22 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



private secretary of Simcoe, Colonel Thomas Talbot. As a field 

 ofiicer he was entitled, under the provision of the law at the time, to 

 a grant of 5,000 acres. He began his settlements personally in 1803 

 at Port Talbot on Lake Erie near the present city of St. Thomas. ^^ 

 Altogether he obtained, on condition of securing colonists, direct 

 grants of land amounting to 65,000 acres. ^^ But this represented 

 only a small part of the area dealt with by Talbot. In consequence 

 of grants or instructions by Orders-in-Council or personal orders from 

 the Lieutenant-Governor, the total area amounted to 540,443 acres. ^^ 

 Actual settlement began in 1809. The first settlers, who were from 

 Pennsylvania, were of Irish extraction ; then came a number of Scots 

 Highlanders, Quakers from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and settlers 

 of miscellaneous origins from New York State, from Nova Scotia and 

 from the south of England. A group of settlers came from Ireland. 

 These various groups were settled in the region controlled by Talbot 

 prior to the outbreak of the war in 1812. When that event occurred 

 immigration from the United States ceased and the frontier settle- 

 ments were overrun not merely by troops during military operations, 

 but also by armed bands of marauders who carried off or destroyed 

 the property of the settlers. ^^ After the close of the war in 1814 

 five years elapsed before immigration on any scale into the Talbot 

 settlement was resumed. In 1819 a group of Argyllshire Highlanders 

 settled at Aldborough and further settlements ensued later. Talbot 

 appears to have been a severe administrator of his large property. 

 He compelled the settlers to live up to their contracts with him at a 

 time when the government was unable to enforce discharge of their 

 obligations to the State. 



Up till 1819 the settlers in Upper Canada were distributed along 

 the shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie in a discontinuous line of settle- 

 ments. The interruptions were caused partly by choice of locality 

 on the part of individual settlers or of groups, partly by Indian 

 Reserves like the Reserve of the Mississagas which landwards cut 

 off York (Toronto) from the settlements westwards along the shore 

 of Lake Ontario, and partly by unoccupied tracts of land, portions of 



^'On the Talbot settlement see Canadian Archives Reports, Ottawa, 1891, 

 pp. XLII and XLIII, and 1903, pp. XXII and XXIII; Coyne, James N., The 

 Talbot Papers, Edited with Prefaces, Introduction and some Annotations. From 

 Transactions Royal Society of Canada, Ottawa, 1908; and Ermatringer, C. O., The 

 Talbot Regime or the First Half Century of the Talbot Settlement, St. Tho'imas (Ont.), 

 1904. 



^^Coyne, op. cit., p. 32. 



^m., p. 37. 



19/*., p. 40. 



