Kitchener is a key education, technology and manufacturing centre in southern Ontario. It was a community for hundreds, if not thousands, of years in the days of First Nations, and has played a key role in Canada’s development as a multi-cultural nation.
The Canadian Shield & Niagara Escarpment
The rocks that form the Canadian Shield were formed about four billion years ago during the Archeon Eon of the Precambrian Era. Erosion of this extremely rugged, mountainous landscape deposited enormous quantities of clays, silts, sands and gravels into the surrounding waters. Compressed by their sheer cumulative weight and the heat of the shifting Earth’s crust, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks formed during the Proterozoic Eon of the Precambrian Era.
More recent rocks that were formed above these ancient layers have since been largely removed by the scouring action of glaciers that covered northern North America in the several ice ages in the past 100,000 years.
The last ice age scraped the rocks in a NNE (north-north-east) to SSE (south-south-east) direction. At the end of the last ice age, all the waters in central Ontario (and the great lakes) drained to the east, toward the St Lawrence River. After the weight of the glaciers left this area, the land slowly began to rise.
As the Niagara escarpment rose, the waters to the west flowed to Lake Huron, and the waters to the east into Lake Ontario. The soil on which trees and other vegetation grow in this part of the continent are the result of gradual sediment buildup since the last ice age.
First Nations & Early Explorers
The first humans, the Clovis people, arrived in Niagara Region almost 12,000 years ago, around the time of the birth of the Falls, when the land was tundra with spruce forests. These nomadic hunters camped along the old Lake Erie shoreline, in small dwellings, and left little behind except chipped stones, likely used to hunt caribou, mastodons, moose and elk.
By 9,500 years ago deciduous forest covered southernmost Ontario, supporting wildlife like deer, moose, fish and plants, enabling small groups to hunt in the winter, coming together into larger groups during the summer, to fish at shorelines and at the mouths of rivers.
About 2,000 years ago, the Woodland Period brought Iroquois culture in southern Ontario. These peoples began agriculture based on crops of corn, bean and squash, which supported a boom in population and a rich culture with small palisaded villages in which extended families occupied individual longhouses. They developed ceramics technology and forged strong inter-village alliances. Natives hunted, fished and lived along the beautiful Grand River.
By the time the European explorers and missionaries arrived in the early 1600s, the Iroquoian villages had elected chiefs and were allied within powerful tribal confederacies. The Neutral Indians were the leaders of a group of ten tribes of the Iroquois Nation. Other tribes included the Seneca, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Huron, Petun, Erie and the Susquehannock. The French explorers , gave this Indian tribe the name “Neutrals”, because of their position and status as peace keepers between the warring Hurons and Iroquois. Unfortunately, inter-tribal warfare was made worse by the intrusion of the Europeans.
In May 1535, Jacques Cartier left France to explore the New World, and was told by the Indians he met along the St. Lawrence River about Niagara Falls. When Samuel de Champlain visited Canada in 1608, he too heard the stories, but it was Etienne Brule, who in 1615 was the first European to see Hamilton on his explorations of Lakes Ontario, Erie Huron and Superior.
Lasalle also visited the area, a fact commemorated at a park in nearby Burlington. These were followed shortly by the Recollet missionary explorers, and a decade later by the Jesuits
In 1641 the Onguiaahra Indians (also called the “Neutral” Indians) were the predominant tribe along the Niagara River, and The Iroquois Confederacy or Five (later Six) Nations first occupied the land now covered by Hamilton. The French initiated a fur- trade rivalry between the Huron and Iroquois, which turned into a 6 year long Indian war which pushed the Huron Nation to the north and scattered them throughout Ontario. The Iroquois moved into the Niagara area, pushing the Neutral Indians eastward to the area of Albany, New York. The wars also managing to keep Europeans settlers away until after the American Revolution.
In 1784 a large tract of more than 240,000 hectares of land, including the future location of Kitchener, was set aside by the British Crown as a grant to the Six Nations Indians for their loyalty to the Crown during the American War of Independence. Between 1796 and 1798, the Six Nations Indians led by Chief Joseph Brant (who later distinguished himslef in the War of 1812) , sold 38,000 hectares of land to Colonel Richard Beasley, a United Empire Loyalist who attracted a group of Pennsylvania German Mennonite farmers to the area.
Early Settlement to War of 1812
After the American Revolutionary War, many United Empire Loyalists settled in the fertile region along Lake Ontario’s and Lake Erie’s shores. The farmer-settlers of Pennsylvania German Mennonite origin feared for their religious freedoms and that they may lose their exemption from military service (granted under British rule) would be lost following the American Revolutionary War.
Initially, members of the Betzner and Sherk families and began relocating by the end of 1800 to be the first permanent non-native settlement. Soon afterward, a group of Mennonites pooled resources to purchase Beasley’s remaining unsold land as the “German Company Tract” which was divided into 128 larger farms and 32 farms smaller tracts.
At that time, the land was mostly dense bush, swamps and sand hills. The area’s streams would power the saw and grist mills for area farms.
The area’s Mohawk Indians, of the Six Nations, under Captain (and Chief) Joseph Thayendanegea Brant, re-settled in the area around Brantford in 1784 on land reserved for them by the Crown. Captain Brant, for whom the town is named, is buried in Her Majesty’s Royal Chapel in Brantford. This is the first Protestant church built in Ontario and one of only two Royal Chapels outside the United Kingdom.
After simmering treaty and border disputes finally erupted into the War of 1812, the Upper Canada area was very strategic. While there were many skirmishes on both sides of the Niagara River, the Americans repeatedly attacked British Upper Canada, including one time landing at and burning Fort York. In 1813, the British regulars and Canadian militia defeated the Americans at Detroit, causing a retaliatory raid up the Thames River, costing both sides many lives after which the Americans retreated.
To Confederation
Much of the early development was along the banks of the Grand and the Speed rivers, who’s waters powered area grist mills and early industry. In 1816, the Government of Upper Canada elevated the German Company Tract to the Township of Waterloo. The area’s Mennonites and their tolerance for other religions and cultures attracted many Germans, ensuring fast growth until the 1870s. The hamlet named Berlin in 1833, which in 1853 became the county seat of the newly created County of Waterloo.
Guelph was founded in 1827 as one of the first planned towns in Canada, and headquarters of a British development firm known as the “Canada Company”. The Company’s Superintendent in Canada, a popular Scottish novelist named John Galt, selected the location and designed the town to attract settlers. The plan had a series of streets radiating from a focal point at the Speed River, and resembles a European city centre, complete with squares and broad main streets and narrow side streets. Galt chose the name “Guelph” as t was one of the British royal family names (leading to the nickname “The Royal City” of Guelph).
In 1856 the Grand Trunk Railway was extended to Guelph & Berlin, opening up the area completely to Upper Canada society and to future industrialization. Large factories and the homes of industrialists and labourers replaced many of the buildings from Berlin’s pioneer era. Many of Guelph’s prominent buildings were erected, a number of which were designed by high profile Toronto-based architects.
Development in the 1900s
In 1912, Berlin officially became a City, and it was considered Canada’s German capital. However, First World War in 1914 caused anti-German sentiment andthere was pressure for the City to change its name from Berlin, and in 1916 following much debate and controversy, the name of the City was changed to Kitchener, after the British General Horatio Herbert Kitchener who won fame during the Boer War.
The diverse industries in Kitchener-Waterloo weathered the worst years of the depression era, and began growing again by 1936. The tension that had marked the city in the First World War did not reappear during World War Two.
In the 1960s, the construction of the 401 which connected Windsor, Kitchener-Waterloo, Toronto and Montreal increased the community’s accessibility for both manufacturing and residents.
While Waterloo has grown to be more white collar with the presence of two universities and a number of high tech companies, Kitchener has been a more blue-collar town, with a diverse range of manufacturing. In recent decades, a number of the old industrial companies of Kitchener have fallen on harder times, and either scaled back or closed down, though manufacturing, processing and utilities still employ about 15% of the local workforce.
In 1973, the towns of Preston and Hespeler, and the city of Galt amalgamated to become Cambridge. At the same time, Waterloo Region was created to economically provide regional services like transit, airport, and healthcare for three urban municipalities (Cambridge, Kitchener and Waterloo), and four rural townships )North Dumfries, Wellesley, Wilmot and Woolwich).
Today, Waterloo is best known as the headquarters of Research in Motion (RIM) inventor of the Blackberry. Kitchener’s downtown features a new city hall and a new farmer’s market. The University of Waterloo is expanding with two significant expansions.