page_title: Oxford County, Ontario
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Oxford County, Ontario / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Sir John Graves Simcoe, first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of the European settlement at Toronto. Simcoe is shown in the uniform of the Queen's Rangers, a regiment he led during the American Revolution, and which he re-established in Upper Canada in 1792.
context_page_description: Oxford County is a regional municipality in the Canadian province of Ontario. Highway 401 runs east–west through the centre of the county, creating an urban industrial corridor with more than half the county's population, spanning 25 km between the Toyota auto assembly plant in Woodstock and the CAMI General Motors auto assembly plant in Ingersoll. The local economy is otherwise dominated by agriculture, especially the dairy industry.
  The Oxford County regional seat is in Woodstock. Oxford County has been a regional municipality since 2001 but has retained the word "county" in its name. It has a two-tier municipal government structure, with the lower-tier municipalities being the result of a merger in 1975 of a larger number of separate municipalities that previously existed before the restructuring. It also comprises a single Statistics Canada census division, and a single electoral division for federal and provincial elections for which the precise boundaries have been revised from time to time. Oxford County had its own school board until 1998, when it was merged into the Thames Valley District School Board.
context_section_description: The geographical area that is now Oxford County was populated with Neutral/Attawandaron longhouse villages for many centuries but was abandoned to First Nations nomadic peoples by the 1650s, as a result of warfare with Iroquois and epidemics resulting from European contact. The land was acquired by the Crown by three treaties, signed in 1792 (by chiefs of the Mississaugas First Nation), in 1796 (by chiefs of the Chippewas First Nation) and 1827 (by chiefs of the Chippewas). They depended for their certainty on an earlier treaty known as the McKee Purchase of 1790, signed at Detroit with 35 chiefs from the Potawatomi, Wyandot, Ojibwe, and Odawa First Nations.
  Oxford County was created by the legislature of the province of Upper Canada in 1798 by an enactment that came into force at the beginning of 1800. The immediate purpose was for better organization of the local militia and the improvement of the social order by the appointment of a lord lieutenant, part of the aristocratic framework for the new province that had been put in place by Governor Simcoe. The county lieutenant appointed for Oxford was William Claus, a grandson of Sir William Johnson and then head of the Indian Department responsible for oversight of the Six Nations settled along the Grand River tract running north and south on the eastern boundary of Oxford.
   
  As first established, Oxford County consisted of the townships of Blenheim, Burford, Oxford-on-the-Thames, Blandford, Norwich, and Dereham (lands to the north of the Thames River had not yet been purchased by the Crown). The first three had been receiving settlers since the summer of 1793, under the leadership of Thomas Hornor (Blenheim), Benajah Mallory (Burford), and Thomas Ingersoll (Oxford-on-the-Thames), each of whom was also captain of the militia in his respective township.  Claus remained resident in Niagara, and his appointment as the Crown's head for the county set off a rivalry between Hornor and Mallory for the prestige of appointment as Claus's resident deputy lieutenant within the county, eventually won by Hornor. Thomas Ingersoll left the county, but the rivalry between Hornor and Mallory for pre-eminence continued for more than a decade, as Mallory was elected as the county's representative in the legislative assembly for Upper Canada in 1804 and again in 1808. All of that was swept away with the coming of the War of 1812. Appointed temporary administrator of the government, General Isaac Brock moved Claus to the head of the Lincoln Militia and appointed Henry Bostwick to head the Oxford Militia, thus passing over Hornor for any role in the war effort (Bostwick was the son of a former associate of Thomas Ingersoll). Mallory lost the 1812 election and turned traitor during the war by defecting to the American side as a captain in a volunteer corps.
  By the end of the first quarter-century of its development, Oxford's population was nearing 2,000 people, but many problems were holding back its development. Robert Gourlay, a Scotsman whose wife had inherited nearly 1,000 acres in Dereham township (around today's Mount Elgin), made the journey to Oxford in 1817 to inspect the prize but could not believe that the township was still a complete wilderness. He began a public movement to find solutions through public gatherings and newspaper advocacy all over Upper Canada but in return was prosecuted and jailed by the government for sedition.  Gourlay's two-volume Statistical account of Upper Canada, compiled with a view to a grand system of emigration, published in London in 1822, presented a detailed analysis based upon reports submitted to him by citizen groups in 57 townships who yearned for improvements. Gourlay spent the next 35 years away from Canada but returned to his land in Oxford in 1856 to run for election.
  Gourlay was just one of many voices that created dissatisfaction in Oxford and area over the slow pace of growth that continued in the 1820s and 1830s. American-born settlers were again making their way to the county, such as George Tillson, the founder of Tillsonburg, and Abrah
caption: John Graves Simcoe (1752–1806)
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