An Account of Fenwick

By Louis Blake Duff

[Pelham PNYX 1933]

“Wick is a common element in names, Norse as well as Anglo-Saxon, and while the spelling of the word is the same in both languages, the meaning is different. With the Anglo-Saxons it was a station or abode on land, that is a house or village.

The settlement of Pelham began about 1790. The Crown grants of the farms where Fenwick is now located were made in 1798 and 1801—two to David Sharpe, two to Martin McClelland and one each to Benjamin Hill and Christopher Bert. The first schoolhouse lot was leased, not deeded in 1844 by Benjamin Corwin of Stamford, to James Disher, Leonard Haney and Simcoe Chapman as “Town Wardens for the township of Pelham in the County of Lincoln in the District of Niagara”. Welland county had not come into being until more than a decade later.

This schoolhouse was to be for the benefit of the inhabitants of Union School District No. 7. The consideration of the lease was five shillings, and it was stipulated that the lease was to terminate if no school was maintained for five years. The School Trustees were James E. Hutt and Joseph Garner.

The “Church corner” was bought in 1860 by Rev. John Wilkerson, Jacob Crow Jr., Abishai R. Crossman, Leonard Loucks, Edward Early, Benjamin Loree and James Swayze—“Trustees of the Chapter of the Canadian Wesleyan Methodist New Connection at Fenwick”. This church deed marks the first use of the name Fenwick so far as Registry Office records show. The name however had been in use for seven years. The place had been known in former years as Diffin’s Corners—and that name dates back to 1845 when George and Benjamin Diffin bought a lot and began the operation of an inn.

The post office was opened on April 1^st in 1853 with Leonard Haney as first postmaster. That was the  birth of Fenwick. Why Fenwick?  That is a question I cannot answer. Local  tradition  says it was named in honour of a famous military man, General  Sir William Henwick Williams, the hero of Kars. Tradition is usually right or nearly right but, I am doubtful in this case. The Reeve of Pelham was Dr. John Fraser, The first Warden of thecounty. He was born in Fenwick in Scotland. It is not unreasonable to conclude he had a part in the naming.

Leonard Haney was succeeded as postmaster by James Brackhill. Mr Brackhill had come to Fenwick in 1858, but soon after joined a large party of adventurers who set out for the gold fields in California. Mr Brackhill never returned for he lost his life when the steamer, Goldengate,  in which he was a passenger, was destroyed by fire off the Californian Coast. He was succeeded as postmaster by James W. Taylor, Fletcher Swayze, Pattison and Diffin, Barney Hare, O.A. Stringer, F.W. Hutt, J. Edsall, William Swayze. W.H. Fry and Frank Tunnacliffe. This information I had a decade ago from the late Augustus Hyatt.

The first plan of Fenwick was filed in 1924 and the street names there listed will pass down to the future the memory of former residents of the village. Haney Street records the names of Henry R. Haney,M.D., at one time Superintendent of Schools in Pelham and who was M.P.P. for Monck when he died in 1878 and also that of Capt. A.W. Haney, who recruited a company of volunteer infantry at Fenwick for the 44^th battalion at the time of the Fenian invasion of 1866. Garner Avenue commemorates the name of County Warden Joseph Garner, who occupied the Reeveship of Pelham for more than a score of years; Baxter Lane is named for one who spent the closing years of a long life at Fenwick—Rev. Michael Baxter, a retired Methodist clergyman.