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city in Ontario, Canada
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Cornwall is a city in Eastern Ontario, Canada, situated where the provinces of Ontario and Quebec and the U.S. state of New York converge. It is Ontario's easternmost city. Although it is the seat of the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry, Cornwall is administered independently from the county.
Cornwall is named after the English Duchy of Cornwall; the city's coat of arms is based on that of the duchy with its colours reversed and the addition of a "royal tressure," a Scottish symbol of royalty.
It is the urban centre for the surrounding communities of Long Sault and Ingleside to the west; the Mohawk Territory of Akwesasne to the south; St. Andrews West and Avonmore to the north; and Glen Walter, Martintown, Apple Hill, Williamstown, and Lancaster to the east.
The city is located along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River and is home to the St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corporation, which oversees navigation and shipping activities for the St. Lawrence Seaway. It lies within the Quebec City–Windsor Corridor along Ontario Highway 401, is a major port of entry from the United States into Canada, and is positioned to support some of Cornwall's largest industries, which include logistics, distribution, and call centres.
Though accounts suggest Europeans filtered into the area and had scattered settlements for some time, the first documented European settlement was established in 1784 by United Empire Loyalists, primarily from the former British colony of New York. In 1787 this settlement became the first in present-day Ontario to be visited by a member of the royal family, Prince William Henry (later William IV).
After the war for US independence, former colonial soldiers loyal to the Crown and other disbanded soldiers and their families were afraid for their lives or uncomfortable in the newly independent United States became United Empire Loyalists as they were later called, and migrated to Canada.
The British government helped them settle throughout the Canadas as a reward for their loyalty and to compensate them for their losses in the United States. One of the chief settlement regions was the St Lawrence River Valley, from Kingston to Cornwall, which would later be known as "Loyalist Country."
Some began to settle at the site of Cornwall, which was then called New Johnstown. Here, many of the new arrivals were of ethnic German, Acts and English origin, and the town is named for Johnstown, New York, the origin of many of them.
The main group was led by Lieutenant-Colonel Sir John Johnson and had soldiers from the First Battalion King's Royal Regiment of New York and a contingent of the 84th Regiment of Foot (Royal Highland Emigrants).
They founded a permanent settlement north of one of a series of portage points (the point was not a settlement, nor was it even a trading post), sometimes referred to as Pointe Maligne by French explorers. The square mile town was temporarily named "Royal Town #2" then "Johnson" or "New Johnstown." It was later renamed to Cornwall for the Duke of Cornwall by the proclamation of Prince George. In 1834, the town became one of the first incorporated municipalities in the British colony of Upper Canada. Much later, during one of a series of annexations, those former portage points were added to the expanded community.
During the War of 1812, the Battle of Hoople's Creek and the Battle of Crysler's Farm were fought nearby. Cornwall was occupied by the United States Army from November 11–13, 1813.
The construction of the Cornwall Canal between 1834 and 1842 accelerated the community's development into a regional and industrial economic "capital" for a growing hinterland of towns and villages.
In 1846, the population was about 1,600, and there were many brick and stone houses, a stone courthouse and jail, and several government offices. There was little industry except for a foundry and two tanneries, but there were many independent tradesmen of various types. Other amenities included two bank agencies, eight taverns, and a ladies' school.
Canal and lock construction in the late 1800s and the early 1900s brought work and international business. The Grand Trunk Railway (CN Rail) built an east-west line through Cornwall in 1856. The New York and Ottawa Railway (NY&O) followed with a north-south line crossing the St. Lawrence, and a station in Cornwall dating to 1898. The Canadian Pacific Railway created a succession of subsidiaries and plans for a Cornwall line starting in the 1880s, which culminated in the Glengarry and Stormont Railway in 1915 to connect to CP's Ontario and Quebec Railway mainline to the northeast for an alternative route to Montreal.
In 1879, a visitor from Scotland enthusiastically declared that the Lochaber dialect of Scottish Gaelic language was better preserved, "with the most perfect accent, and with scarcely any, if any, admixture of English", in Glengarry County and in Cornwall than in Lochaber itself.
The railway connections linked Cornwall and local communities that required access to public services in Cornwall itself, such as high schools and medical services, and helped cement Cornwall's position as a regional centre for a large, rapidly expanding, and increasingly populated rural hinterland. The network of villages and towns surrounding Cornwall helped make the city a local entrepot for business, commerce, media and services.
In 1944, the city was rocked by the magnitude 5.8 Cornwall–Massena earthquake. There were no deaths or injuries reported, but several chimneys were destroyed or damaged, along with heavy damage to historical masonry structures. For example, the Cornwall Collegiate and Vocational School received heavy damage from masonry work falling through the roof of the gymnasium. Part of the school had to be demolished and reconstructed.
West of Cornwall, along the St. Lawrence River, there were several smaller communities that became known as the Lost Villages. They were submerged in 1958 during the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, providing a reservoir for the Moses-Saunders Power Dam, which regulates water levels flowing from Lake Ontario and maintains the levels required to operate the two adjacent Canada-US hydroelectric power generating stations.
The post-contact regional population was a mixture of French Canadian, Ojibwe and Mohawk residents. Then came an influx of American Loyalists and refugees from the Thirteen Colonies, along with other French Canadian and Acadian migrants. Then poor Scottish and Irish immigrants and refugees who arrived from overseas and other parts of Canada. The different groups mixed and integrated over time, with family names and histories reflecting a blending of different backgrounds that became typical of Eastern Ontario.
Smaller but impressive contributions in the region were made by a host of other migrants, from Jewish traders, craftsmen, and merchants to Eastern European refugees and even a significant body of former slaves. Many of the stories go unreported in standard histories, which pass over the remarkable history of migration in the region. One good example is the story of John Baker, who died in Cornwall in 1871 at the age of 93. Born in Lower Canada, he was said to be the last Canadian born into slavery and had been an active soldier in the War of 1812 who fought in both Canada and Europe. Slavery was ended in the colony of Upper Canada in stages; in 1793, the importing of slaves was banned, and in 1819, Upper Canada Attorney-General John Robinson declared all slaves in the colony to be freed, making Upper Canada the first place in the British Empire and even the world that unequivocally moved towards the formal abolition of chattel slavery. Most of the former slaves settled and integrated into the same communities in which they were freed. By 1833, this process of liberation had succeeded throughout the British Empire by the decision to free all of its slaves. It was the first major state in world history to abolish slavery, and Ontario was the place where the process first bore fruit. John Baker, the last slave to be born into slavery in Canada, died in Cornwall.
"Canada" had been conquered from France after the Seven Years' War and included roughly the areas covered by Quebec and Ontario. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the British authorities divided the Province of Canada in 1791 into two: Upper Canada for English settlers fleeing persecution in the United States and Lower Canada for the French. That was designed to accommodate Loyalists who had fled postwar reprisals and persecution in the new United States, but the 5,000 English-speaking settlers in the Eastern Township of Quebec were allowed to stay in the French-speaking area, and many French settlers moved into Ontario. Along with the area's original inhabitants, that made the area a patchwork of intersecting ethnicities that later greatly intermingled. Cornwall and the surrounding area, originally called "Royal Settlement #2" and then "New Jamestown," was initially a rough place and was largely left to its own devices. According to contemporary reports, that bred a local culture of intense self-reliance. Adding to the initial history of pragmatic entrepreneurialism, since very early with the founding of the city, provincial and federal governments have typically neglected the area and treated it as little more than a transit corridor. Those who remained in the region tended to be those who had the fortitude and the energy to survive on their own, with little outside assistance.
"The original 516 settlers arrived in Royal Township #2 with minimal supplies and faced years of hard work and possible starvation. Upon their departure from military camps in Montreal, Pointe Claire, Saint Anne, and Lachine in the fall of 1784, Loyalists were given a tent, one month's worth of food rations, clothes, and agricultural provisions by regiment commanders. They were promised one cow for every two families, an axe, and other necessary tools in the near future. For the next three years, bateaux (boat) crews delivered rations to the township, after which residents were left to fend for themselves."
The region's energetic spirit of enterprise and fortitude was well-known in the 19th century. David Thompson, the Welsh-Canadian explorer who mapped the Far West and was called the greatest land geographer in history, drew many of his travelling companions from Cornwall's rural hinterland, with Scottish and native settlers, and he lived in Williamstown.
More recently, Cornwall has seen an increase in the arrival of new immigrants, who tend to integrate and often fare better than immigrants in other parts of the country.
The Cornwall region was unusually integrated for rural counties in Ontario. For hundreds of years, the local population has been characterized by a mix of economic migrants, refugees, and opportunists. The mixing of different social classes and ethnic backgrounds was common even early in its history because of the interdependence demanded by isolation and the lack of support from or interference by official authorities.
The original Native population was welcoming, and the Iroquois were known for integrating newcomers into local societies and for adapting to change as it happened. Many people in the region have some Native ancestry as a result, and many communities sit on sites that have been occupied, farmed, or managed for hundreds of years. Some people were pushed out, but others blended into new communities in a process that would go on continuously over many generations.
The lack of strict hierarchy was a characteristic of the region. For example, from the 1780s to the 1830s, a "bee" was a social event that pooled local labour resources for people to come together for collective projects or to help out individual families, and it was often a festive occasion. The early "bees" presaged the development of a varied and integrated culture that ultimately drew on many different classes, backgrounds, and ethnic and linguistic groups, all of which were forced by the harsh reality of life in the region to work together for common goals, the primary of which was survival. The "bees" and different forms of collective shared labour were extremely common all over Eastern Ontario, especially in the early villages of the St. Lawrence Valley.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Cornwall, Ontario”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.