Surveyors

Taming the Land

Surveyors were the ones who began to impose order on the wilderness of Hastings County. In the late 1700s they divided the land along "The Front", the waters of the Bay of Quinte, into neat townships with concession lines and lots. The gentle farmland townships of Thurlow, Sidney and Tyendinaga appeared on maps, followed by Rawdon, Huntingdon and Hungerford.

Map: North Hastings as it was in 1894. The map shows the Central Ontario Railway route to the iron mine in Coe Hill but not to Bancroft, where it arrived in 1900. Ormsby is identified as Rathbun.

Surveying was never easy work and it became even tougher as the surveyors entered the the Precambrian Shield country north of Madoc. Marmora, Madoc and Elzevir townships were followed by Lake, Tudor and Grimesthorpe. The colonization road scheme of 1854 dictated the surveying of reasonably straight roads on a wildly undulating landscape, forcing through the Hastings Road north to meet Monck and Peterson roads. Surveyors with colourful names such as Publius V. Elmore became associated with opening the north.

Where the lands in the south were closely settled agricultural plains, the north was sparsely settled by isolated mining and lumbering communities. Here and there farmers scratched out an existence on patches of arable land among the rocky hills. Along the colonization roads, surveyors divided the land into smaller 50-acre lots for settlers who were required to build houses and cultivate the land.

Until the roads were surveyed and opened, northern Hastings was accessible only by trails and by rivers. The work of the surveyors began the process of taming the land.