A history of Goderich: From 1840s to 1850s

By: Kathleen Smith

Founded in 1826 by Dr. William ‘Tiger’ Dunlop and The Canada Company, the settlement of Goderich was soon a bustling urban centre for the Huron Tract by the 1840s and 1850s.

With a population of about 1,000, agriculture had evolved beyond the pioneer stage at this point in Goderich’s history.

Although limited services were provided for the immigrants who settled the town, a road network was soon laid out to open the interior and connect the Huron Tract with other settlements in what was known as Upper Canada.

The 1840s brought rapid development, a result of immigration trends and soon the Huron Tract area had two flourishing towns, Goderich and Stratford.

Through the 1830s and 1840s, Goderich grew into an agricultural settlement, and while the harbour served local needs, it did not yet have substantial importance.

During the 1830s Goderich expanded with the construction of homes, commercial buildings, and public infrastructure.

Thomas Mercer Jones, another Canada Company administrator, built the Park House mansion around 1839.

The 1840s brought rapid development, a result both of general immigration trends and new Company leasing policy.

By 1846, the town had a functioning harbour, though docks were in poor condition, and a lighthouse was under construction.

By 1850, roads connected Goderich to Wilmot Township and London, which helped facilitate trade and further settlement.

Research indicates that the Canada Company built piers to protect ships in the harbour between 1830 and 1850.

At that time, the harbour served local needs but had not yet expanded to serve substantial commercial importance.

The Goderich lighthouse, the first on the Canadian side of Lake Huron, opened in 1847, with a tower and the keeper’s house.

The downtown Square was designed and developed between 1840 and up until the mid 1890s, and in its early days, contained the main office of the Canada Company, which helped develop the area.

The design of the square is attributed to John Galt of the Canada Company, inspired by ancient Roman city plans.

The downtown core of Goderich was designed to suit the local geography and inspired by the first century BC city planning concepts of the Roman Architect Vitruvius. His designs were the inspiration of similar centralised town plans in Europe.

The Square’s ordered symmetry is centred on an octagonal shaped public space known locally as ‘Market Square’ or ‘Courthouse Square’ for having been the site of a market since the 1840s and the location of the County Courthouse since 1857.

Eight radiating principal roads stem from the central square in alignment with the eight points of the compass and is a contract to the more standardised grid-pattern design of many North American settlements of this period.

The Huron County Gaol was erected between 1839 and 1841, features an octagonal central block, to ensure constant supervision of prisoners.

Construction of this prison with its third-floor courtroom enabled Huron to qualify as a district separate from London, with Goderich as its seat.

Throughout its history, the gaol housed inmates for crimes from misdemeanours to criminal convictions, including prisoners who were hanged for their crimes of murder. Men, women and children all spent time in the gaol.

The railway arrived in June 1858, and a grain elevator was erected in 1859.

It wasn’t until the 1850s and 1860s when Great Lakes shipping expanded.

Harbour Hill was graded in 1850 just as fishing became an important part of the community, and the pier was soon lined with fish shanties.

The town was growing and becoming cultivated.

Once officially named a settlement and taking shape through laying the foundations of streets and the square, the area soon faced elections in 1835 and 1836 and proved as a test to the loyalists and the radicals.

In both elections, two candidates vied for support of the same 60 voters.

Although there were over 4,000 inhabitants in the Huron Tract by 1835, only freehold British male subjects over 21 were entitled to vote, which kept the number of eligible voters to just 60.

According to historian Yates, electors had to travel to Goderich from all over present-day Huron and Perth counties to declare their ballot. The future of the province was at stake as these elections became tests of the Huron Tract area’s loyalty to the Crown.

In 1835, it was ruled that the Huron Tract was entitled to send its own representative to the Upper Canadian Legislature in York.

In the 1835 election there were just two choices – Tory or Reformer.

In the previous year, 45-year-old Captain Robert Dunlop, Royal Navy war hero and brother of Dr. William ‘Tiger’ Dunlop, was chosen as the Tory champion.

He campaigned on his loyalty to the Crown, rather than defend the Canada Company’s incompetence.

For Huron Reformers, their choice was Anthony Van Egmond, who emigrated to Upper Canada from the Netherlands in 1828.

According to Yates, no other family worked harder to open the Huron Tract than the Van Egmonds, and in 1829, Susanne Van Egmond harvested the first wheat in the Huron Tract.

Van Egmond and his sons constructed major portions of the Huron and Lond Roads to allow access into the new settlement.

However, the cash strapped Canada Company refused to honour its agreement to pay cash for Van Egmond’s labour, giving reason to hate the system.

On election day, June 29, 1835, Captain Dunlop was paraded into towns by his mostly Scots supporters who wore blue ribbons in their bonnets as Union Jacks floated from nearly every corner of town.

His arrival was heralded by cheering supporters at Feltie Fisher’s Steamboat Hotel on the river flats and then taken to the hustings on the Goderich Square.

Despite three days of voting, Captain Dunlop was declared the winner with 35 votes to Van Egmond’s 25.

This defeat drove Van Egmond into the arms of radicals.

Despite a lacklustre career in his first year of politics, in the second election of 1836, Dunlop issued a loyalty manifesto asking voters to support their King, country, laws, liberties, and everything freemen hold sacred, as well as denouncing those wishing to sever Canada from the Crown.

For Van Egmond, this second election was a humiliating political disaster, reviled as a traitor.

He died in a York gaol within a year and a half awaiting trial for treason on his part in the 1837 rebellion.

Voters in Huron proved they were loyal to the Crown, as it rejected radicalism in both elections and continued to attract loyalists to immigrate from England.

During the first half of the 19th century, Canada became known as the land of hope, as everything was new, and moving forward.

In a letter written by Catherine Parr Traill, she describes Canada as a land with constant excitement on the minds of emigrants, particularly in settled townships where the arts, sciences, agriculture, manufacturing industries were advancing.

Once townships were developed and roads connecting the settlements were created, there was a wave of British migration to Canada in the 19th century. Between 1815 and 1850 Canada received almost one million settlers.

In what was once the wilderness, and eventually laid out into townships, the Huron Tract area continued to develop, and Goderich alongside it.

Despite hardships, industry continued to develop in the area and loyalist immigrants stayed faithful to the Crown and rejected the radicalism that was broadening across other colonies.

As a result of the lifework of the men who opened the roads, felled the trees, built the farmsteads, tilled the fields, and reaped the harvests, and of the women who made the homes, bore and nursed the children, and ennobled domestic life in the Huron Tract, the area continued to thrive and develop.

From a howling wilderness prior to The Canada Company surveying the area, to a cultivated and developing society during the 1830s and 1840s, Goderich was finally incorporated as a town in 1850.

This is an ongoing series of historical features to tell the story of Goderich, in each issue of the Goderich Sun, from June 2026 until June 2027, in anticipation of its bicentennial.