The Honorable Thomas Talbot received his company and his majority in the
same year, 1793. He was Colonel of the Fifth Regiment in 1795, at the
early age of twenty-five. After eight years of military service on the
Continent, partly in Flanders and partly at Gibraltar, he was still in
1803 a young man with every prospect that is usually considered alluring
to ambition. Suddenly, to the amazement of his friends and the public,
he abandoned the brilliant career upon which he had entered under so
favorable auspices, cut himself loose from civilization itself, and
buried himself in the recesses of the Canadian forest. He determined to
settle on the north shore of Lake Erie, where he had previously selected
a location on one of his journeyings with Governor Simcoe. Talbot had
formed plans for diverting the stream of immigration from the United
States, or rather for continuing its current as far as Upper Canada. He
would attract settlers from New York, Pennsylvania and New England, who
were dissatisfied with republican institutions or allured by the
fertility of the Lake Erie region, and would build up a loyal British
community, under the laws and institutions of the mother land.
It was a memorable event in the history of the County of Elgin, when on
the 21st day of May, 1803, landing at Port Talbot, he took an axe and
chopped down the first tree, thus inaugurating what has since been known
as the Talbot Settlement. Henceforward, Colonel Talbot, Port Talbot, the
Talbot Road, and the Talbot Settlement, are names inseparably connected
with the history of the making of Upper Canada.
At that time the nearest settlement on Lake Erie was near Turkey Point,
60 miles away. In 1802 there was but one settled minister west of
Niagara, Father Marchand, of Sandwich, a Roman Catholic priest. There
were but seven clergymen settled in the whole Province. The record[24]
states, however, that "Besides, there are several missionaries of the
Methodistical order, whose residence is not fixed." Even at that early
day the circuit-rider threaded the maze of forest between the Long Point
clearings and those near the mouth of the Thames, and made his way down
the Detroit River to the Essex shore of Lake Erie, where there was a
fringe of settlement. But, generally speaking, the country north of Lake
Erie to the borders of Lake Huron and the Georgian Bay was still a
wilderness of continuous unbroken forest.
[24] Tiffany's Upper Canada Almanac, Niagara, 1802.