page_title: St. Joseph Island (Ontario)
section_title: Settlement of St. Joseph Island
hierarchical_section_title: St. Joseph Island (Ontario) / History / Settlement of St. Joseph Island
caption_attribution_description: Bridge to St. Joseph Island (seen in background), Ontario, Canada
context_page_description: St. Joseph Island is in the northwestern part of Lake Huron. It is part of the Canadian province of Ontario. The island is 30 kilometers in length and 20 kilometers in width at its widest point and 365 km² in area. It is the sixth-largest lake island in the world; the second-largest island on Lake Huron, following Manitoulin Island; and the third largest of all the islands on the Great Lakes, trailing Manitoulin and Lake Superior's Isle Royale. The circumference of the island's coastline is 145 km.
  The island lays approximately 45 km south east of the city of Sault Ste. Marie and 225 km south west of Sudbury.
  St. Joseph Island played an important role for First Nations and Europeans in the early fur trade and as a staging point for the first victory for British North America in the War of 1812. The island is the subject of one of the Upper Canada Land Surrender treaties conducted by the British government and First Nations in the period between the end of the American Revolution and Confederation.
  Today St. Joseph Island is a destination for tourists and cottagers in northeastern Ontario.
context_section_description: From the end of the war until 1829, St. Joseph Island was virtually uninhabited. Exploring a creek in the southeast corner of the island, one of the commission survey teams reported "a neat log house far up in the woods, with a patch of Indian corn, and other vegetables. It was inhabited by an Indian widow and her daughter. Nothing could exceed the cleanliness of the lodge in the wilderness. The surveyors saw no one else on the island and reported it as a jungle containing only bears and other wild animals."
  The boundary commission process, combined with the demilitarization of the Great Lakes under the Rush–Bagot Treaty of 1817, offered greater certainty in the region. Increasingly St. Joseph Island and its environs began to be seen for their abundant resources and potential for settlement.
  Among the first to see this potential was Major William Kingdom Rains. A veteran of British wars in Europe, Rains resigned the military in 1830 to start a new life in British North America. In 1834, Lieutenant Governor John Colborne allowed Rains to purchase over 2,200 hectares to start a colony on St. Joseph Island. Rains, his family and a company of investors established Milford Haven - named after a seaside resort near Rains' hometown in Wales - complete with a store and saw mill in the southeast of the island. However, very few settlers came to the island. By 1836, Rains, short on capital for the settlement due to poor investments of his agent, had become estranged from his fellow investors and relocated to a point of land not far from the site of Fort St. Joseph which he named Hentlan (today, Rains Point). Rains' wife Frances and her sister Eliza bore nineteen of Rains’ children, many of whom remained in the area.  His son Tudor Rains would go on to establish a successful store at Sailors Encampment on the northwest of the island.
  A government report on the progress of the settlement in July 1839 found only ten small homes at the Milford Haven, several of which were occupied by French Canadians and Metis fishermen who had been living on the island prior to the start of Rains' colony. The only other occupant was an American store owner who was shipping fish and a sizable amount of maple syrup by schooner to Detroit and Chicago.
  Beginning in the mid-1850s, population growth of the island began to shift from the south and west to better agricultural land in the north. Government policies including the Free Grants and Homestead Act of 1868, encouraged would-be farmers in the south of Ontario to relocate to tracts of land in Algoma by providing up to two hundred acres of land per head of household. The greatest influx of settlers came between 1874 and 1882.
  John Richards moved to St. Joseph Island from Sault Ste. Marie in 1876 and founded Richards Landing.  Two years later, businessman John Marks moved from Bruce Mines and founded Marksville, which was incorporated as the Village of Hilton Beach in 1923.
  Two lumber mills began operating on the island in the early 1880s.  In 1912, the Stone Lumber Company at Marksville had added 13 km of railroad with a locomotive to reach dense woodlots up the mountain and deliver timber to the mill. For a time both the train and mill were operated around the clock. By the end of the 1910s, the mill had produced and shipped two and a half million board feet of maple and pine lumber around the world. The rail line operated for almost 25 years until mill ceased operation in the depression of the 1930s and the tracks were dismantled.
  The completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway spur from Sudbury across the north channel to Sault Ste. Marie in 1887 opened up the region to migration by farmers and settlers. In 1909, a group of capitalists proposed a plan to connect the island to the CPR line from Richards Landing. While local residents contributed to the financing for the project, nothing came of it.  A rough roadway followed the CPR line so that by 1923, the communities along the channel were connected to Sault Ste. Marie by road.
  At the close of the 1800s and beginning of the 1900s, it became very fas
caption: The St. Joseph Island Bernt Gilbertson Bridge, opened in 1972, is seen leading to the island
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "", "Image Make": "SONY", "Image Model": "DSC-H1", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image DateTime": "2008:04:28 12:25:21", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "215", "Thumbnail ImageWidth": "160", "Thumbnail ImageLength": "120", "Thumbnail BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Thumbnail Compression": "Uncompressed", "Thumbnail PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Thumbnail StripOffsets": "2458", "Thumbnail SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Thumbnail RowsPerStrip": "120", "Thumbnail StripByteCounts": "57600", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/100", "EXIF FNumber": "4", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "64", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2008:04:26 16:34:39", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2008:04:26 16:34:39", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "8", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "3", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "27/2", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1229", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "922", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "2239", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal"}