Beverly, the largest, rural and most westerly of the three townships covered an area of 70,084 acres. With no direct access to water for transportation purposes it was the last of the three to receive its first settlers.

The southern section of the township was surveyed by Lt.-Gov. John Graves Simcoe’s surveyor, Augustus Jones in 1794, with the northerly five concessions surveyed three years later by Deputy Provincial Surveyor John Stegman – but his work was incomplete and poorly done, as on reaching the great swamp on the eighth concession with its rattlesnakes and mosquitoes, he stopped and reported to the government that he was finished.

Jacob Cope and George Jones, the first settlers to arrive in the southern half of the township beginning in 1800, saw wilderness lots of 200 acres that could be purchased for £10, rise to £2 per acre in value by the time of the township’s 1816-17 Assessments. While land had risen in value, so too had the population – approximately 300 in 1817, to 2,684 in 1841 and to 6,339 in 1867. The southern part was quickly settled, but the northern part of Beverly was delayed until the early 1830s, when the incoming arrivals were forced to request the township to re-survey their properties because of Stegman’s failure to complete his assignment.

While the township contained a total of two grist mills, nine sawmills and a number of small factories by 1867, its economy was based almost entirely on agriculture, with over 600 farmers listed in Sutherland’s City of Hamilton and County of Wentworth Directory for 1867-1868. Much of the land in the township was fertile, with rich loam soils, allowing for a variety of farm sizes, but because the central section was poorly drained due to the swamp, there were still wilderness areas, unsuited to settlement.

West Flamborough, described as triangular shaped, was the smallest of the three townships, with a land area of 30,370 acres, “sandwiched between” Beverly and East Flamborough Township. It was the first to receive settlers, including members of the Morden, Lyons and Cummins families, late Loyalists from New Jersey.

The original survey of 1793 had provided the township with frontage onto open water, as lying at the extreme western end of Lake Ontario it could be easily accessed by incoming settlers who then journeyed inland using First Nations trails.

When first surveyed, the boundary was the north shoreline of the present-day Dundas Marsh, a favourite haunt of Thomas Coote, 8th King’s Own Regiment, a keen sportsman who devoted his spare time away from his military duties to the sport of shooting the ducks, geese and wild pigeons that fed by the thousands on the wild rice beds.

The small military garrison on the marsh became the starting point for Lt.-Gov. Simcoe’s first road in Upper Canada, the Governor’s Road, and the little settlement gradually grew to become the Town of Dundas, resulting in a boundary change to the township’s original survey that when redrawn followed the face of the Niagara Escarpment overlooking the town.

The landscape of West Flamborough, gently sloping from north to south and crossed by numerous and at times fast-flowing creeks, ensured its early industrial development and soon attracted settlers.

The oldest of the many small crossroad settlements in West Flamborough at Rock Chapel dates from the 1790s, when wilderness land could be purchased for one shilling an acre. When the first township Assessment was recorded in 1817, the population was listed as 360 inhabitants, rising to 2,428 by 1841 and to 3,815 by 1867.

By 1867, West Flamborough’s early financial prosperity that had come from the establishment of one of the first industrial complexes in Upper Canada, created by the Hon. James Crooks around his paper mill in Crooks Hollow had begun to fade and was being rapidly overtaken by not only the Town of Dundas, but also by the neighbouring township of East Flamborough.