Sarasota Sister Cities Association

Citizen Diplomats - Carving a Path toward Peace Since 1963

Hamilton, Province of Ontario, Canada Crest

HAMILTON, PROVINCE OF ONTARIO HISTORY

The Iroquois Confederacy or Five (later Six) Nations first occupied the land now covered by Hamilton. French explorers made transient visits to the area, but major European settlement did not begin until United Empire Loyalists arrived around the American Revolution and War of 1812. In the latter conflict, Britain defeated American invaders at the Battle of Stoney Creek in what is now Hamilton.

Immediately after the war, in 1815, George Hamilton laid out a townsite in Barton Township which eventually outstripped close rivals like Dundas. Hamilton was incorporated as a police village in 1833 and as a city in 1846.

Hamilton was part of (and served as seat for) Wentworth County since its creation in 1816. By 1851, the county acquired its final composition of townships: Ancaster, Barton, Beverly, Binbrook, East Flamborough, West Flamborough, Glanford and Saltfleet.

In the second half of the 1800s], Hamilton became identified and self-identified with heavy industry, billing itself as the Ambitious City and the Birmingham of Canada. It became a hotbed of working class activism, and in 1872 the cradle of the Nine Hour Movement which urged the universal limitation of working hours to nine per day.

The easy access to limestone from the Niagara Escarpment, coal mined in Appalachia, iron ore mined from the Canadian Shield and export markets through the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence system made Hamilton an important iron- and steel-producing city. Diverse steel works combined to form the Steel Company of Canada in 1910 and the Dominion Steel Casting Company in 1912.

Hamiltonians participated in the First World War as combatants, but due to Col. Sir Sam Hughes' mobilization plans for the Canadian Expeditionary Force, there were no major battles associated purely with Hamiltonians.

Heavy industry boomed as the Canadian and British governments' war-driven demands for steel, arms, munitions and textiles increased. War profiteering by manufacturers dampened some of the mood, but generally Hamiltonians pulled together.

After the Great War the school-building boom continued. In the Roaring Twenties hundreds of low-rise apartment buildings, of three to four stories and six to ten units, grew up across the city. The Great Depression of the 1930s hit Hamilton hard, with the simultaneous and prolonged decline in domestic consumption and international trade in finished industrial goods and building supplies dried up.

When the Second World War began, Hamiltonians - like most Canadians - welcomed the spike of economic demand but not its cause. In this war, the Canadian Army mobilized its territorially recruited militia units. As a consequence, Hamilton lost hundreds of its young men on a single day in 1942, when the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry was effectively wiped out at Dieppe. Read more of The Hamilton Spectator's coverage of the war. Hamilton also gave The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada (Princess Louise's) to the cause.