Author Description

"Dummer township differs from its neighbours in many ways. Perhaps most significant is its geology – the limestone outcroppings and the drumlins and eskers of the Dummer moraine which created a unique challenge for the earliest settlers who attempted to farm the land. But equally important was the character and quality of those settlers themselves – largely self-sufficient, independent yeoman stock from England and Scotland, with a smaller number of Irish families. Little has been written about the groups of English and Scottish settlers who found their way to Peterborough County as part of the great wave of immigration to Canada in the early 1830s. Of the latter group, some 2000 came to Dummer in 1831 and 1832. Although the township had been surveyed in 1823, no attempt was made to populate it until eight years later. For more than a century before that time the local Mississauga Indians had seasonal encampments in the township, especially on the shores and islands of Stoney Lake, and an even earlier prehistoric Iroquois village site not far from the lake dates to around A.D. 1500. Origins tells the story of these people. It is a book about ancestors – who they were, where they came from, how their lives evolved, how they interacted with their neighbours, what diversions lightened their burdens. Today's readers will find their forefathers on these pages, a sense of the real men, women and children behind some of the rather stern countenances that gaze out from the remarkable portraits that appear here."--Jacket flap.