[herrington] township of SIDNEY 79 



but for the mdst part they relied upon their own sense of justice and 

 their decisions were, as a rule, accepted without cavil. Having ready 

 at hand these arbiters, whom they were accustomed to obey and in 

 whom they had confidence, several years passed before they felt 

 the need of appointing other officers to assist in carrying on the affairs 

 of the municipality. 



In the township of Sidney the conditions were quite different. 

 The population did not come in as a body and they were not on 

 intimate terms with each other. Many of them met for the first 

 time in the woods. They had no organization of any kind, no leaders 

 upon whom they were accustomed to depend, hence there was in 

 fact a greater need for providing some means of carrying on the 

 affairs of the township through the medium of the town meetings 

 than there was in the front townships of Frontenac, Lennox and 

 Addington. After weighing all the facts I was not therefore so much 

 surprised to find that the township of Sidney had held four town 

 meetings before the passing of the Act authorizing the holding of 

 such meetings, as I was to find that the minutes had been so carefully 

 preserved. Too frequently such valuable documents, if ever obtained, 

 are rescued from the dust covered rubbish heaps of some forgotten 

 lumber room. Not so in the township of Sidney. There must have 

 been a long unbroken line of painstaking officials down to the present 

 day; for the precious records were not entrusted to my keeping until 

 after two months of diplomatic negotiations and the most solemn 

 assurances that I had no intention of appropriating them for our 

 local Historical Society. 



First as to the book itself. It is a well preserved quarto volume 

 bound in mottled cardboard with sheepskin back, and a memorandum 

 on the first page informs us that it cost 18s. 9d., and that this sum 

 was made up of contributions of 7}^d. each from twenty-six con- 

 tributors and Is. 3d. each from Caleb Gilbert and Cornelius Lawrence. 

 The first name upon the list is Caleb Gilbert and he appears to have 

 occupied the same prominent place in the general affairs of the town- 

 ship as he did upon the list of contributors towards the purchase of 

 the book. 



Although the first meeting was, according to the entry, held on 

 the 15th day of May, 1790, this memorandum shews that the book 

 itself was not obtained until March 8, 1806. It is quite evident 

 therefore that although the book contains a faithful record of all the 

 town meetings from 1790 the entries for the first sixteen years have 

 been transcribed from some other original documents which have not 

 been preserved. An examination, of the book provides convincing 



