Blanshard Township and St Marys Links
The following are part of Blanshard township: Kirkton, Woodham, Whalen Corners, Anderson, Metropolitan, Rannoch, McIntyre's Corners, Prospect Hill (aka Fish Creek), Science Hill and the town of St Marys. St Marys, for some reason, does not have an apostrophe in its name.
St Marys Home Page
St Marys Museum is located at 177 Church St, St Marys, ON N4X 1A9. The museum's resources include: local newspapers (1857-present) on microfilm, indexed up to 1913 with directories for births, marriages and deaths; census records of St Marys and Blanshard township, some of which have been indexed; St Marys assessment rolls from 1870s; voters lists; donated local family histories. Contact the museum for further information on any of these.
St Marys Public Library home page
St Marys is home to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame Museum. If you're into sports, have a look.
Maps of St Marys and the surrounding area
The St Marys home page also includes information on many different historic attractions.
Blanshard and St Marys Books
Pioneers of Blanshard by William Johnston, published in 1899 in Toronto, is a good book. It includes the following: chapters on social history and pioneer life; a chapter on St Marys history; chapter biographies of the following men: David Cathcart, Capt John Campbell, Samuel Radcliff, James Dunsmore, the Gunning Brothers, W. F. Sanderson, Reuben Switzer, David Brethcour, Mathew Forsyth, Johnston Armstrong.An excellent book is My Roots are in Blanshard. It has tons of stuff, too much to list.
$ You may be able to purchase it from Stratford-Perth Archives.
Another book is History of Blanshard in Review: 1951, reprinted in 1989. It has information on schools, early settlers, municipal history, local organizations, military history, churches, and more.
$ You may be able to purchase it from Stratford-Perth Archives.
Also there is a Blanshard book in Vera McNichol's excellent series, Reveries of a Pioneer. More info on this series is on my Perth County books page.
Pioneers
Early pioneers in Blanshard included David CATHCART (1844) and the WHALEY family. Blanshard was surveyed for settlement in 1839, but there were already people living there at that time.
Huron County Library has put online many assessment rolls for 1842. This is basically a list of residents of the area in 1842; it tells you who was living there and how much land they owned. Read their introduction first and then go to their Blanshard Township page.
See also the new Perth County Pioneers page for visitors' submissions of their pioneer info.
Prominent People
- Timothy Eaton - yes, it all began here. Timothy Eaton was born in County Antrim, Ireland, and came to Canada in about 1854. He had a small store near Kirkton. In 1860 he and his brothers had a store in St Marys. In 1868, he moved to Toronto and opened a store there, naming it - you guessed it - Eaton's.
Source: My Roots are in Blanshard, p. 45.
There's a picture of The Eaton House in St Marys on the St Marys site. - Canada's 9th Prime Minister, Arthur Meighan, of St Marys. He was Prime Minister from 1920-1921.
More information can be found on him in the book My Roots are in Blanshard, p. 37-39. There's more information on him on the Right Honourable Arthur Meighen, Prime Minister of Canada page on the St Marys site.
Surrounding Counties
Oxford | Middlesex | Huron | Wellington | Waterloo