From Queenston to Kingston. Ron Brown
By the water’s edge, Grimsby Park offers a shady respite from summer’s heat, as it did many years before, while down on the lake, traces of the pier remain, buried now under more recent fill.
The bell from the Grimsby Beach meeting ground is preserved in a park surrounded by camp cottages.
The village of Grimsby was once quite separate from the Methodist Camp at Grimsby Beach. It began to grow as a mill town on the banks of Forty Mile Creek. The first settler on the Forty was said to be a Captain Hendrick Nelles, whose son Robert built the area’s first mills on the creek. The sites lay along the St. Catharines Road, inland from the lake. In 1846, William H. Smith would describe Grimsby as “beautifully situated on the St. Catharines Road … in the midst of some very fine scenery…. During the summer it is a favourite destination of pleasure seekers from Hamilton.”21
A harbour was developed where the creek flowed into the lake and where schooners called at the wharves to carry off such products as lumber and wheat. When the Great Western Railway built its line closer to the main road, business at the harbour decreased. Grimsby still boasts a powerhouse from this era, located on the lake along with the remains of the wharf. A busy marina now occupies most of the one-time harbour. Although the picturesque station built by the Grand Trunk in the 1890s burned a decade ago, the original Great Western station still stands close to the track, now a private business operation.
But it was the Nelles family who dominated much of Grimsby’s early history, and much remains of their legacy. At 126 Main Street West the grand home built by Robert Nelles between 1788 and 1798 still survives. Other Nelles family homes are also still standing — the one at 139 Lake Road, known as the “Hermitage” was built by Robert’s brother William in 1800, while William’s son Adolphus built “Lake Lawn” in 1846, found today at 376 Nelles Road North.
Geographically, the head of Lake Ontario is somewhat complex. Two sections of the mighty Niagara Escarpment form a wide steep-sided valley where the walls converge to the west, creating the spectacular Dundas Valley. Here the waters of Lake Ontario reach their western extremity. But before they do, they encounter two hurdles.
One is a sand strip or beach bar separating the main body of the lake to the east from a bay known variously as Lake Geneva or Burlington Bay to the west. At the western end of Burlington Bay lies yet another, higher barrier, Burlington Heights — the remains of an ancient beach deposited by the waters of Lake Iroquois. Beyond this ridge lies the lake’s westernmost body of water, Cootes Paradise, which breaches the Burlington Heights through a small stream known as Morden Creek. Burlington Bay flows into the lake through an occasional breach in the sandbar at the north end of the strip. At least that was how the first Europeans encountered it.
When John Graves Simcoe was obliged to relocate the province’s capital from Newark, he chose a site a safe distance away, in fact so distant that he was told to abandon it. That site was to have been at the forks of the distant Thames River, the location of today’s busy metropolitan centre of London. To access that location, he ordered that a road be laid out from the head of Cootes Paradise to the Thames. Simcoe named that starting point King’s Landing, a landing which, along with the community of Dundas Mills, developed into the town of Dundas.
But Lord Dorchester refused to consider the manning of two garrisons, and ordered Simcoe to forget the Thames and instead locate the new capital near the ruins of an old French fort named Fort Toronto. But as was his custom, Simcoe eschewed the aboriginal name and selected the name York. The location had the advantage over the forks of the Thames in that, while the harbour offered a military advantage, it also lay on Lake Ontario, then the only means of moving troops and supplies. Thus, the head of the lake was no longer the jumping-off point to a new territorial seat of government.
Hamilton developed later than Dundas. The parcel of land that forms the old section of the city today was originally bought by James Durand, the local member of the British Legislative Assembly, who in 1815 sold it, along with his palatial house, to George Hamilton, a local early settler and son of Robert Hamilton, the Queenston entrepreneur. Hamilton, along with another local property owner, Nathaniel Hughson, went on to acquire and subdivide more parcels in 1813, naming early streets James, John, Hunter, and Catherine, after family members. In 1816 he convinced the government to designate the town site as the administrative centre for the District of Gore.
Hamilton was elected as the MLA for the Gore District and lobbied for improvements to Burlington Bay. Up until that time, any exported goods had be hauled across the sand spit, or poled through the occasional breach at the north end, into waiting schooners. Between 1823 and 1832, a canal was cut through the sand strip, allowing vessels to come and go from the harbour with greater ease.
As Smith described it in 1851: “The town of Hamilton was laid out in 1813, but for many years its progress was very slow…. The completion of the Burlington Bay Canal however gave it access to the lake and formed the commencement of a new era in its history.”1 Soon a bustling and doubtless rowdy little community grew at Port Hamilton, well to the north of Hamilton’s original town site.
Railway days were soon to arrive. As early as 1837, lawyer Allan Napier McNab, who had moved to Port Hamilton from York in 1826, had earned much of his fortune through land speculation, and was promoting the building of the London and Gore Railroad, which in the end failed to gain sufficient financing. He did manage, however, to start the Great Western Railway, and by 1850 it had been surveyed from the Niagara River to the Detroit River, with Hamilton as its headquarters. Smith saw potential there, too: “Hamilton is admirably situated for carrying on a large wholesale trade with the West — being at the head of navigation of Lake Ontario and in the heart of the settled portion of the province.”2
This early view from the mid-1870s shows Hamilton’s Great Western rail yards and docks.
Before the rails were laid, Port Hamilton consisted of several small streams that cut their channels into the soft silt of the lake bottom. Pilings more than ten metres deep were required to anchor the many private piers that stabbed out into the bay. McNab’s first wharf originally stood near the foot of Bay Street and is known today as Pier 4. Nearby was the first location of the prestigious Royal Hamilton Yacht Club (RHYC). It lasted here until 1891, when encroaching industry began to reduce the ambience of the location, and an elaborate new clubhouse was built beside the Burlington Canal. Upon its completion, Queen Victoria consented to the use of the word royal — one of only ten yacht clubs in Canada to have earned that distinction. After the new clubhouse burned in 1915, the RHYC returned to its original Bay Street site, and erected a newer clubhouse in 1938 at the foot of nearby McNab, where it remains today.
Other early operations on Hamilton’s bayfront were the Leander Rowing Club and H.L. Bastien’s boathouse. During its heyday as the main passenger line on the Great Lakes, and while also operating several amusement parks, Canada Steamship Lines maintained an office at the foot of Wentworth Street. Following an investigation into the tragic fire on the Noronic in Toronto on September 14, 1949, which killed upwards of 140 people, the company was faulted for its lack of fire alarms, escape plans, and extinguishers. Partly as a result of those findings, Canada Steamships decided to focus instead on freight. McKay’s Wharf, at the foot of James Street, was built to handle larger ships, which began to enter Hamilton Harbour as soon as the Burlington Canal was opened, and ferries such as SS Lady Hamilton puffed out from their slips near James Street.
McNab had by this time purchased a property on Burlington Heights, where he constructed the magnificent Dundurn Castle. From his new perch he could look down upon his railway empire, as the Great