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Norwich, Oxford County, Ontario, Canada



 


Notizen:
Wikipedia 2020:

The Township of Norwich is a municipality located in Oxford County in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. The preferred pronunciation of the town name is NOR-witch, which differs from the pronunciation NORR-ij used for the city of Norwich, England. The origin of Norwich, Ontario, is more likely Norwich in upper New York State, the area from which the pioneering families emigrated in the early 19th century, where the community was known as Norwichville.

Oxford County Road 59 (formerly Highway 59) is the major north–south highway through much of the township, including the community of Norwich proper.

The local economy is largely agricultural, based on corn, soybean, and wheat production with dairy farming in the north part of the township and tobacco, vegetable, and ginseng farming to the south. Slowly, ginseng and traditional cash crops are replacing the former cash crop - tobacco, as demand shrinks.

History:

Upon his arrival in the province in 1792, the first proclamation issued by John Graves Simcoe, the Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada while still at Kingston, announced the names and boundaries he had decided upon as political boundaries for Upper Canada. For areas lying to the west of Kingston, he decided that county names would be a "mirror of Britain". To accomplish this, the sequence of names for counties along Lake Ontario became Northumberland, Durham, York and Lincoln, and for counties along Lake Erie, the names became Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Kent. (This was the same sequence of county names in place along the eastern seacoast of England, running from the Scottish boundary down to the English Channel.) The proclamation defined the northern boundary of Norfolk County as being the Thames River. Norwich and Dereham townships were originally within the land area designated as belonging to Norfolk County in Upper Canada, and were named after the towns of Norwich and Dereham in Norfolk County in England.

Gov. Simcoe with several other government officers, guided by a party of Six Nations warriors, conducted a wilderness tour on foot down and back up the length of the Thames River in 1793 and decided to assign additional place names to mirror those they knew along the Thames River in England. Middlesex County was the name assigned to the area around a town site reserved at the "lower forks" in the river, to be called London; Dorchester was the name for a town site at the "middle forks", and the area around the "upper forks" was to be Oxford - the same sequence of names as found along the Thames in England. When legislation was passed in Upper Canada in 1798 to implement these new divisions, Norwich and Dereham were separated from Norfolk County and added to the new Oxford County, which included also Burford, Blenheim, Blandford and Oxford townships - names drawn from Oxfordshire in England.

Shortly after returning from this tour, Simcoe received in March 1793 a petition from Thomas Ingersoll and associates asking for grant of a township to which they promised to bring settlers from New England. Simcoe was impressed that the list of associates in the group was headed by the name of Gideon Bostwick, a well-known Church of England (Anglican) missionary in Massachusetts, and the group was granted the township of Oxford-on-the-Thames. The only way to bring settlers into such a wilderness area township was to first build a road from Brantford up to the Thames River, a distance of 30 mi (48 km), and Thomas Ingersoll arranged that work over the course of the next two years, involving numerous journeys back and forth by those involved. In all of this, the first ones to become permanently settled in the township were likely Samuel Canfield Sr. and his wife and sons, who agreed to make their new home into a half-way stopping point for travellers along the road, at what became known as Oxford Centre. This is commemorated with plaques at the cemetery there and in front of the elementary school a short distance to the east along what is now known as "The Old Stage Road".

The Bostwicks, Ingersolls and Canfields were all New England families who had made their start in the New World in the 1600s, and frontier living had been second nature to them for generations. The Bostwicks and Canfields were kinfolk by marriage and as community leaders in several places. Samuel Canfield Sr. was particularly valuable to the Oxford settlement because he had already lived the life of starting a new settlement in the mountains of New Hampshire. In the early 1770s he and wife Lucy joined a group of Connecticut families who had been granted the wilderness township of Marlow there, and Samuel soon became a town leader, elected one of the selectmen for the community and appointed captain of the local militia company. When the War of Independence came, he rallied the company to support the Continental Army. For this he is still revered as a local hero in Marlow.

For he and his family, however, the Marlow years also brought sorrow, because three daughters died and are buried there, two of them lost together in a house fire in 1789. Samuel complained of hearing voices which eventually drove him to quit Marlow, and the family was living in southern Vermont by the time Gideon Bostwick was traveling his Anglican mission circuit which reached there, spreading word of the township grant which had been received in far-away Oxford. Samuel and family agreed to join the new venture, but he brought with him his own faith as a Baptist. He had been a Baptist preacher in Marlow, a community which had been drawn to a missionary named Caleb Blood in the early 1770s, and Caleb Blood became the first Baptist missionary in western Upper Canada thirty years later.

Settlement in the former Norwich Township came more than fifteen years after Oxford Township. The Norwich settlement was founded by two men: Peter Lossing and Peter De Long. Both were from New York. Peter Lossing's house was the first one in Norwich. It now stands by the old Quaker Meeting House. Both men where Quakers. The town of Norwich commenced as a completely Quaker settlement.

In 1799, the Township of Norwich was laid out by surveyor William Hambly into lines and concessions and 200-acre (0.81 km2) lots. The township was divided into North and South Norwich Townships in 1855.

Ort : Geographische Breite: 42.9888384, Geographische Länge: -80.5978060


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1 Colborn / Comfort  27 Dez 1849Norwich, Oxford County, Ontario, Canada F72330