From Aboriginal village to factory
FLASH FROM THE PAST Storied lot has seen Pennsylvania Mennonites, factories
GCT — German Company Tract.
Property descriptions in Kitchener-Waterloo area are based on Lots in the GCT.
In 1805, following complicated negotiations involving Joseph Brant of Six Nations and merchant Richard Beasley, wealthy older Mennonites in Pennsylvania formed the “German Company” and bought a tract of land in Upper Canada.
Most purchasers never moved north, often selling to sons or nephews who then took their young families to the GCT.
A perfect example is GCT Lot 16, mentioned in last week’s Flash from the Past. One of the Doors Open sites — the eight-year-old University of Waterloo’s School of Pharmacy — is on Lot 16, camouflaging a historic Kitchener site.
Using 2017’s streets, imagine a parallelogram’s corners: King at Ontario; Patricia at Victoria; Glasgow at Belmont; Duke at Shanley. That encloses the 448 acres of Lot 16 purchased by Henry Weber in 1805 then transferred to his eldest son Benjamin. Neither moved to Upper Canada for over a decade; however, Benjamin’s younger brother Abraham investigated Lot 16 briefly in 1806, reportedly making quick friends with the few remaining Mississauga natives. He walked back to Pennsylvania, then returned north in 1807 to farm Lot 16 for 12 years before purchasing it from Benjamin.
But let’s backtrack. The Webers and other pioneers were Americans — and latecomers to this area’s story. Lot 16 contains one of the few known Indigenous settlement sites within Kitchener.
The 1894 Ontario Archaeologist’s Report noted evidence of a Neutral village in the area around 2017’s Dominion, Park, Cherry and Strange streets. It had last been occupied in the mid-1600s. In 1912, during the Canadian Consolidated Rubber factory’s construction on Strange Street in the west corner of Lot 16, several well-preserved Indigenous skeletons surfaced. In those days, there were no requirements for investigation, consultation or preservation.
Back to 1807 and 20-year-old Abraham Weber. He built his farmstead in the centre of his lot, close to 2017’s King and Victoria. All vestiges of Weber’s buildings have disappeared but one incidental structure lingers. At some point, Abraham gave refuge and work to an ex-slave named Levi Carroll. Levi and his family are among the earliest identifiable blacks in the German Company Tract. They appear in a later, wellknown photograph from the 1880s featuring their home, the original 1820 Waterloo schoolhouse. It was then located on Lot 16 near the collegiate but is now in Waterloo Park.
Abraham left the farm in the late 1830s when son Abraham C. took over. Then, in 1855, the Grand Trunk Railway route split Lot 16 in two, so Abraham C. sold most of his land to George Grange who had the property surveyed and began selling industrial and residential lots.
In the late 1860s, Berlin barris- ter Ward H. Bowlby and wife Lissie Hespeler purchased about 10 acres at King and Wilmot (renamed Victoria South in the 1930s), erecting “Bow Hill,” one of the village’s first elegant estates. In 1918, Lissie, now a widow, sold her property to Ames, Holden, McCready, a rubber firm presided over by T.H. Rieder of Kitchener. It was the third rubber company Rieder had helped found locally — Merchants and Canadian Consolidated (later Dominion) being the first two. Three years after the huge factory was built behind Bow Hill, Rieder died and B.F. Goodrich of Akron, Ohio assumed control.
For the next 60 years, Goodrich tires and rubber products poured out of the factory. By the late 1980s, following purchase by global rubber conglomerates, both Dominion and Goodrich were doomed. When the King Street factory closed, a group of ex-Goodrich employees operated the plant as Epton Industries.
Epton closed in December 1995 and within two years, all traces of the vast five-storey factory had been erased. A decade-plus later, the City of Kitchener and University of Waterloo filled Abraham Weber’s old farmstead site with one of the most striking architectural gems in the city.
Some sources, including Ezra Eby, incorrectly place the Webers on Lot 15. Lots 14 and 15 were Abraham Erb (part of Waterloo’s core); Lots 16 and 17 (Weber and Schneider) are early Kitchener’s south and west wards.
Updating Flash from August 29, 2015: I am delighted to report that the City of Waterloo has recently erected an historical plaque in front of the 1820 schoolhouse.