page_title: Guelph
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Guelph / History
caption_attribution_description: "Map of the Town of Guelph, from recent surveys and original maps"
context_page_description: Guelph is a city in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Known as "The Royal City", Guelph is roughly 28 km east of Kitchener and 100 km west of Downtown Toronto, at the intersection of Highway 6, Highway 7 and Wellington County Road 124. It is the seat of Wellington County, but is politically independent of it. The city is built on the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.
  Guelph began as a settlement in the 1820s, established by Scotsman John Galt, who was in Upper Canada as the first Superintendent of the Canada Company. He based the headquarters, and his home, in the community. The area – much of which became Wellington County – had been part of the Halton Block, a Crown Reserve for the Six Nations Iroquois. Galt would later be considered as the founder of Guelph.
  For many years, Guelph ranked at or near the bottom of Canada's crime severity list. However, the 2017 Crime Severity Index showed a 15% increase from 2016. Guelph has been noted as having one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country throughout the Great Recession.
context_section_description: Before colonization, the area was considered by the surrounding indigenous communities to be a "neutral" zone and was inhabited by the Neutral Nation. According to the University of Guelph, "the area was home to a First Nations community called the Attawandaron who lived in longhouses surrounded by fields of corn". The majority of this nation, about 4,000 people, lived in a village near what is now the Badenoch area of Puslinch, near Morriston.
  John Galt, the first Superintendent of the Canada Company, was hired to help colonize Upper Canada. He selected Guelph as the headquarters of this British development firm. Galt was a popular Scottish poet and novelist who also designed the town to attract settlers and farmers to the surrounding countryside. His design intended the town to resemble a European city centre, complete with squares, broad main streets and narrow side streets, resulting in a variety of block sizes and shapes which are still in place today. The street plan was laid out in a radial street and grid system that branches out from downtown, a technique which was also employed in other planned towns of this era, such as Buffalo, New York.
  The founding was symbolized by the felling of a tree by Galt and William "Tiger" Dunlop, who would be significant in the history of Goderich, Ontario, on April 23, 1827 . That was St. George's Day, the feast day of the patron saint of England.
  The name Guelph comes through the Italian Guelfo from the Bavarian-Germanic Welf. It is a reference to the House of Welf and chosen to honor King George IV—the reigning British monarch at the time of the city's founding—whose family, the Hanoverians, descended from the Welfs. It is for this reason that the city has the nickname The Royal City. The directors of the Canada Company had actually wanted the city to be named Goderich, because Lord Goderich had helped form the company, but reluctantly accepted that the village was called Guelph.
  Galt constructed what was one of the first buildings in the community to house early settlers and the Canada Company office; "The Priory" (built 1827–1828). was located on the banks of the Speed River near the current River Run Centre for performing arts and could house up to 100 people. The building eventually became the Canadian Pacific Railway Priory station on the Guelph Junction Railway before it was eventually torn down and removed. A historical plaque commemorates John Galt's role with the Canada Company in populating Upper Canada's Huron Tract, calling it "the most important single attempt at settlement in Canadian history". (Galt was responsible for finding settlers for the 42,000 acre Halton Block that would become Guelph and its townships but also for the one million acre Huron Tract that stretched to Goderich, Ontario.)
  By the fall of 1827, 70 houses had been built, though some were primitive. In that year, the community had hired its first police constable; the first police station would be opened in 1856 at the town hall and it was moved in 1900 to the Annex building behind the court house. Also in 1827, the first Guelph Farmers' Market was built; the Market House was located in the downtown area. Founded in 1827, James Hodgert's brewery was managed by John Sleeman until he bought a property and opened the Silver Creek Brewery in 1851. (In 1843, there were nine breweries serving the 700 people living in Guelph.)
  The first Board of Commerce also started in 1827, to stimulate economic growth; in 1866, it would be renamed the Board of Trade, and in 1919, it became the Chamber of Commerce. In order to eliminate the need for farmers to take their grain to Galt or Dundas for grinding, the Canada Company built the first grist mill; the Guelph Mill was sold to William Allen in 1832. A sawmill was erected in 1833 by Charles Julius Mickle, originally from Scotland, on the Marden Creek which runs into the Speed River; its ruin survives today. The Mickle family also built a home nearby, a year earlier. Both properties were off what is now Highway 6, an area that was Guelph Township at the time.
  In 18
caption: Map of Guelph, 1855
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