Go West…… And Grow Up With the Country
By Dan Bourgeois
By the late 1860s, Millbrook was a bustling village of some 1,300 people.
The commercial district included King Street along the current “downtown”, as well as Tupper Street heading north of King Street. Businesses along Tupper St alone included multiple general stores, shoemakers, carpenters’ workshops, blacksmiths, wagon makers, as well as a butcher, saddler, tanner, hardware dealer and of course several taverns. Millbrook Junction train station was a hive of activity with trains passing through nearly hourly, many carrying lumber cut from the great forests of Victoria and Haliburton counties down to the lakeshore for shipment to the USA and Britain.
The surrounding farms were becoming more prosperous as the original immigrants and their growing families continued to clear more land for crops and livestock. Brick and wood frame houses were being built to replace the original log cabins and shanties. Things were definitely looking up.
However, over the next couple of decades, the population of Millbrook and Cavan township declined by nearly a half. What happened? Well, it was a perfect storm of circumstances.
Out in the wide world, the Industrial Revolution was booming. Huge investments were being made in railways and other industries resulting in a stock market bubble. Eventually, overextended financial institutions, wild speculation and stock manipulation led to bank and corporate insolvencies, much like in 1929 and the dot-com bubble of 2000. In the spring of 1873 the Vienna stock exchange, a major European exchange, collapsed. In the fall, several major investment banks in New York City went bankrupt, crashing the New York stock exchange.
The subsequent economic depression affected all of Europe and North America. Unemployment rose drastically at a time when there was no organized social safety net. Agricultural commodity prices plummeted. At times, wheat sold for one third the price it commanded in 1867.
On top of this economic upheaval, an equine flu epidemic swept across North America. While most horses survived, few horses were spared a sickness that took weeks to recover from. This was a crippling consequence for a largely horse drawn society.
Our “Green and Pleasant Land” was not immune to all these outside influences. There were also more local problems to deal with.
Most of the land suitable for farming had been cleared. Even if land was available, prices had risen such that many who wished to become farmers were unable to purchase that available land. The drop in commodity prices just made things worse.
Millbrook businesses were affected by the overall depressed economy. Farmers in the district had much less money to spend on goods in town. Traffic through the railway station was decreasing as the forests to the north were cleared and the lumber trains were less frequent. A more direct train line to Toronto from Peterborough and Ottawa now bypassed Millbrook, decreasing passenger traffic.
In July 1875, a fire began inside cabinet maker Thomas Gillott’s workshop on the north side of King Street. It quickly spread along the entire block, then jumped over to Tupper St, burning the buildings on both sides. Most of the commercial district, including the apartments above the businesses were thus reduced to ashes, only sparing a cluster of the buildings on the south side of King Street. Things were not looking up.
Meanwhile the vast hinterlands of western Canada beckoned. The Canadian government had purchased Rupert’s Land, which encompassed all the watersheds draining into Hudson’s Bay (which is most of what is now western Canada) from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1870. The province of Manitoba was created; at the time, it comprised only the southern part of the current province. The Indigenous peoples had lived on these lands for 10-12,000 years since the great ice sheets receded. They were mostly hunter-gatherers, although there is also evidence of pre-contact agriculture along some river valleys. However, due largely to introduced European diseases such as measles and smallpox, their numbers were a fraction of their former population.
In 1871, Treaty 1 was signed by the Assiniboine people and government of Canada, covering southern Manitoba. This opened the area to European settlement, perhaps not exactly what the First Nations intended.
Back in Millbrook and the surrounding townships, the opportunities opening up in the west looked very attractive. In 1880 the Millbrook Colonization Syndicate was formed led by W.H.(the Squire) Sowden, a major landowner in the village and also Reeve (mayor), lawyer J.N. Kirchhoffer, and local bankers A. Wood and T.G. Kells.
In the fall of that year Squire Sowden headed west and scouted an area covering southern Manitoba and into southeast Saskatchewan. He decided that three surveyed township sites at the junction of the Souris River and Plum Creek in southwest Manitoba was an ideal site. The Syndicate petitioned Ottawa for a land grant stating, “We propose to take next spring into these townships, 500 settlers. They will be a very different class from that composed of ordinary emigrants from Europe. They will be people who will be possessed of such capital….will be in a position to successfully farm the whole area he acquires.”
The land was granted to the Syndicate, and they advertised that 160 acre lots were to be made available at a cost of $3.00/acre (about $105 in today’s currency), plus a $25 deposit. There was no shortage of families eager to sign up for the new adventure and opportunity.
To be continued