Photo supplied.
The plaque to John Deyell in his birthplace of Drum, County Monaghan, Ireland.
Place names in many ways reflect the history of a landscape. A road may be named after a prominent family or political figure, or a town in memory of the lands that settlers originated from. It may simply describe a prominent feature of the area.
The names given to our local landscape by the first nations who originally lived in the area are largely lost to time. The early European settlers were mostly Irish, mainly from the north and this is reflected in many names on a map of Cavan and Monaghan townships.
Both Cavan and Monaghan townships are named after counties of the Republic of Ireland, adjacent to each other along the border with Northern Ireland. The landscape of both Irish counties are largely of rolling hills and drumlins, similar to our own landscape.
Our townships were named by John Deyell. The Third Line of Cavan, or Deyell Line, is named after his family. John Deyell lived a very full life spanning 103 years. He served in the British Army and fought the Americans in the War of 1812 under General Isaac Brock (of Brockville and numerous Brock streets across Ontario), then the French at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 where Napoleon’s armies were finally defeated. Returning to Upper Canada, he was a member of the team that surveyed Cavan and Monaghan townships and was asked to name these townships. He picked Monaghan (site of his birth place in the village of Drum, where there is a memorial plaque in his name) for the name of the township to the west, where he had been granted a land concession. Cavan was chosen for the township to the east. Somehow, when the paperwork was sent to the colonial administrators in Quebec City, the names were switched around and the Deyells ended up in Cavan, not Monaghan. Which just goes to show that typos and other clerical mixups also happened in the early 19th century and aren’t just a recent problem.
By the way, is there anybody out there who can explain why, in this area, Monaghan is pronounce MonaGUn, as opposed to MonaHAn, which is used everywhere else in the world?
John and James Deyell built the first mill in the area where a brook crossed the 5th Line (now County Road 21 and King Street). Eventually, the community around the mill on the brook became Millbrook.
Incidentally, while our Millbrook village may be unique, the name is not. There are nearly 30 communities named Millbrook scattered across the world. The AFC (soccer) club in Millbrook, Cornwall, England has a stylized image of their old mill on their crest, the appearance similar to our own Needler’s Mill.
John Deyell also built and ran an Inn midway between Port Hope and Peterborough on the Boundary road between the two townships (now County Road 28) at the crossroads with the 4th (Zion) Line. The community of Centreville, including the still active Centreville church and its cemetery, grew up around the Inn. It is thought that the first schoolhouse in the township was in this settlement.
Now and Then by Dan Bourgeois