42 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
XX.— EFFECTS OF THE WAR. 
The close of the war found the settlement diminished and impover- 
ished. The destruction of the mills was a serious inconvenience. 
It was now necessary to revert to primitive methods, to grind wheat 
by hand in stumps of trees, hollowed by fire, or else the settler had to 
carry it on his back (horses being almost unknown and oxen scarce) to 
the mill at Long Point, seventy or eighty miles away, wait there his 
turn, sometimes for days, and then trudge home again through the 
woods with the flour on his back. 
Some found it more expeditious and economical to row in an open 
boat to Buffalo, one hundred and fifty miles distant, to purchase flour. 
A letter is extant from a new settler, Singleton Gardiner, who late in 
October, 1816, after a perilous voyage in an open skiff from Port Tal- 
bot succeeded in securing but a single barrel; there is pathos in its 
reference to the dangers of the return voyage over the treacherous lake 
in a rowboat so late in the autumn. His brother, Thomas Gardiner, 
was the first schoolmaster in the settlement. 
X X1I.— IMMIGRATION. 
After the war, as has already been intimated, immigration from 
the United States was prohibited. A few Irish and Scotch settlers 
who had lived for some years in the States arrived, however, in 1816 
and subsequent years, and located in Dunwich and Aldborough. Several 
families of the Selkirk Settlement of Kildonan in the Red River Settle- 
ment came in about the same time. About 1819 these were followed 
by a large immigration of Argyleshire Highlanders, who took up land 
in Aldborough. These settlers, Scotch and Irish, formed a very desir- 
able addition to the population. So numerous were those from Argyle- 
shire, that when their descendants presented an address at St. Thomas 
in 1881 to the son of the great MacCallum More, the Marquis of Lorne, 
then Governor-General, they assembled by thousands at St. Thomas. 
An address in classical Gaelic, the composition of the late Rev. Dr. 
MacNish, perhaps the most accomplished Gaelic scholar then living, 
and himself an Argyleshire man, was presented to the Marquis and 
fittingly responded to. It is said that the Marquis informed those 
present that he had never in Argyleshire itself seen so many Argyleshire 
people present at one time. 
XXII.—St. THOMAS AND THE TALBOT ANNIVERSARY. 
The village of St. Thomas dates back to the year 1817, when a 
general store was opened at Kettle Creek, and another on the hill above. 
