[13] They depended for their certainty on an earlier treaty known as the McKee Purchase of 1790, signed at Detroit with 35 chiefs from the Potawatomi, Wyandot, Ojibwe, and Odawa First Nations.

The immediate purpose was for better organization of the local militia and the improvement of the social order by the appointment of a lord lieutenant, part of the aristocratic framework for the new province that had been put in place by Governor Simcoe.

[15] As first established, Oxford County consisted of the townships of Blenheim, Burford, Oxford-on-the-Thames, Blandford, Norwich, and Dereham (lands to the north of the Thames River had not yet been purchased by the Crown).

Gourlay's two-volume Statistical account of Upper Canada, compiled with a view to a grand system of emigration, published in London in 1822, presented a detailed analysis based upon reports submitted to him by citizen groups in 57 townships who yearned for improvements.

[22] A new government program that gave preferential grants to encourage retired British military officers to settle in Upper Canada in the 1830s was successful in bringing many to Oxford who showed a determination to make Woodstock the seat of a new local aristocracy, just as Simcoe had envisioned 40 years earlier.

The "father of the settlement" at Woodstock was Rear-Admiral Henry Vansittart, surrounded by an assortment of retired army and navy officers who had been schooled in the Napoleonic Wars.

[23] Resentment of the old settlers grew to rebellion, with Oxford's elected member in the legislative assembly, Dr. Charles Duncombe, taking on the role as leader of an uprising in December 1837.

[24] In the aftermath, Duncombe was driven into exile, and one of the Woodstock retired Royal Navy veterans, Captain Andrew Drew (Vansittart's right-hand man), created an international incident that is still studied by legal scholars, when he led a raid into the United States to seize and burn a paddlewheel steamer being used in the Niagara River by the exiled rebels, leaving it to drift over Niagara Falls.

[25] The decade of political turmoil that followed resulted in greater democratic government at the local and provincial levels, as Oxford repeatedly elected Reformers to serve as the county's representative in the legislative assembly.

His analysis of place of birth shows that more than half (17,990) of the county's population had been born in the province, and of the remainder, the largest groups were from Scotland (4,685), England (3,724), the United States (2,618), Ireland (2,371), and Germany (322).

A large proportion of these were granted their own post offices and thus became known as "postal villages", details of which can be found in the online database maintained by Library and Archives Canada.

[42] For the first several generations of European settlement, knowledge of First Nations occupation was limited to souvenir hunters who searched freshly-plowed fields for whatever relics had turned up.

[47] Since then, the Oxford Historical Society has published a series of booklets as history bulletins and a quarterly newsletter, and also ensures that more recent books by local historians are kept in print and available for purchase.

Thomas Ingersoll bore the expense of making the path passable for wagons between Brant's Ford and the Thames River as part of his efforts to develop Oxford township in the mid-1790s.

The wisdom of a road link from Burlington Bay (Hamilton) through Brantford into Oxford has been reaffirmed with the completion of Highway 403, which also joins the 401 to the east of Woodstock.

[56] An electric street railway joined Woodstock and Ingersoll through Beachville from 1900 to the 1920s, but was replaced by a bus service which succumbed in the 1940s to private automobiles as the preferred mode of travel thereafter.

[57] Woodstock has developed a transit system which now operates a fleet of 11 buses six days a week, and charter bus companies have experimented with other local services.

[60] The first two cows were brought into Oxford-on-the-Thames by Thomas Ingersoll in the 1790s, and by 1810 the township was famous for butter and cheese made by farmers' wives for local sale.

The queen of cheesemakers was Lydia Ranney on their family farm just south of Ingersoll, who was creating thousand pound cheeses for prize competitions at provincial expositions by the 1840s.

[63] When wheat yields fell as a result of soil exhaustion and insect infestations by the 1860s, greater reliance was placed on dairying for butter and cheesemaking.

The seasonal workforce demands drew annual influxes of migrant workers and conditions which were made legend in Stompin' Tom Connors' 1970 hit song "Tillsonburg".

[67] The pioneer scene with a few hens scratching in the yard and a rooster crowing atop a fence rail has long since given way to giant poultry barns.

[70] Efforts in Dorchester Township just to the west of Oxford's boundary by William Reynolds and Seth Putnam were more successful, but production from their saw mills remained on a small scale for many years.

[73] Export of sawn lumber eventually became a booming market by the 1840s, increased with the improvement of roads by toll companies,[74] and even more so after the construction of railways through Oxford.

Cold Springs was founded by W. Harvey Beatty (1916–1994), a dynamo who worked around crippling injuries to build an enterprise starting in Thamesford in 1949 that eventually included 60 farms in Ontario.

A deposit of unusual purity 100 feet deep stretches from Norwich up to Embro through the centre of the county, with potential extraction volumes of 3.5 billion tonnes.

Residents of Ingersoll and surrounding area have been in a militant state of opposition since the announcement in 2012 that the international conglomerate Carmeuse intends to give a 20-year lease to Walker Industries to operate a megadump taking in garbage from Toronto and London to fill the spent portion of the limestone quarry operated by Carmeuse on its nearly 2,000 acres stretching east and north from Ingersoll's eastern boundary.

As a preliminary, it will conduct a pilot Alternative Low-Carbon Fuels ("ALCF") project to assess pollution levels that result from burning 'engineered' garbage to be trucked in from New York state.

[98] Lafarge and its 1,400 acres north of the Carmeuse lands are not a part of the Walker/Carmeuse garbage landfill/recycling proposal currently in contention, and Oxford County residents are concerned Walker has declined to disclose its future business plans for the quarry sites other than the nearly 200 acre section being made available by Carmeuse along Ingersoll's eastern boundary for which Walker seeks megadump approval.

[101] Internet access has been important to preserving social connectedness as the ongoing process in Oxford of economizing through centralization has caused neighbourhood schools, churches, post offices and businesses to close.