Richard Beasley, who owned most of Waterloo Township, at from $1.00 to $4.00 per acre.

In 1803 it was found that there was a mortgage for $20,000 on Beasley's lands. Through the advice of Hans Eby they formed a stock company in the United States which bought up the township and assumed the mortgage. Samuel Bricker was appointed agent for this company with Daniel Erb as his assistant. $20,000 in silver was taken in a light waggon and given to Beasley when the company then got a clear title to 60,000 acres of land in Waterloo County.

In the same year (1803) a settlement was made near Markham in York County. In 1807, 45,000 acres were bought in Woolwich Township, north of Waterloo.

In the second decade of the 19th century immigrants flocked in. Soon much of South Waterloo Township was occupied by the Mennonites, that is, near Doon and Preston.

Berlin was once called Ebytown, and since the war, Kitchener. In 1827 it was given the name Berlin upon the suggestion of Bishop Eby. Bishop Eby was appointed in 1812 and exerted a strong influence in the community till his death in 1835. He wrote a short history of the Mennonites.

In 1909 there were thirty congregations in these districts in Ontario, mostly in Waterloo. There would likely be a total membership in 1913, of about 2,000.

House near Doon, Waterloo Township, built by Christian Schneider 1807.

WATERLO0 COUNTY HISTORY.

BY W. H. BREITHAUPT, C. E.

Waterloo County is in the heart of the peninsula of south-western Ontario. It is watered by the beautiful Grand River and its three principal tributaries, the Conestogo, the Speed, and the Nith Rivers, the first two uniting with the main stream within the county and the third a little below its southerly boundary.

Before its settlement the stretch of country of which the county forms a part was one of the most densely wooded sections of the continent. Magnificent hardwoods, maple, beech, elm, ash, oak, and others were interspersed with great pines. Oak trees three to five feet in diameter, and pine up to five and six feet in diameter, were not uncommon. Some pine were as much as six and a half feet in diameter and two hundred feet high. The clearing of these lands by the settlers, the removal, at great labour and with only slight utilization, of the dense forestation, the development of numerous water powers, the building of saw mills and other industries operated by the waterpowers, is an interesting story by itself.* One hundred and twelve larger and smaller waterpowers have been traced as in operation within the county at some time. Some of them, comparatively few, still remain.

The County was on the northerly edge of the Attiwandaronk or Neutral Indian Country. Little evidence of continuous aboriginal residence is found within its borders. Tree growth was too dense and continuous to afford suitable lands for the agriculture of the Indian. It was however a fine hunting and fishing country. There are remains of Indian encampments at various places along the Conestogo River, and at Breslau and below Galt on the Grand River. Flint arrowheads and spear heads, stone axes, tomahawks, etc., are well in evidence. No ossuaries or other large Indian burial places have been found within the county.

There is little mention of the settlement of Waterloo County in general Canadian History, nor did the early map makers know of this Pennsylvania colony. John Cary for instance, a noted map-maker of London, showed on several maps, 1806 to 1808, London, Upper Canada, and Dundas Street extending therefrom to well east of Kingston, and the Waterloo district as Six Nation Indian Reservation, while the fact is that neither London, Upper Canada, nor much of Dundas Street existed at the time, while Block 2 Home District, as it was called, was already fairly occupied by settlers.

There have been several county historians in Waterloo. Hon. James Young, published in 1880 his History of Galt and North Dumfries. Ezra Eby, himself a Pennsylvania descendant, brought out in 1895 two large volumes, somewhat on general county history, but, in the main, being a biographical dictionary of 8495 individuals, Pennsylvania settlers in Waterloo County and their descendants. The best account of the settlement of the county appears in Vol. VII of the Ontario Historical Society publications, in a paper by the Rev. A. B. Sherk, who was in his time the foremost authority

* E. W. B. Snider, 1918 Annual Report, Waterloo Historical Society. +"Indian Occupation of S.W. Ontario," James H. Coyne, LL.D., F.R.S.C., 1916 Report, W. H. S.

on early Waterloo history. Mr. Sherk was born near Breslau, Waterloo Township, in 1832, and died in 1916. He personally well remembered the two first (1800) settlers, who were his granduncles; and thus in a manner spanned the entire period, well over a hundred years, up to the time of his death, of the history of Waterloo County.

At the close of the eighteenth century we find the Grand River_valley one of the grants made, at the end of th Revolutionary War, by the British Government to its Indian allies, the Six Nation Indians, who came here from Central and Western New York State. The Indians soon sold in parcels or blocks a large part of the lands granted to them. Block 1, of Grand River lands, 92,160 acres, was sold to Philip Stedman of "Fort Erie Tp., in the County of Lincoln," in 1795; and Block 2, of the same lands, 94,012 acres, was sold to Richard Beasley, James Wilson and John B. Rousseau; these two most

concern us.

The first settlers in what became Waterloo County were what were called Pennsylvania Germans, and this was the third, and soon became the largest, colony of these people in Upper Canada. The first to come appears to have been the Niagara Colony, somewhat scattered from near Port Colborne to Campden, Lincoln County; the second the Markham Colony, east of Yonge Street, not far from Toronto. A traveller in 1794 relates that "on the east side of Yonge Street, in the rear of the townships of York and Scarborough, is the township of Markham, settled principally by Germans." Elsewhere he states that "these Germans came in this season, furnished with everything to make their situation comfortable." This was the Markham colony of Pennsylvania Germans.

Germans of the Mennonite faith formed a distinct body, as do their descendents to this day, in Pennsylvania, to where they began to migrate in 1683, on the invitation of William Penn, to escape religious persecution and to find entire freedom of conscience. They continued to come to Pennsylvania for over half a century, partly from Switzerland, largely from the Rhine Palatinate, as is reflected in their 'dialect, and some from Holland, the original home of their religious denomination. The records of the earlier emigration to Pennsylvania are meagre.

Influenced by the example of the United Empire Loyalists and by their preference for the stability of British Government they came to Upper Canada where they were promised freedom, in the full exercise of their religious tenets, one of which was not to bear arms in war. In this connection there may be mentioned that some of the Grand River settlers served as teamsters, and otherwise in the supply service, in the war of 1812.

Waterloo County has the distinction of being the first larger settlement in the interior of Upper Canada. Up to their coming, settlement had been mainly along the border and lake shore; the Pennsylvanians struck out boldly for the interior of the country.

The pioneers midway along the Grand River were Joseph Schoerg and Samuel Betzner, brothers-in-law, farmers from Chambersburg, Franklin County, Pennsylvania. They crossed the Niagara by the Black Rock Ferry in the fall of 1799, and located on the Grand River early in1800, all as related by the Rev. A. B. Sherk in the Ontario Historical Society paper referred to. Tidings went back to the home country, three more families came out in 1800, seven in 1801, and more in 1802. These vanguard comers obtained what they thought was sufficient title to their lands from Richard Beasley, who appears