July 7, 2024
D. Rollings

     A commonly accepted story underpinning the founding of Churchville relates that the initial 1819 survey for the 3rd Concession West of Hurontario (Creditview Road) had to be diverted in order to bypass Church’s Mills. This theory forms the basis for our claim that the community was established in 1815; several years before any other community in northern Toronto Township. As a result of the Brampton Heritage Board recently commissioning a Heritage Impact Assessment for 7749 Churchville Road, the original Surveyors’ Logs from this time have come to light, revealing that this scenario was quite unlikely and calling into question the origins and timelines of our community. 

        The 1806 Head of the Lake Treaty (No. 14) between the Mississaugas of the Credit and the Crown led to the surveying and settlement of the areas that would eventually become Mississauga, Oakville and Burlington, spanning from the lakeshore to Dundas Street and excluding land and fishing rights to either side of the Credit. In 1818, with immigration into the colony beginning to accelerate, the Crown determined to purchase the lands between Dundas and what is now Highway 9, and approached the Mississaugas of the Credit with proposals.

        In spite of the terms of Treaty No. 14, European settlers were already brazenly hunting, fishing and squatting on these lands, making it very difficult for the Mississaugas of the Credit to survive. They entered into negotiations in a state of economic and cultural impoverishment and the Crown was able to secure the immense tract for the small price of £522.10 in goods paid each year. 

        In order to open up this huge new tract of land for organized settlement, an official survey was required. On January 20th, 1818, the team of Timothy Street and Richard Bristol petitioned the government to take on this extremely challenging job. It is unclear how these two men knew each other. Not much is known about Richard Bristol, beyond that he was a former British soldier, a qualified surveyor and that he was a resident of Bayham Township, near London (Upper Canada). Richard would lead the survey teams and conduct the actual work, and Timothy Street, an American from New York now settled in St. Davids, near Niagara, would pay for the survey. In exchange, they would each receive a large amount of valuable land of their choice.

Sketch depicting a 19th century survey team, with a man 'blazing', or marking a tree as a reference point, a surveyor operating his compass, or circumferentor, and taking field notes and the men operating the Gunter Chain, pins in hand (Gill 1865).

      The Street-Bristol team was hired to survey northern Toronto Township (Dundas to Steeles), Chinguacousy Township (Steeles to Mayfield Road) and Trafalgar Township in Halton. Richard Bristol assembled his teams, gathered his clearing tools, camp gear and, most importantly, his set of Surveyor’s, or ‘Gunter’ Chains and set out to tackle this immense job in winter and spring of 1819. 

      Richard Bristol worked with a Deputy Surveyor named Samuel Benson to complete the project. The team’s process involved using a compass, extending the 22 yard-long chain for measurement (ten links equaled one ‘rod’ and ten square chains equaled one acre) and recording the natural elements of the area in a log while simultaneously building a detailed survey map. They planned to use a novel technique, Double-Fronted, 200 acre lots, to create the grid that we now know so well as our road network in northern Peel. The survey teams camped outside and endured hardships that winter and spring, including snow storms, difficult terrain, treacherous river crossings, isolation and, seemingly worst of all, unrelenting assault from mosquitoes. Their logs, created outdoors in these harsh elements, were written and rewritten in order to be usefully legible afterward. 

A few tools of the trade: A circumferentor and Gunter's Chain (New Hampshire Historical Society).. 

       The Bristol-Benson team started out by surveying Eglinton Avenue (called Baseline because measurements stemmed from there) to Winston Churchill Blvd, which is the boundary between Toronto and Trafalgar Townships. They then walked back and surveyed the “Checkline” (Hurontario) north to Steeles Avenue. They then surveyed retraced their steps and surveyed Mississauga Road (4th Line), Heritage Road (5th LIne), then Creditview Road (3rd Line), Chinguacousy / Mavis Road (2nd Line) and McLaughlin Road (1st Line), before tackling concessions east of Hurontario and then Steeles Avenue to the north. Each line in the Toronto Township survey is six miles long, and this particular approach required constantly forging a way through untouched ancient forests, swamps, valleys and waterways… and then retracing steps to start over again for all fifteen lines. They then also measured the two baselines of Eglinton and Steeles Avenue. 

       The team set out to establish the course of 3rd Line (Creditview Road), from the southern (Eglinton) Baseline on Monday, March 8th. They may have expected at least a little bit of relief in the form of the ancient indigenous trail that ran along the Credit, but their logs reveal that progress was made especially difficult by bad weather conditions: “the weather being very disagreeable for traveling in the woods”. “Eight or nine inches of snow had fallen overnight to add to the four already on the ground but the following day was pleasant”.  After trying again the next day, they managed to progress northward and set up camp between what is now aptly named Bristol Road, and Britannia Rd. 

That evening at camp, four individuals visited them. The only name recorded from this group was a Mr. Silverthorne. This may have been Aaron Silverthorn, who was known to be a shrewd businessman and may have been looking for inside information about the soon-to-be opened up lots. The other three were not identified. The logs make no mention of any further interactions with people, or the discovery of any buildings, dams or settlements.

       The next day, Wednesday March 10th, the team managed to reach just north of Old Derry Road. This would have been an especially difficult day, as it involved their first crossing of the Credit as it wound its way south, north of Britannia Rd. and below Falconer Drive. How they accomplished this without any bridges is left to speculation, though it seems safe to say that it was likely a dangerous affair. 

       On Thursday March 11th the team finally reached the site where Churchville is now, arriving at their destination near Churchville Road and Steeles Avenue; essentially where Churchville Public School once stood. The course of the 3rd Line leading to this point travels directly through the Credit for some ways, which would have required a special degree of effort from the team. They recorded that the day was a cloudy one and that there was wet snow that afternoon, and that the line was “very difficult to trace”. Lot 15, which runs essentially from the bridge to Steeles and from Mississauga Road to Chingcuacousy proved especially tricky and likely very dangerous. In its logs, the team described the winding course of the Credit, its split (which formed  the eventual natural Mill Race), the flats and the steep banks and hills of the Credit Valley that lead into and out of the village. They carefully recorded the local flora that they found, including pine, birch, maple, oak, black ash, basswood, elm, balsam and butternut trees, but made no written reference to any signs of human habitation. It is hard to imagine that, given the terrible conditions that the team was working under, they wouldn’t note any buildings or settlers that they detected or bumped into while they toiled and camped in the area that night. If a decision to move the otherwise-straight course of 3rd  Line was made specifically to bypass Amaziah Church’s rudimentary saw mill, it was not recorded in their logs. 

      The team returned to the area once more - likely reluctantly - on Tuesday, April 13th as they surveyed the northern boundary of the township, Steeles Avenue. Again, they suffered extreme hardship, dragging their chain down into the valley where the Steeles Avenue bridge now sits, and trying to take accurate notes in the middle of the ancient forest. At noon that day they struggled to cross the Credit because the water level was so high. To their dismay, when they returned the following day to correct a measurement error, ice that had collected on the Credit overnight (a phenomenon that we are still dealing with in the 21st Century) had driven the water levels up even higher.

           This is the extent of what the Surveyor’s logs detail about their work in the Churchville area in 1819, leaving us with some serious questions regarding the timeline of our village’s founding. I suspect that the 1815 date originated in a report that Timothy Street made to the government's Select Committee on Dams in 1822, where he stated that a mill had operated in the Churchville area for 'four or five years'. But when it comes to indisputable evidence, the first mention of the Church family appears in 1820 when Orange and Susan Church settled in the area. They leased a Reserve lot southwest of the village, near Lisgar, before eventually receiving land from Orange's aunt Rhoda Ann Church Matthews-Stoyell in1830 or 1831.  Orange and Susan are also documented as the builders and innkeepers for the first village hotel at 7767 Churchville Road. So far only two pieces of evidence have surfaced demonstrating that Amaziah Church lived in the village: the first was an 1827 petition to the government to intervene in a conflict he was experiencing with the Densmore family over flooding rights for land north of the village, and the second is his grave memorial, dated to 1831. We know that three of his sisters from Milton, Vermont, Orphia Blackman, Mary “Polly” Hyde and Rhoda Matthews-Stoyell would eventually live, die and be buried in northern Toronto Township… but the question remains: how much of the village’s 1815 origin story is based on fact, and how much developed over the past two centuries during tellings and retellings in the village taverns, local newspapers (especially those owned by the Church family!) or perhaps by parents, lulling their children to sleep with tall tales on cold winter nights in the village?

The finished product: Bristol's 1819 Survey of Toronto Township

Detail of the Churchville area, with the names of the initial grantees included. 'R' stands for Reserve: lots that were withheld for the use of the established church (i.e., the Anglican Church). The smudges represent swamps, lakes or bogs.