As 1867, the most important and momentous year in Canadian history began, few residents in the former rural townships that today are commonly called Flamborough and part of the City of Hamilton knew little about the approaching and significant announcement that would come from Ottawa later in the year about the official creation of a new country that they would call home.

Few would have read the announcements in The Hamilton Spectator or the Toronto newspaper, The Globe, published on Feb.,20, 1867, that in the early weeks of the year the final details of the British North America Act that was “to forge a new country” were being negotiated by delegates in faraway London, England.

The paper reported with great excitement that “the name of the new confederation is to be CANADA! Upper Canada is to be styled the Province of Ontario; Lower Canada is to be called Quebec; and the other provinces are to retain their present designations. We fancy this is as good a selection as could have been made.”

While many in the newly proposed country welcomed the news, there were others, in the Maritimes especially, with questions about the benefits that would result and even the paper was critical of some of the last-minute changes that saw some departments placed under federal control and others transferred to the provinces, ending with the comment that such proposals were “most unjust” to the new province of Ontario.

To the majority of residents of the soon-to-be province of Ontario, these would have seemed minor irritants that had little bearing on their day-to-day existence. In Flamborough, still almost entirely rural, it would change little in a society slowly emerging from the days of pioneer settlement.

During the last decades of the 18th Century, the Flamborough area was still home to small groups of semi-nomadic indigenous people who lived by hunting and fishing, their existence and those of their ancestors documented by the numerous artifacts found in the many archeological excavations that have been conducted across the area.

As the century came to an end, Flamborough would witness dramatic changes, as the first permanent European settlers began to arrive. Later to become known as Loyalists or United Empire Loyalists from their support of the British Crown during England’s war with her rebellious American colonies, these first refugees to enter British North America – farmers, merchants, government officials, soldiers, widows and children – would be compensated for their loss of livelihood, property and belongings with grants of free land in what to them must have seemed an “empty wilderness landscape.”

In the years that followed, they would be joined by wave upon wave of immigrants – late Loyalists and “carpetbaggers” from the United States looking for cheap land and from England, half-pay army officers, participants in British emigration schemes, Scottish entrepreneurs and destitute Irish peasants – examples of all, who by 1867, could be found in the former Flamborough townships as Confederation approached.

As Flamborough celebrates 150 years of Canadian Confederation, by using newspapers, census records and local directories published during the 1860s, we are able to look back at life in 1867 and the evolution of the Flamborough townships from their “wilderness landscape.”

We are able to see names of residents, look at the records of their occupations, organizations and the news of the day that were part of everyday life.

In 1867, this area was part of Wentworth County and consisted of three separate townships: Beverly Township and East and West Flamborough, each with its own municipal government and within each, a number of villages and crossroads settlements. The three townships were spread across almost half the total area of Wentworth County and as a result both the landscape and development of each township was very different, with each coming to have its own identity.