Historical Sketches of the County of Elgin - 1895

Cat No.:   CA0355:

Originally published by The Elgin Historical and Scientific Institute in 1895, this book is actually a collection of three individual papers on this theme as follows:

The Country of the Neutrals by James H. Coyne. (44 pages)

The Talbot Settlement by C. O. Ermatinger (17 pages plus 1 plate). And

Development of the County of Elgin by K. W. McKay (46 pages plus 1 plate)

Additionally, and in support of these papers, there are two maps one of which is a "pull out" copy of the 1670 map drawn by Galinee, which was the first made by actual exploration showing Lake Erie. The second is a map of the whole county. It is undated but is presumed to be contemporary with the date of the book's publication. Finally there are several pages of tabular and textural data stuffed with facts about the County of Elgin and its history including listings of the officers and members of the Elgin Historical and Scientific Institute.

"The County of Neutrals" provides Mr. Coyne's findings about the early history of the general area which was later destined to be know as Elgin County. He explains the evidence which led to the finding that the original inhabitants were the tribe know as the "Neutrals" during the time that the Iroquois and the Hurons were doing battle. His researches in this period are very thorough and produce a vivid picture of life in those times. From there he moves, at a rather faster pace, through subsequent historic eras with the European settlers having more and more influence on the character of the land, concluding with the landing of Col. Talbot in the very early 1800's.

C. O. Ermatinger's paper, "The Talbot Settlement" provides a nice concise record of the work and events during the 30 odd years that Talbot was actively administering homesteading on this tract of Upper Canada as an "onsite" agent of the Canadian government. The account does not skip around those aspects of this settlement activity which might be considered questionable, but neither does it make any accusations, so we can describe it as being an unbiased account.

McKay's "Development of the County of Elgin" takes a completely different approach to tracing the roots of the development of the community which occupies Elgin County. He examines the events, agreements, processes through which an interactive community forms itself and comes to a state of organization within the overall framework of a larger (area) government. Mr.McKay does not shy away from naming those people who played significant roles in this development process and indicates the offices they filled.

This is a digitized copy of every page in the book including the two maps (one in a larger pull out format) and the two nicely printed portraits. Additionally the text has been computer "read," and the result hand edited, so that you can use the Search and Find facilities of the Adobe Reader application to find all occurrences of every word in the text. Text searching is further enhanced by our FastFind technology to make finding all occurrences of your search terms almost instantaneous.

No. of CDs is:  1 ;   Format is:  PDF ;   Searchable?:  YES;

FastFind:  Yes;  ISBN No.:   978-1-897405-71-0 ;