A Letter to the Editor of the Kingston Gazette, 27 Jul 1816

July 27, 1816 (Published in January 2017 Cataraqui Loyalist Town Crier)

COMMUNICATION.

Sir – The situation of the old settlers in the Province of Upper Canada is truly deplorable. These people settled in the wilds of Canada, then the Province of Quebec, under the surveys made by the acting surveyor General. Landmarks being established for the guidance of their improvements. No deeds were given them nor could be given them until the parliament of Great Britain altered the Quebec bill and arraigned a new constitution, for [?word] that they had lost in the revolution, in the Province of New York, from whence they chiefly came to settle at Frontenac, now Kingston. After cultivating the country agreeable to those surveys for twenty years and more, deeds are issued to cover those lots, drawn and cultivated as above mentioned. The Surveyor General David William Smith, Speaker of the House of Assembly, knowing that those deeds were filled up by guess, the survey never having been made complete, Mr. Smith wisely provided an act of the Legislature to prevent the deeds from moving the old land marks. This act provides that when thirty freeholders apply to the Magistrates in Petition, they shall make an assessment and collect the money to enable the Surveyor General to erect monuments, in order to preserve their ancient landmarks and boundaries. What is the reason that this act has not been complied with? Are the magistrates all landholders and their sons Lawyers?

An order from the Governor has lain in the Surveyor General’s office, ever since the year 1801, for monuments to be erected in the township of Kingston, agreeable to the intention of that act. – Why will not the magistrates do their duty? The consequence is, that the licenced surveyor John Ryder, is running new lines every day and moving the landmarks of the old settlers. People who have come into the country, from the States, marry into a family and obtain a lot of wild land, get John Rider [sic], to move the landmarks, and instead of a wild lot, take by force a fine House and barn and orchard and a well cultivated farm and turn the old Tory (as he is called) out of his house, and all his labour for 30 years.

These old settlers have suffered all that men could suffer; first in a seven years rebellion in the revolutionized colonies – then came to a remote wilderness, some hundred miles from any inhabitant – not a road, not a cow, or an ox or a horse to assist them. No bread to eat the winter they wintered first at Cataroque. A little pease and pork was all they could get until the ice gave way in the spring of 1785. The king as an acknowledgment and mark of his approbation for the loyalty and sufferings of His faithful subjects, ordered lands to be granted them, free from expence, and marked each man’s name with the letters U. E. with a grant annexed to each child as it became of age, of two hundred acres of the waste lands of the crown.

Now these children cannot get these lands agreeable to the intention of government – They must sell their rights to a set of speculators that hover round the seat of government, or never get them located: Or if they should have the good fortune to get a location ticket, it is situated on rocks and Lakes and barran [sic] lands, where they are worth nothing at all; the good lots being marked by the surveyors and located by those U.E. rights they have so purchased.

Now, sir, was I a scholar, I might draw you a much better description of this wickedness.

But I have lived to see thirteen colonies, now States of America, severed from the British empire by the maladministration of justice in the civil government of those colonies: the people’s minds were soured to that degree that a few designing men overthrew the government. After the conquest of Canada, the King ordered a thousand acres of land to be granted to each man – the land was granted; but the people to whom it was granted were deprived, by a set of speculators, from ever getting a foot, unless they became tenants to those who, in a manner, had robbed them of their rights.

A.G.