Concession Lines & Side Roads: Pathways of the PRHC

Submitted by: Jay Sherwin

Hike reference: 10.3 km: Bethel Grove Rd, Donaldson Rd. W

As members of the Pine Ridge Hiking Club, we owe much to the original surveyors of this area, which includes Hope, Hamilton, Alnwick, Haldimand, Percy and Cramahe Townships. With a few exceptions, such as municipal parks and the forests, most of our trails follow the gridiron of concession lines and side roads laid out by an intrepid band of adventurous souls who surveyed this area more than 230 years ago, just prior to the influx of settlers.

Settlement along the north shore of Lake Ontario began in 1783 when United Empire Loyalists emigrated to Prince Edward County following the end of the American War of Independence.  Despite this inflow, the British recognized additional settlement was required to populate the land with more citizens loyal to the Crown. The new nation of America, hungry for land, was already expanding west beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The best defence of the British colonial lands north of the Great Lakes was loyal settlers. But British authorities would not permit settlers to move into the area until two conditions were fulfilled. First, the land had to be acquired by treaty from the First Nations who were recognized as occupiers. Secondly, the land had to be surveyed to create lots which would be “conceded” to settlers. 

In 1787, representatives of the Mississauga First Nations met with British officials at Carrying Place near Brighton and agreed to cede the lands along the north shore of Lake Ontario, between the present-day locations of Trenton and Toronto, to the British for the purposes of settlement. The ceded lands were to extend inland from the shore of Lake Ontario to the distance a gunshot could be heard on a calm day. The Gunshot Treaty, as it was named, was verbal. There were no signatures and the First Nations representatives were led to believe their traditional hunting and fishing practices would be allowed to continue. The ambiguity and informality of the Gunshot Treaty led to a 230-year struggle by the Mississauga First Nation to regain the hunting and fishing rights on the lands ceded for settlement.  

The Canada Act of February 1791 divided the province of Quebec into Upper and Lower Canada. Upper Canada, land to the west of the Ottawa River, was divided into districts and townships. The district in present day Cobourg-Port Hope area was designated as Newcastle. Newcastle weas further divided into the townships of Hope, Hamilton, Haldimand and Cramahe. A few months later, in the summer of 1791 surveying began. 

The work of a surveyor in the late 1700s in this area was brutally difficult. Imagine being given the task of establishing a road network in the wilderness of the Township of Hamilton in the District of Newcastle in the province of Upper Canada in 1791. Your tools were an axe, a compass and a measuring chain. Your lodging at the end of a day slashing through bush, bogs and bugs was a mattress of pine needles in a canvass tent. There was little time for rest as there was urgency to your work. Settlers would soon be arriving.   

The difficult work of a surveyor began with establishment of a Base Line, an east to west line through the south end of the township. Elgin Street through Cobourg, and County Road 2 from Cobourg to Port Hope, are today located on what was the Base Line of Hamilton Township. Following the establishment of the Base Line, Concession Lines and Side Roads were laid out in a grid pattern to create individual lots. The pattern of lot size and shape used for this part of Ontario was Single Front, 20 chains by 100 chains with side roads spaced two lots apart.  Single Front meant a Concession Line provided lot frontages on only one side of the road allowance*.  A chain was a unit of measure – 66 feet. 

The allowance for the Concession Lines and Side Roads was one chain. Concession Lines were established parallel to the Base Line. Side roads were established at right angles to the concession Lines along the boundary of every second lot. Once all the lot and road monuments were set by the surveyors within a concession, the lots were “conceded” from the Crown to first owner, hence the term Concession Line.  

Lots created in the Single Front survey system were long and narrow. They extended the full length of a Concession and thus had access to the Concession Line at both the north end and south ends of the lot. However, the lot was considered to have frontage on Concession Road on just the south end of the lot. This was important to the settler when the requirements of clearing and improving the Concession Line frontage was limited to just one frontage. Double Frontage lots were twice as wide and half as long as Single Frontage lots. The Double Frontage lots thus had frontage on only one Concession Line but looked across the Concession Line at second lot that had frontage on the other side of the road allowance. The owner of a Double Frontage lot had twice as much road allowance to clear as the owner of a Single Frontage lot, but had the neighbour across the Concession Line to help. 

It was the surveyor’s task to install monuments or markers of some type to designate the corner  points of lots along the Concession Lines. If the surveyor’s work was perfect, the 20 chain by 100 chain lot would have an area of 200 acres. A township in the Newcastle district was typically 35 lots in width east to west and 10 concessions south to north.

In the early period of settlement, a lot was conceded to a settler at no cost other than a permit fee. However, as payment for the land, the new lot owner was required to clear five acres, construct a dwelling and clear the road allowance along the front of the lot. The settler was thus dependent on finding the monuments along the concession line designating the road allowance.  

Given the primitiveness of the surveyor’s tools and the obstacles of swamps, bogs, hills, valleys, dense bush, black flies and mosquitoes, errors were inevitable. Those errors live on and during today’s hike, 230-plus years after the survey, we will experience examples of survey errors.  

The errors are apparent along the Vimy Ridge Road, formerly the 6^th Concession Line of Hamilton Township. Hiking north along Irving Goheen Road, we jog slightly to the east along the 6^th Line to continue north again on Little Road. On the return leg, hiking south on Glen Gavel Road, we jog slightly to the west on the 6^th Line to resume the southbound trek along Vic Lightle Road. The side roads should line up at the 6^th Line but they are out of line by about 200 meters, roughly 10 chains of the 1791 surveyor’s measure. Why do the Side Roads not line up? The blood of a squashed mosquito obscuring a number on the surveyor’s note pad? An error in counting chains?  Or perhaps the surveyor was just having a bad day. Drunkenness was a justifiable condition for the maligned surveyor as evidenced by the lyrics (attached below) to the  song The Drunken Dummer Survey by the folk group Tanglefoot.   

Example of a surveying error.

Irving Goheen and Little Roads are Side Roads along the east side of Lot 29 in the 5^th and 6^th Concessions respectively. Glen Gavel and Vic Lightle Roads are Side Roads along the west side of Lots 30 in the 6^th and 5^th Concessions respectively. Side Roads were designed to provide north-south travel routes and access for the lot owner to the entire length of the property. As Side Roads were not as important to the fabric of the township road network as Concession Roads, some were never opened. Others were cleared, opened and then abandoned if the farm failed and the owner moved on. Many others were cleared, improved bit-by-bit and finally added to the network of fully maintained township roads. Glen Gavel Road is both maintained (south portion) and unmaintained (north portion). While hiking along the unmaintained portion of Glen Gavel Road it is easy to see the crumbling fence lines to the east and west, one chain length (66 feet) apart.

The Pine Ridge Hiking Club benefits tremendously from the network of Concession Lines and Side Roads in the townships over which we ramble. We are indebted to the hardy surveyors and tenacious settlers that created the pathways of our hikes.   

  Sources

1. Gores Landing and the Rice Lake Plains: Norma Martin, Catherine Milne, Donna McGillis/Clay Publishing, Bewdely , ON 1995.

2. Rolling Hills of Northumberland: Various Contributors/County of Northumberland, Cobourg, ON 2000

3. Village Settlements of Hamilton Township: Catherine Milne/Clay Publishing, Bewdley 1991

4. Historical Atlas of Northumberland and Durham Counties.  Original editions by H Belden and Company, Toronto ON 1878.

5. The Double-Front Era: Township Surveying in Upper Canada (1812 - 1829)

By Hugh Goebelle, B.A., B.Sc., M.A., O.L.S.

Abstract from a Master’s Thesis in the History of Surveying at the University of Waterloo

1. Crown Surveys in Ontario: W.F. Weaver/Ontario Department of Lands and Forests Toronto ON 1962