John Brown

[History of the Village of Fonthill The Fonthill Women’s Institute, 1944]

The John Brown family were U.E. Loyalists, coming to Canada from the States in 1783. They settled first near DeCew falls in what was then called “The Gore” and in 1797 received three hundred acres of land from the crown.

The father died in 1804 and his son John Brown, who married Mary Damude, daughter of Henry Damude, then moved to a farm near Port Robinson.

John Brown Sr. came to Fonthill about the year 1824 for it was during the time the first Welland Canal was being excavated, and that primarily was the cause of his moving from his farm at Port Robinson. The canal came as far south as Port Robinson where the boats were locked into the Chippawa Creek, from whence they proceeded down the Creek to the Niagara River at Chippawa. The excavating was done mostly with shovels and wheel-barrows, by a rather wild crowd of Irishmen who liked nothing better than a good fight. In fact it was after one particular brawl in which a man by the name of Griffith was evidently killed, for he was never heard of again, that John Brown decided to seek a more peaceful region and traded his farm in Port Robinson for the one in Fonthill where the Browns still live.

At that time there was a frame house on the farm, which later burned and in 1864 was replaced by the present brick home.

John Brown Jr., was three years old when the family came to Fonthill. At that time there was no school in the village, and the first school he attended was situated on the Port Robinson Road in the corner of the farm now owned by Frank Clark. Afterward a small brick school house was built in the village, first of the three to be erected on the site of the present one.

The writer of the Biographical Sketch, a daughter of John Brown Jr., tells: About the time my parents were married an escaped slave came to my Grandfather’s; he had been the personal slave of a Mr Murray, so bore the name Sam Murray. Sam with some other slaves, had received permission to attend a religious ‘camp meeting’ and as they were to be gone two days and a night, they were well on their way before they were missed. Like so many slaves who escaped into Canada, they came by the ‘Underground Railway.’

Sam’s clothes were of fine broadcloth but were in tatters when he arrived here.. He lived several years and was a real friend of the Brown family.

Another interesting item follows: At the time of the Civil War in the States, some rich men who were conscripted by the Army, paid well for substitutes, and men from Canada were sometimes drugged, then taken across the Niagara River and sold. A case of that kind occurred at the old Rice Hotel which stood on the corner, now the lawn at the home of Gordon Haist. A number of men were in the hotel drinking; later one of them wrapped in a quilt, awakened in the Brown’s bush and was able to get home, but two others were never seen again.

Miss Brown continues: My first memory of cutting grain was by hand, with a cradle which left the grain in rows to be bound by hand. The first machine my father owned, drawn by horses, let the grain fall on a table: when enough was cut it was pushed off by a man who sat at the back of the machine. The next reaper had revolving rakes which pushed the grain flat on a table, the driver pressed on a ‘trip’ which caused the rake to force the sheaf off the table. It too had to be bound by hand.

Then came the Binder which cut the grain and bound the sheaves. Now we have ‘combines’which cut and thresh the grain in one operation.