He is significant due to his role in the surveying and early settlement of large areas of Upper Canada, including much of the Bruce Peninsula and south shore of Lake Huron, and notably the city of Owen Sound.
[3] George married Mary Stuart (born in Bunker Hill, Massachusetts to Scottish immigrants[3]) and the couple had seven children: John (who became a medical doctor in Picton, Ontario),[4] Charles, George Junior (who became an army surgeon in India),[4] James (died young), Susan, Kate, and Arthur, the seventh child,[5] who also became a land surveyor.
[5][6] The elder Rankins would later move to Amherstburg,[6] York (now Toronto),[4] and finally Bytown (now Ottawa),[4] but Charles' life would diverge from theirs before that point.
Militiamen and soldiers received land grants, and the re-fortification of the north shore of the Great Lakes during the war enriched the merchants, farmers, and mill owners who supplied the forts.
Development agencies like the Canada Company were formed, and by the middle of the 19th century the government would be laying out the colonization roads to key destinations, with townships along the way, creating secure land-based routes between the previously scattered and isolated lakeshore settlements which had been vulnerable to American interdiction and blockade during the War of 1812.
On 27 December 1820,[4] Charles Rankin was appointed deputy provincial land surveyor for Upper Canada's Hesse (or Western) District by Peregrine Maitland,[8] the 4th lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, who was also an early advocate of the Canadian Indian residential school system as a means to deepen British control of the province's indigenous population.
[9]: 55–57 Initially based in the township of Malden near Amherstburg, Rankin developed a close understanding of the region's natural geography throughout the 1820s.
In the early 1830s, he would survey a number of townships scattered throughout the province in rapid succession: in 1830, Eldon and Fenelon in what would become Victoria County (now the city of Kawartha Lakes); in 1831, Presquisle or Presqu'ile Point; in 1833, the Nottawasaga Bay area (where he settled on some 200 acres (0.81 km2) of land west of the present town of Thornbury);[1] and in 1834, Loughborough (now the community of Sydenham in Frontenac County), Gore, Crowland (now a part of the city of Welland in Niagara Region), Humberston or Humberstone (now a part of Port Colborne), and Blanford or Blandford (now the township of Blandford-Blenheim in Oxford County).
[10] Today these scattered groups are referred to as the Saugeen Ojibway Nation, and the original Nawash reserve land is a part of the city of Owen Sound.
[4] Throughout the early 1840s, Rankin continued his survey work around Owen Sound and the south shore of Lake Huron, laying out secondary town sites as well as separate townships: Holland and Sullivan in Grey County in 1845; Saugeen, Indian Bay, and Derby (also Grey County) in 1846; and Kempenfeldt and Barrie Park in 1847.
[4] Charles Rankin's death date and burial location are disputed, with sources variously claiming that he moved to Millbrook to live with his daughter, where he died on 15 March 1886 and was buried in St. James Cemetery in Toronto, alongside his wife and parents; or that he died on 12 October 1888 and is buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Owen Sound.
In another claim filed in 1994, both the Saugeen First Nation and Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation challenged the Crown on its alleged failure to uphold the terms of Treaty 72, which instructed "[t]hat the interest of the principal sum arising out of the sale of our lands be regularly paid, to ourselves and our children in perpetuity, so long as there are Indians left to represent our tribe, without diminution, at half-yearly periods,"[16] and requested reparations in the form of $90 billion, as well as the return of unsold Crown lands in the Treaty 72 area, much of it still existing in the form of twenty-metre shore allowances left by surveyors like Charles Rankin.