Loyalists and Settlers

Southern Hastings County was settled by people who were essentially refugees from the American Revolution, also known as the American Revolutionary War. For various reasons they retained their loyalty to the British colonial system rather than embark on the republican route favoured by the revolutionaries.

Deprived of their sources of income, harassed and intimidated by revolutionaries, a large percentage chose to flee northward. Of the 70,000 Loyalists who fled the 13 colonies, about 50,000 moved northward to the British colonies of Quebec and Nova Scotia. Many of them were professionals who, by revolutionary law, had lost the right to practise their professions.

Quebec at that time included what is now Ontario. The Constitutional Act of 1791 partitioned Quebec into Lower and Upper Canada (now Ontario). Land along the north shores of Lake Ontario, Lake Erie and the St. Lawrence was acquired by the government from the Indians and Loyalists began to settle the land. Lt.-Gov. John Graves Simcoe offered additional incentives to attract more settlers from the new United States.

Loyalists moved first into Prince Edward County and then into the southernmost townships of Hastings. The first parties of Loyalist settlers arrived in the Bay of Quinte area in June 1784. A prominent Loyalist was Captain John Walker Meyers who built a mill on the Moira River in 1790 and founded the settlement that became Belleville. The first settlers reached the future town of Trenton in 1790 when James Smith and John Richard Bleecker took up their land grants.

The Bay of Quinte region has become known as "Loyalist Country" for the origins of its inhabitants. Today many residents can trace their families back to Loyalist ancestors. Later generations of these Loyalist families would make their way into northern regions of the county.

A monument to the arrival of the Loyalists was established in Belleville in 1924, on the 140th anniversary of the arrival of the Loyalists. Eighty years later the monument was moved across the intersection of Front and Dundas streets and was relocated and refurbished on its current site.