Map 42. From Seneca Park, Caledonia along the Rotary Riverside Trail (RRT) via Sims Lock to York Park. The RRT, which shares its course with two other trails and on occasion runs on a public road, is about 6 km long. It’s the last longer riverside hiking trail on the lower Grand, though Ruthven Park (see #602-09 below) has several pleasant short riverside nature trails.
The blue dots along the eastern bank of the Grand indicate where the RRT is a true riverside trail. The best P for the RRT is at either end, in Seneca Park, Caledonia, and in York Park. The blue dots running southeast from Caledonia to Haldimand Road 9 is a rail trail, the Gypsum Mine Tract Trail (GMT), on the former Grand Trunk Railway line.
586. Looking across the Grand in February from the start of the RRT at Seneca Park.
587. In late summer, an American rubyspot damselfly (Hetaerina americana) perches on a stalk by the Grand.
588. At its 3 km mark, the Rotary Riverside Trail shares the path with the Trans Canada Trail, the Grand Valley Trail, and Sims Lock Road.
589. Sims Lock was the site of Lock 3 and a dam on the Grand River Navigation. Those have now disappeared, but there is still a small residential area on Sims Lock Road.
590. Portrait of John Norton (1804-05) by Solomon Williams (Ireland, fl. 1777-1824).
In 1823, Sims Lock was the scene of a scandalous duel. John Norton, probably born in Scotland, claimed to be the son of a Scottish mother and a Cherokee father.* Well-educated, a prolific and fluent writer and linguist, he came to North America as a private soldier in 1785. By 1794 he was in Upper Canada working as an interpreter for the Indian Department. There he met Joseph Brant, who adopted him as his “nephew.” He was appointed Teyoninhokarawen, a Chief for war and diplomacy, in 1799, and translated the Gospel of John into Mohawk. From 1804-06 Norton was sent by Brant on a mission to the Privy Council in London, England, but failed to persuade it that Six Nations had the right to sell portions of the Haldimand Tract. He had made an enemy of William Claus of the Indian Department, who undermined his suit. Yet he became something of a celebrity among British Evangelicals and Abolitionists.
Norton became the de facto leader of Six Nations when Joseph Brant died in 1807. During the War of 1812 he led Mohawk warriors who participated in crucial victories over the American invaders in the Battles of Queenston Heights and Stoney Creek.
In 1813, aged about 50, he was married for the second time, to 16-year-old Catherine (Karighwaycagh), “said to have been a Delaware” (Klinck). He built Hillhouse, a mansion of logs, here at what is now Sims Lock, where he farmed and translated the Gospel of Matthew into Mohawk. In 1823, his wife complained that Big Arrow, a.k.a. Joe Crawford, had “offered her the grossest insult a woman can receive” (MacDonald, Haldimand History 46). Evidently distrusting Catherine’s version of events, Norton told both of them to be gone from his sight. But Catherine “scolded Norton for not being more vigorous in defence of her honour,” so he challenged Big Arrow to a duel with pistols. Big Arrow fired first, missing Norton, then charged before Norton could return fire. In the struggle Norton’s gun went off, mortally wounding Big Arrow. Norton gave himself up, and refusing any defence that implicated his wife, was tried for murder. He was found guilty of manslaughter and fined £25, which he immediately paid. Dismissing Catherine, to whom he’d been married 10 years and never saw again, Norton left for the far southwest, and is thought to have died in 1831 in Mexico.
*One commentator, Mary V. Nelles, claims Norton was born in Georgia ca. 1763 (Farquharson 133). There’s little doubt that he was adopted by the Haudenosaunee and accepted by the Cherokees as one of their own. But a recent historian feels that “Norton was an early-modern trans-Atlantic shapeshifter, stretching the truth at best, and completely fabricating his own reality at worst” (Ince). Whatever the truth, Norton is a fascinating figure, and an important one in Canadian and Indigenous history, especially as he left a large body of writing.
591. A peaceful islanded section of the Grand south of Sims Lock.
592. We’re now in the former Nelles Tract/Settlement. The Nelles family were originally French Protestants who had moved to the Palatinate (now southwest Germany) to avoid religious persecution. Then in 1710 they sailed in a large group of other poor German Protestants to North America to escape rapacious landlords.
Living in the Mohawk Valley of New York State during the Revolutionary War, Capt. Hendrick (later Henry) William Nelles (1735-91) had allied with the British-supporting Mohawks and taken part in a punitive series of raids against areas that had supplied the American Rebels. After 1777, the strategy of the Indian Department of the British Government “was simply to destroy the settlements in the interior of New York that supplied the [US] Continental Army. Captain Nelles (he anglicized his name to Henry at this time) accompanied Indians on many savage raids back into his own Mohawk valley, sacking homesteads, burning crops, and killing and scalping settlers” (Nelles, H.V.) It’s not surprising, then, that after the Revolution he was persona non grata in the USA.
Nelles, who had five sons, was invited by Joseph Brant in 1787 to settle in Seneca Township, and was gifted 4,254 acres of land here on the east bank of the Grand River. The Nelles family were thus among the first legitimate – in Native eyes – white settlers along the Grand River. Brant’s gifts of land to his white allies were part of a strategy to ensure the prosperity of the Haldimand Tract, as he believed their experience in settled farming and milling would serve as models to his Six Nations people.
When Henry Nelles died, his son Robert moved to Forty Mile Creek, the site of what is now Grimsby. Robert’s son Abram, an Anglican clergyman, served as the much respected rector of the Mohawk Church and Principal of the Mohawk Institute in the latter’s early days, when it still served as an educational model and before the later horrors that took place there (see #525 above).
593. Near the end of the RRT before it meets Front Street North in York.
594. The west side of the Grand is almost entirely in private hands and inaccessible to the public from here to its mouth.
595. This sign in York shows the locations of the five canals, dams, and locks on the former Grand River Navigation between Caledonia (Oneida/Seneca) and Indiana (see #610 below). A towpath was constructed, too, linking all these places. Almost all traces of these workings have vanished.
596. York Bridge (1935) is a four-span steel girder bridge 166 metres long that was rehabilitated in 2007. It connects Front Street in York to River Road, which follows the west bank of the Grand for 26 km from Caledonia to Haldimand Road 50.
597. The downstream view from York Bridge. The dam is long gone, and now there is a rapids in its place.
598. The former Barber Hotel (1862), the most prominent building in the village of York. This was where passengers on boats along the Grand Navigation would take refreshment while the lock here filled or emptied.
York was originally at the riverside base of a narrow triangle of land called the Fish Carrier Tract (see #592 above). It lay between two much larger tracts, the Nelles Tract to the north, and the Young Tract to the south. Peter Fishcarrier, among the first to settle here, was the son of the notable Cayuga chief Fish Carrier (Ojageght), a British ally during the American Revolution.
By the 1860s, thanks to its central place on the Grand River Navigation, York had a population of about 600. As in Paris upstream, there were extensive deposits of gypsum (plaster of Paris) hereabouts. Gypsum was used as a fertilizer and to make plaster and blackboard chalk, and was processed by a plaster mill here owned by the Martindale Brothers.
Hikers may be interested in the 7.1 km Gypsum Mine Tract Rail Trail, which runs from Caledonia to Haldimand Rd. 9 a couple of kilometres north of the Grand (see Map 41 above).
599. In York Park beside the Grand there’s a survival from York’s industrial past. The plaque on this lump of concrete reads: “The Davis, Martindale Flour and Grist Mill of York. This was the site of a flour and grist mill that served the village of York for more than a century. The original mill built in the 1820’s or 1830’s had a water-wheel operated by water from the Grand River Navigation Co. dam at York. The mill processed flour from wheat into bread and feed for livestock. When Adam A. Davis assumed ownership, he built a new mill in 1870, replacing the water-wheel with a water turbine. After his death in 1905, brothers Arthur and Chester Martindale acquired the mill and ran it for about ten years. When the dam decayed and water-power failed, an internal combustion engine was placed on this concrete base. Finally activity ceased and the building was removed in 1921.”
600. The Grand downstream from York Park. This backwater is all that’s left of the canal and lock at this point.
Map 43. From just south of York to Cayuga via Ruthven Park. The plaques at #601 below are marked with X, and there is P for a couple of cars in front of them. There is a large scale plan of the site of Ruthven Park at #606 below. Cayuga’s Grand Vista Bridge is marked GV, with P places on both sides of the river. There is public access to the Grand riverbank in Ruthven Park and along Ouse Street in Cayuga. P in Ruthven Park when open, and roadside in downtown Cayuga.
601. On the River side of Haldimand Highway 54 about 1 km north of its junction with Indiana Road are these plaques, bookended by Canadian flags. Adam Young (formerly Jung, 1717-90), born in Foxtown, NY, was a descendant of the 1710 Palatinate Immigration to North America that also included the Nelles family. In about 1722 the Young family were living in Canajoharie, Mohawk territory in upstate New York. Before the Revolutionary War, Young had become one of the richest landowners in the Mohawk Valley, operating mills and an Indian trading post. But in 1775 he was accused of seditious activities by the local Rebel Committee of Public Safety and jailed in Connecticut. Released, in 1778 he joined Chief Joseph Brant in a raid against a Rebel stronghold, in retaliation for which the Rebels stole his property and burned his house and other buildings. He escaped with two sons to Niagara, where he became one of the first settlers in Upper Canada. There he started to farm, only to have his farm expropriated by the British Government!
Chief Joseph Brant came to his aid. In 1783, in gratitude for Young’s comradeship-in-arms, he granted a 999-year lease to the Young family on one square mile on the east side of the Grand River, later greatly increased to approximately nine square miles. This is what’s marked as “Young’s Tract” on the map at #592 above. The Youngs “made their home on the shore of the river, southeast of York … The Young and Nelles properties were located in what later became Seneca Township. Thus it was that the Young family, along with the family of Henry Nelles … became the first two white settlers of what is now known as Haldimand County” (McBride). For further information and identification of John Young, Adam’s son, as the first white settler on the Grand River, see Karen E. Richardson, “My Loyalist Ancestors,” in Farquharson 80-84.
602. And so we come to Ruthven Park, site of the grandest house on the Grand River.
“Ruthven” is a Scottish place name associated with three different hamlets, in Aberdeenshire, Angus, and the Highlands, and a clan name associated with Perthshire. In Scots dialect, “Ruthven” is pronounced “Riven,” though here by the Grand River, the name is pronounced “Ruth-ven,” as spelled.
Aficionados of horror fiction will know that “Lord Ruthven” was the name of the first fictional vampire in English literature – the antihero of John Polidori’s novella The Vampyre (1819). This story was the product of the same ghost-story contest in Villa Diodati, Switzerland in 1816 that gave us Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The Vampyre proved very popular on publication, especially as Lord Ruthven was thought to be based on Lord Byron, already a notorious figure throughout Europe. Byron, by the way, also participated in the 1816 storytelling contest.
Admission to the grounds of Ruthven Park and P is free, donations welcome. Check the website for hours, guided tours, and upcoming events.
603. This area, overlooking the Grand about 4 km north of the present-day town of Cayuga, was settled ca. 1830 by Lt.-Colonel David Thompson (1793-1851). It had been the site of a Cayuga longhouse, though under pressure from white settlers the Cayugas were forced to surrender their Haldimand Tract lands from 1831-34. Thompson built a lock (Lock 1 of the GRN), a dam, a grist mill, a sawmill, and a distillery on the Grand, and these became the focus of the surrounding village of Indiana (see #610 below).
Wealthy as result of his involvement in the Welland Canal and the Grand River Navigation, “On 18 January 1845, Thompson paid the Crown ‘579 pounds, five shillings and five pence of lawful money’ for 431 acres of land, designated as Lots 1-5, on the front concession on the Grand River, in the Township of Seneca” (Quirk 53). On it he built this house, “a stately mansion, a home so far exceeding in site and dignity the homes for miles around that it was called the castle and the pioneers came from miles around to see what many of them regarded as Thompson’s folly” (54). It was occupied by four later generations of his family.
“Ruthven” may have Gothic associations, but the house itself “was designed in the Classical Greek Revival style by an American expatriate, architect John Lapshaw of Drummondville. The main house is constructed of Ohio limestone and measures 45 feet by 40 feet across (14 metres by 12 metres). It features a five-bay symmetrical composition with a high basement, two floors and an attic, limestone ashlar with squared bush-hammered stone, and an almost square plan fronted by a 30-foot high portico (9 metres) with wooden Doric columns and full Doric frieze and pediment facing the river” (Ontario Heritage Trust).
604. It’s certainly worth taking a guided tour of the interior of the mansion, normally available during the spring and summer. Check the website for dates, times, and fees.
Here our tour guide introduces us to the five generations of Thompson family associated with this property. “The estate remained in the family until 1992 when it was acquired by the Lower Grand River Land Trust with 1,600 acres (648 hectares) of rural land … Interior features include Greek columns, Italian marble fireplaces, 15-foot (5-metre) ceilings and a spiral staircase that climbs three floors under a skylight. Agricultural buildings on the estate were arranged around an enclosed rectangular yard close to the main house. The coach house is an L-shaped building south of the main house and constructed of random-coursed rubble stone. It has a gable roof with a louvred cupola. The gatehouse is a red brick structure. A family cemetery is located south of the main house along the river” (Ontario Heritage Trust). Ruthven Park was declared a National Historic Site in 1995.
605. Some of the interior features of the house. (Top to bottom) A portrait of the founder, Lt.-Col. David Thompson; the dining room; a love seat; period kitchen wallpaper.
606. A plan of Ruthven Park. When the site is open, enter from Highway 54 at 1, P at 14, and visit the Park for free. All the nature trails are short, relatively undemanding, and worth exploring.
607. Some features of the grounds. (Top to bottom) A rustic shepherdess; the gazebo; a secluded corner where brick and stone meet.
608. The Thompson Family Cemetery lies to the south of the mansion. This stone poignantly records an all-too-brief life: “Our Little Emily. Born 27th Dec. 1859, Died 26th February 1860.”
609. The Grand from the Riverside Nature Trail (1.1 km). The Thompsons bought the plot of land on the other side of the river so they wouldn’t have to put up with strangers ruining their view.
610. An 1869 plan of the village of Indiana, that formerly occupied the area on and around the Ruthven Park property. It shows the lock and the extensive canal leading up to it. During the height of GRNC’s operations on the Grand, Indiana had a population of 766. It was the largest industrial town in Haldimand County, with seven mills, a lumber camp, pail and stove factories, and two distilleries. A bridge over the Grand was built here in 1852.
Indiana no longer exists! The Buffalo, Brantford and Goderich Railway opened in 1854, and from then on, the GRNC was doomed, as goods and travellers could move much more easily and quickly by train than by scow on the Grand. Indiana lost its bridge to a flood in 1866. The Canada Southern Railway (1871) bypassed Indiana for Cayuga. Indiana’s derelict lock was abandoned in 1880. By 1905 the settlement had almost totally disappeared, and is now considered a ghost town. You can visit its former location on the trail marked 3 on the plan at #606 above. For much more about Indiana and why it disappeared, check out Laura Quirk’s 2010 PhD thesis, an outstanding piece of research.
611. One of the few remaining traces of Indiana: scattered gravestones in the St. Rose of Lima Irish Catholic Cemetery. The church has long gone. Irish immigrant “navvies” (i.e., builders of canal navigations) were largely responsible for constructing the GRNC’s canals, locks, dams, and towpaths by hand. Those of them who survived the backbreaking toil didn’t stick around for long when Indiana began its decline.
612. The Grand today where Indiana used to be, looking downstream.
613. The old rail bridge (1902), abandoned by CN in 1996, over the Grand north of Cayuga. It has been restored and rebranded as the Grand Vista (GV on Map 42 above), a pedestrian bridge with scenic lookouts. P and access to GV is either behind the Court House at the end of Victoria Street in Cayuga, or from a lot off King George Street on the west bank of the Grand. You can make a loop hike of about 3 km using this bridge to cross the Grand and Cayuga Bridge to recross it.
614. The downstream view from the Grand Vista, with Cayuga Bridge visible in the distance.
615. Ouse Street in Cayuga runs pleasantly along the eastern bank of the Grand. Its odd name recalls that John Graves Simcoe, first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, attempted to rename the Grand River the “Ouse,” after the historic river flowing through York in England. Fortunately, the name (pronounced “ooze”) never caught on.
616. (Top) A short riverside trail along Ouse Street South in Cayuga.
(Bottom) Young fishermen below Cayuga Bridge. This sleek concrete bridge taking Ontario Highway 3 across the Grand was completed in 2014. At that time it controversially replaced the previous 1924 steel bridge, considered an icon of Haldimand County.
617. Cayuga (pop. about 1,800) is still a small place, not quite as populous as it was when the GRNC was in full swing in the mid-19th century. It is named, of course, for that Nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy that formerly occupied this stretch of the Grand River. Cayuga = Gayogohó:no’, “People of the Pipe, or of the Great Swamp.”
As it’s a long commute to a large centre, Cayuga hasn’t yet seen the explosive population growth of, say, Caledonia. In 1974 Cayuga was chosen as the seat of amalgamated Haldimand Township – now single-tier Haldimand County – as a result of its central location.
(Top) The old Post Office (1888) on Cayuga Street downtown. It now houses a bakery on the main floor and a rental apartment upstairs.
(Bottom) Terraced cottages around the corner on King Street.
Holmström Ruddick 