History of Hamilton, Ontario
Hamilton, from the point at which it was first colonized by settlers, has benefited from its geographical proximity to major land and water transportation routes along the Niagara Peninsula and Lake Ontario.
Indigenous groups loyal to the Crown, under their leader Captain Joseph Brant, were settled in several nearby areas of what became Upper Canada in 1791 and ultimately Ontario in 1867.
[4] The United Empire Loyalists moved into the Hamilton area during and after the American War of Independence as well, dramatically boosting the population and economic development of the region between the original Upper Canadian capital at Newark (now Niagara-on-the-Lake) and the new one at York (now Toronto).
James Durand, the local Member of the British Legislative Assembly, was empowered by Hughson and Hamilton to sell property holdings which later became the site of the town.
As he had been instructed, Durand circulated the offers at York during a session of the Legislative Assembly and a new Gore District was established of which the Hamilton town site was a member.
In 1813, the British regulars and Canadian militia defeated invading American troops at the Battle of Stoney Creek which was fought in what is now a park in eastern Hamilton.
[9] George Hamilton, a settler and local politician, established a town site in the northern portion Barton Township after the war in 1815.
[4] Gore Park, whose western boundary is King and James Streets, formed the public square for the new settlement and has remained the centre of the city ever since.
It was only supplanted as the court site by a move across the street in the 1990s as part of an architectural preservation project for the Post Office and Dominion Public Building.
Completion of this railway and the Niagara Suspension Bridge transformed Hamilton into a major centre and part of the American immigration route from New York City or Boston to Chicago or Milwaukee.
The GWR’s maintenance and marshalling yards were located in Hamilton, and the city got its first taste of the steel industry as it re-rolled rails imported from Britain.
Other industrial ventures conducted in the Ambitious City (a phrase adopted by ‘’The Spectator" from detractors in Toronto) and Birmingham of Canada included manufactured tobacco, beer and other consumer products.
Patriotic Britons and native born Canadians of British stock erected many public monuments downtown to honour John A. Macdonald, Queen Victoria and the United Empire Loyalists.
While staying at his parents’ Brantford home in neighbouring Brant County, Alexander Graham Bell conceived of the idea of the telephone in 1874 and made the first experimental long-distance call to Paris, Ontario in 1876.
As it was absorbed by Hamilton Electric Light and Power Company in 1899, HSR workers joined Division (now Local) 107 of the predecessor of the current Amalgamated Transit Union.
The route circumnavigates Burlington Bay and, although it is not a proper marathon, it is the longest continuously held long distance foot race in North America.
Adelaide Hoodless and other founded the first Women’s Institute in Saltfleet Township (Stoney Creek) in 1897 and began her educational campaign for home economics.
Ernest D’Israeli Smith, after being frustrated by paying to have his fruit transported from the Stoney Creek area, had founded a company in 1882 to market directly to wholesalers and eliminate the middleman.
The working class voters of Hamilton East, sympathetic to the ATU, elected Allan Studholme as their Member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.
For years he stood as the lone labour representative in the legislature, championing the eight-hour day, workmen's compensation, the minimum wage and women's suffrage.
Stelco and Dofasco, as they became colloquially and then legally known, were located in the north end to take advantage of the transportation and cooling opportunities provided by access to the water.
McCurdy won that contest, sponsored in part by the newly minted Hamilton Automobile Club (now CAA South Central Ontario).
Emigration continued from Britain and the United States (chiefly blacks) during this period as local museums show, but also began from other countries such as Italy and Austria-Hungary.
Remarkably, thousands of Italian Hamiltonians are descendants of emigrants in this period from a single Sicilian town, commemorated by the dual naming of Murray Street as Corso Raculmuto.
Heavy industry boomed as the Canadian and British governments' war driven demands for steel, arms, munitions and textiles increased.
Unfortunately, in their quest to expand, the twin steel giants damaged the land by infilling Hamilton Harbour and burying or diverting many creeks which formerly flowed into the bay.
The simultaneous and prolonged decline in domestic consumption and international trade in finished industrial goods and building supplies put a stop to residential and institutional construction for a decade.
[24] Practical relief was found in government works projects designed to prime the economy and which added to the long-term attractiveness of Hamilton.
Men of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry (colloquially known as the Rileys) and the rest of the 2nd Canadian Division were mobilized early, but sat on their hands in Britain for two years.
The Hamilton area was also active in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF): the city proper sponsored 424 "Tiger" Squadron by buying bombers to equip it.
