In 1827, Colonel Anthony Van Egmond immigrated with his family to Waterloo County in Upper Canada. During the previous eight years they had lived in Indiana County, Pennsylvania. Within months of arriving in Upper Canada they homesteaded on the Huron Road (now the Provincial Highway 8) midway between Seaforth and Clinton.
The Van Egmonds were originally from the Netherlands. In contrast with most settlers in the New World, they were a family of means. Anthony and his eldest son Constantin were educated men, fluent and literate in German, Dutch, French and English. Colonel Van Egmond had fought on both sides in the Napoleonic wars. To the men of power in Upper Canada, Van Egmond seemed a man who they could entrust with important responsibilities in the settlement of the Huron Tract. These responsibilities were to be taken on by Van Egmond and were to mean much to the arriving settlers.
The Huron Tract was a wedge-shaped territory, with Galt at its apex and Lake Huron as its base. It comprised more than one million acres. It had been ceded to the newly formed Canada Company three years earlier in 1824. Some of the well known personalities who would be connected with the Van Egmonds - John Galt, Major Samuel Strickland and Dr. William ‘Tiger’ Dunlop - were also connected to the Canada Company. Concerned that the settlement of the Tract was proceeding slowly because of lack of roads, these men convinced Anthony and Constantin Van Egmond to serve as general contractors for the building of a road to link Waterloo and Lake Huron. This was a unique idea in colonization. Typically, good roads were built only after the arrival of colonists. In this case the road was to be built before the arrival of settlers to the area. After the Van Egmond’s road had been pushed through to Goderich in 1828, the Huron Tract filled up rapidly. Amazingly, the Van Egmonds reaped the first field of wheat in the Tract in the same year.
In return for building the road, the Canada Company was to reward Van Egmond in land and cash. He duly received the land - almost thirteen thousand acres in all - but no cash was forthcoming. John Galt, as Commissioner, had wanted to pay Van Egmond; but in 1829, before this could happen, Galt was recalled to England over some accounting irregularities. Galt was replaced by Thomas Mercer Jones, a man of dubious integrity.
Between 1828 and 1836 the settling of the Huron Tract was beset by many problems. Most of these problems can be blamed on the unwillingness of the Canada Company to honour the conditions set down in their own contracts with the settlers. Where were the promised side roads, concession divisions, bridges, canals, schools, churches and wharves that the Canada Company had promised? The combination of the usual hardships of pioneering life and the blatant negligence of the Canada Company did little to encourage continued immigration to the Tract. Indeed, a number of the existing settlers in the Tract soon left for the United States. Despite all this, the Van Egmonds prospered at first. Anthony and Constant continued to run their farm, and they established a store and a mill at what is now Egmondville. But even their prosperity was threatened by the Canada Company’s mismanagement.
In a petition made to the Board of Proprietors of the Canada Company, settlers made this statement concerning
our worthy and respected friends, Van Egmond.They wrote of the Colonel’s monetary difficulties.
. . . he certainly kept money from leaving the Tract, but it brought himself into pecuniary difficulties. He will hardly be relieved of unless it be by the good character he bears. Moveable and immoveable property he has plenty, but (he) cannot get a dollar for it at present, and besides about 3000 pounds remain due him from advances made to settlers....
One can understand better the reasons for the widespread admiration of the Van Egmonds if one reads the minutes of meetings of a reform group that sprang up in the district in protest to the Canada Company’ s mismanagement. The Colonel as Chairman is addressed:
It was you and you alone Sir, who, when orders were received to open a temporary road from Waterloo to Lake Huron and Mr. Galt had not a dollar to give towards it (and) advanced the means for executing those orders for opening that road. Finally it was you and you alone Sir, who by buying and paying for with your own money, and sending to Goderich, two loads of flour, saved the lives of the people left there the first winter... You Sir, ventured to that place, a journey of then upwards of ninety miles without a house in that distance, through a gloomy wilderness and a very, very deep snow to extricate those people from their situation.At another meeting he was addressed thus:
It was you Sir, who while in ill health, accompanied by your son, then of age to assist you in your humane and Christian exertions, left your family forty miles behind you in the woods, and flew to the assistance of the sufferers at the eastern extremity of the Tract, at the first news of the cholera having broken out among them, riding whole days and nights to procure a physician, medicines etc. to the spot, not allowing yourself half the necessary rest your age and sickness entitled you to and rendered necessary.
The praise goes on, giving further examples of Van Egmond’s concern and generosity. There seemed to be little doubt amongst the settlers of that time as to who in fact was responsible for supporting the settlement to the Tract and maintaining the settlers in the early years.
But Anthony Van Egmond was to fall into disrepute. In 1837, angered at the injustices of the Canada Company and the ruling Family Compact based in York (Toronto), the Colonel was persuaded by William Lyon Mackenzie to command rebel forces in a popular uprising which took place near York on December 7, 1837. Van Egmond was a natural choice as commander-in-chief as few of the rebels had any sort of military background. Events might have gone differently for the rebels had Mackenzie taken the Colonel’s advice. But he did not. The rebellion was a disaster and Anthony was quickly captured. He died awaiting trial in January 1838. Having been branded a rebel, it is not surprising that his role in the settling of the Huron Tract has not received the attention it deserves.
Constant Van Egmond
With the worst years of struggle behind them, the people of Huron no longer needed a saviour. Constant Van Egmond did not have to take on the role that his father had filled in former years. But he was still a man whom the settlers styled as ‘hardly surpassed in sentiments of benevolence and honesty’ and a ‘promoter of what was fair and good’. He knew and practiced ‘generosity and lack of pride . . . to gain good will and consideration in this country’. This was not a eulogy for an elderly patriarch but praise in public print for a man only twenty-seven years old. After the December 1837 rebellion, Constant continued to build in the Huron Tract. The drama of the turbulent past was gone, and to a large extent the family reputation was gone too. Most of his father’s thirteen thousand acres had been confiscated by the government. When the Colonel was granted a full pardon thirteen years later, no recompense was made. Constant was instrumental in the growing prosperity of the Tract. He farmed, owned a gristmill, a flour mill, a distillery and a lumber mill. He accepted the responsibilities of Town Clerk, District Commissioner, Magistrate, Commissioner of the Queen’s Bench, and Lieutenant-Colonel of the Militia. He was held (as noted in the Canadian Biographical Dictionary) in universal esteem.
In 1846, Constant built his house, the Van Egmond residence, which was to long remain the social centre for the community that grew around it. The community that developed did so largely through the industry of Constant, his brothers, and brothers-in-law. Among them they controlled much of the industry in the area: whisky, woolens, hotels, haberdashery and the mills. Today these establishments have disappeared and the family’s rightful thirteen thousand acres are in many other hands. Apart from the scattered descendants of Anthony Van Egmond, only three things remain of his enterprise: the territory that has become Huron County, the Huron Road that has become Provincial Highway 8, and the house Constant built more than one hundred and fifty years ago – the Van Egmond House.