John Clarke

Colonial survey records and the vegetation of Essex County, Ontario

Abstract This paper uses the earliest colonial records for Essex County to establish and map the ingredients of the forest at European contact. It does so in the context of the work both of P. F. Maycock, the modern botanist, and the records of the colonial surveyors. It uses Maycocks thesis of the relationship of individual species to the soil moisture series. The paper establishes what the surveyors considered “good” and “poor” land, maps vegetation areas which the settlers may have discerned and offers statistical evidence for the idea that they, using the prevailing forest lore, could identify the better lands with a minimum knowledge of tree species. Specific references in the historical record suggest that these relationships were valid.

Social integration on the Upper Canadian frontier: elements of community in Essex County 1790–1850

Abstract Individuals settling new areas have had to rely on a variety of resources, including the social structures inherent in their culture. This study focuses upon the elements of family, kinship and origin in part of nineteenth-century Ontario. It approaches them from the perspectives of interaction over distance and of sociological institution, the particular institution being that of land conveyancing. Data drawn from the surviving parts of the personal and agricultural schedules of the Census of Canada for 1851/52 were searched for the propinquity of individuals to one another. Social interaction seems to have occurred within two miles for most people. Random samples and a series of t-tests suggest that there were no differences in proximity for the members of the different cultural groups but that there were differences between immigrant and established groups with respect to the desires of kin for proximity to one another. These differences were paralleled by differences in the structure of the family. Kinship was also important in determining to whom land was sold; most sales occurred within the particular community. That this was so suggests, according to the model of Steeves, that the level of integration in mid-century Essex was simply embryonic.