the Riviere Aux Perches (the name was changed to Wawanosh Creek in 1964). The ditch drained into the St. Clair River just north of the west End of George Street. There Durand’s water-powered sawmill went into operation in 1837 relieving the settlers of the necessity of bringing sawn lumber from the American side of the river.
One of the big social events of the village was Durand’s wedding celebration on October 10, 1837 when he married Mary Jones, daughter of the Indian agent, William Jones. Following the ceremony the couple took up residence in their house on the southeast corner of Lot keel and Front streets.
Though a Protestant himself, Durand gave the land at the northeast corner of London Road and Christina Street for a Roman Catholic Church and burying ground “out of loving respect for my wife.” She and two of their children were among the first to be buried there. In the 1890s the cemetery was moved to Michigan Avenue, and there is a monument in it for Durand’s wife and three of their children.
Until 1978 the brick business block that Durand built, the first one in Sarnia, stood on the west side of Front Street at Cross Alley. With it demolished, only two prominent mementoes of him were left; they are in the streets bearing his name, George and Durand.
Captain Richard Vidal, another prominent early settler, moved here in 1834 into a log house on Front Street near the site of the old curling rink. This house was described by Henry Jones as being “large, comfortable though not elegant.”
Like Durand, Vidal gave a lot for a church. He bought a piece of land from George Durand where Our Lady of Mercy Parish Hall is now on London Road and had Alexander Mackenzie erect St. Paul’s Anglican Church. The bell from that church is still in Sarnia, for when the congregation moved to St. George’s, the bell from St. Paul’s was removed and eventually installed in St. John’s Church on Devine Street.
It was in Captain Vidal’s diary that the account of the naming of Sarnia was written:
“January 4, 1836. Wet, rainy, cloudy day. Held our first Township meeting. I was appointed a Commissioner. Named the village Port Sarnia by a majority of 26 to 16 votes.”
The 16 opposing votes were cast by those who favoured the name Glasgow or Buenos Aires. Up to this point the village had been called The Rapids by some of the Englis-speaking settlers, Glasgow by the Scots, and Buenos Aires by the Vidals. Sarnia was chosen because it was the name given the township by Sir John Colborne several years earlier. It is the Roman name for Guernsey where Sir John had been lieutenant-governor. before his appointment to Canada. “Port” was dropped from the name in May 1855.
Vidal, Durand and Jones held their land for years, but that of La Forge and Pare soon changed hands. Once he had the deeds, La Forge sold his to Elijah Harris, the Indians’ schoolteacher. Immediately Harris sold to Malcolm Cameron. Pare willed his to his La Forge grandchildren, all but two of whom soon sold their property. Rose La Forge and her husband, Gilbert La Croix, lived on her share on the southeast corner of Front and Cromwell Streets until they sold it for the Vendome Hotel. Francis La Forge, whose inheritance was larger than the rest, kept it until 1856 when he sold it to Fred Davis. Davis Street, called Francis Street for La Forge until the 1870s, runs along the north side of this property.
News of the new land owner, Malcolm Cameron, was recorded in Jones’s diary on October 21, 1835:
‘… Took tea at Crampton’s (Inn) with John and two Foresters and afterwards went down, took some grog, and slept at W Jones. Porter Cameron’s partner, who purchased from Harris, had arrived at the Rapids and is about to establish a store on a very large scale.”
Cameron came to Sarnia from Perth in Upper Canada when he was 27 years old and built his store on the northeast corner of Lochiel and Front Streets. In addition to his store he set up a shipyard where he had four vessels built, and he brought in four more that he used to take out squared oak timbers for the Glasgow shipyards and staves to make Jamaica rum barrels. He also acquired the steam grist and saw mills that James Flintoft built on the riverfront north of Lochiel Street in 1845. Being a member of the Legislative Assembly for Upper Canada, he was instrumental in having a road built between Sarnia and Warwick Village to connect with the Egremont Road running between London and Errol.
That Cameron may well be called the founder of Sarnia is attested to by Major John Richardson, a Canadian author of some note. Coming in on the ship that brought the goods to be distributed to the Indians, in gratitude for their support of the British in the war of 1812, Richardson noted in 1848 that:
“On the street facing the water are several good stores, a large brick church [Congregational, built in 1846 on a site south of the Federal Building] and a very respectable hotel, the Exchange,. There are two other half-finished streets in the rear… Mr. Cameron had a very good store here and deserves great credit for the spirit he has been the means of infusing into the place. He had moreover some good mills which constitute the chief wealth of his very beautiful little town.”
That Cameron had done much may be realized from the assessor’s report of 1837. According to Robert’s Skilbeck, who was assessor then, the village had 15 persons on the assessment roll. Buildings consisted of two squared log houses of one storey, four frame houses of one storey, and three frame ones of two storeys, three merchant shops and one storehouse.
Yet in spite of Cameron’s exertions the village had only 420 inhabitants by 1846. Growth was impeded by the forests and swamps surrounding it, by its distance from the seaports, and by the Rebellion of 1837 – 39 when the place was considered to be in danger from attacks by American sympathizers of the rebels.
During that insurrection, Huron and Lambton County men were called up to serve along the border under Dr. William (Tiger) Dunlop of Goderich. In the following extract from his will Dunlop makes reference to the men from Sarnia:
“I leave Parson Chevasse (Magg’s husband) the snuffbox I got from the Sarnia Militia, as a small token for the service he had done in taking a sister no man of taste would have taken.”
More informative is the letter written by Rev. James Evans, who came after Thomas Turner as missionary on the reserve. On June 10, 1838, he wrote:
“I assure you we are far from being free from the turmoil of the present commotion. Last night 75 fellows marched into our village from Goderich, and 80 more will be in today. Our new chapel is occupied by them as barracks and we now muster about 400 effective men.”
The chapel mentioned by Evans was Sarnia’s first church. At the instigation of Evans, money to build it was raised by public subscription and a donation made by the Methodist Church. It was built in 1837 on the west end of Lochiel Street facing the river, a frame building set on high posts. Of its occupation by the Militia, Robina and Kathleen Lazars wrote in their book HUMOURS OF 37:
“They saw no active service, but their sufferings were not inconsiderable. Some of them had quarters in a church, where the narrowness of the pews and benches and the scantinests of the blankets led to much discomfort.”
Later the chapel was moved to a lot that Cameron donated on the corner of Brock and Lochiel Streets where it stood until it burned in 1868.
Following the rebellion, industry centred around Cameron’s grist and sawmills. Durand’s sawmill, Porter’s flouring mill, and Francis Blaikie’s foundry. The foundry produced boilers, iron castings, iron bake ovens, used before stoves came into use, and potash kettles.
These kettles were a necessity for the pioneers. When they had cut bush, and burned the trees to clear the land, they took the resulting ashes to make potash, a product used in making soap and munitions. Potash was one of the very few of their products for which they could hope to get cash. The kettles also served for boiling down maple syrup and for making soap.
Business was carried on in Cameron’s and Durand’s stores and in those belonging to their six competitors. According to Smith’s Gazetteer four 1846, the village had, in addition to these stores, two tanneries, one foundry, two chair makers, one cabinetmaker, one cooper, three tailors, two bakers, one saddler, one tinsmith, three blacksmiths, one wheelwright, three shoemakers, and two tavern proprietors.
A good trade in imported British goods was carried on with the Americans whose vessels stopped here on their way between Buffalo and Chicago. Then and for years afterwards, Sarnia merchants benefited from supplying vessels it anchored in Sarnia Bay until weather conditions permitted them to go out into the lake.
Local settlers got their goods on a barter basis, money being very scarce. Only the well-to-do had any cash. To make it available for development, Robert Skilbeck formed the Port Sarnia Syndicate. Members deposited their cash with him, and he put it out on loan to the highest bidder. Interest rates were very high: 50 pounds was put up to competition and it was ultimately taken by Mr. Hitchcock at 45%.
The name of the Syndicate underwent several changes, but in 1881 it became the Lambton Loan and Investment Company and stayed in business under that name until it was sold in 1959. Books of the Company from 1847 on are in the Victoria Grey Company’s office in Kennewick Place. The office used for many of the early years was in the Skilbeck home at 112 Maria Street.
Times grew more prosperous at mid-century. Agriculture was getting beyond the subsistence level, money from England was being invested in Canada. Land prices rose. A road to London had been opened. Port Sarnia grew enough that in 1852 the south boundary was extended from north of the library to Johnson Street through the purchase of 189 acres from the Indian reservation.
That year Sarnia’s second financial institution, a branch of the Bank of Upper Canada, opened in a small building north of St. Andrew’s Church with Alexander Vidal the manager.
When Lambton became a separate county in 1853, Port Sarnia was elevated to the status of county seat. The first council passed a bylaw authorizing the borrowing of money to build a county building. It was erected on the corner of Elgin and Christina streets by Alexander Mackenzie, where the Chalet Motel is in 1982 [Editor’s Note: in 2015 the site of Wagg’s Restaurant and a motel].
Also in 1853 the forerunner of the current Sarnia Observer was established under the name Lambton Observer and Western Advertiser by John Raeside Gemmill. Cameron had Gemmill come to Sarnia from Perth to publish the paper in order to rival one put out by Alexander Mackenzie called the Lambton Shield. Mackenzie had criticized Cameron for his political views, and in a libel suit over the matter Mackenzie lost and ceased publication.
Neither of these publications was Sarnia’s first newspaper. That honour belongs to the Frontier Spectator, which came out in a 1841. It was published in Sarnia but printed in Port Huron. It was succeeded by the Banner 1847 – 50, and the Herald of 1851.
Some buildings erected in the Village of Port Sarnia are still in the city of Sarnia in 1982. Among them is the “Sarnia Tavern” on the southeast corner of George and Front Streets, built and named “The Western” in 1852. Of the number of old houses still standing, the oldest is believed to be the one on the southwest corner of Samuel and Confederation Streets. It belonged to a Causley family, who lived in it when it stood on Front Street North of Wellington. Another old house, still in its original location, is the Rev. Henry P Chase home at 120 Christina Street. The third is one at 310 Christina Street that Captain Vidal built for his daughter, Emma Vidal Farrell, probably in the spring of 1854. The first house south of London Road on the east side of Brock Street is one that Count and Countess Brockdorff lived in in the early 1850s. Originally it stood around the corner from where it is now on the south side of London Road. The Skilbeck cottage at 112 Maria Street is also a survivor of Port Sarnia days.