CHAPTER I 

 HALCYON DAYS ON PRESQU' ISLE BAY 



"Those were, indeed, halcyon days" were the words which 

 especially arrested the attention of Joseph Keeler, Esq., whole- 

 sale merchant, Toronto, as one Sunday evening he turned the 

 pages of an old chronicle in the Papers of the Ontario Historical 

 Society, telling of the days of early settlement on the eastern 

 shores of Lake Ontario. 



Mr. Keeler had been greatly interested in the story of long 

 ago in that part of Upper Canada, which he had left when a lad 

 of five summers, with his father, who, finding trade in his 

 general store going yearly from bad to worse through the changes 

 incident to the coming of railways, had in the late fifties gone 

 to Toronto as the metropolitan centre. The latter with a fair 

 capital had established there a general and, subsequently, a 

 wholesale grocery business, and gradually had come to be 

 looked upon as one of the leading merchants of that city. The 

 business had in the natural course of events been continued by 

 the son, Joseph, whom we find a leading merchant and impor- 

 tant member of several large financial corporations. 



As Joseph Keeler read on in these historical papers, he had 

 become yet more interested in the list of names occurring in an 

 old parish register of the District and most so when he found 

 the following: 



NEWCASTLE DISTRICT, U. C. 

 "May 21, 1804, Baptized this day, 

 "Joseph Keeler, son of Joseph Keeler and Mary Peters Keeler." 



The article, proceeding, had gone on with a popular account 

 of the other settlers on PresquTsle Bay in Northumberland 

 County, among whom were Peters, Simpsons, Rogers, Wards, 

 Burnhams, Gibsons and others, and told of how in 1803 a sur- 

 vey of the now village of Brighton had been made, and of how 

 lots had been taken up by a number of these people, the Gov- 

 ernment intending to make it the town of Newcastle and county 



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