| The Story of Edward Hammond | |
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| Edward's Story | (Extracts taken from “Beyond Rogues' Harbour” by Don Baron)Context |
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Backstory In the book "Beyond Rogues Harbour", it is speculated that Edward Hammond's ancestors had undoubtably been among those protestants “planted” to Ireland from Scotland in the Ulster Plantation of 1600. On the other hand, the family name Hammond was in Ireland before the 11th century coming of the Normans, and there is no record of the Hammond name in the first two waves of "Planters" (see the write-up in the Context column.) At the time of Edward's birth, ever so briefly, Ireland was in the throes of relative prosperity in 1765. The Ulster hand weavers were creating an enormous amount of flax linen from their looms flooding the English markets. Flax and linen production had become Ireland’s single most important industry.
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"The Ulster Plantations" of 1605 - 1697
The first of the three major migrations consisted primarily of fortune seekers to the "Emerald Isle" from Scotland. The second wave had more political overtones, supported by the governments of Scotland and England to a) get rid of as many impoverished lowland Scots as possible, seen as consisting primariy of horsethieves, and to b) populate Ireland with British subjects to counterbalance and overrun the Irish Roman Catholics. Wave three resulted from typical British arrogance: In 1630, King Charles forced the Prayer Book of the Church of England on the Church of Ireland, thus overriding the Scots' form of worship. Then in 1638, England imposed an oath on the Scots in Ulster ('The Black Oath') forcing them to support the English king. Doubly insulted, many returned to Scotland. In October 1641, the native Irish rebelled and killed many remaining settlers, many of the survivors returned to Scotland. In 1642, 10,000 Scottish soldiers, (incluing highlanders this time) arrived in Ireland to beat down the rebellion and many remained in Ireland. |
| Born in 1765 There is not a lot of information about the parents of Edward Hammond, nor his early years. The Hammonds lived in Tyrone county, and made a living producing linen. As the weaving trade provided a secure lifestyle, Edward grew up to become a weaver as well. Married in 1789 When Edward Hammond was 24 years old, he married Peggy Shankleton. Their first son James was born about 1797. It was thought that Edward (and his neighbours) "undoubtably had relatives living across the Irish Sea in Scotland. The distance across that open water was not great. The Kintyre Isthmus extending out from Glasgow towards Belfast provided protection for boats journeying there, and beyond it was only 13 miles of open water. The Hammonds and others may well have crossed that water occasionally to visit relatives." "The Hammonds were Baptists with their roots set deeply in religion and family values. And these strengths would be instilled in their children. But now, as events pressed in on their country, they faced some fateful decisions." |
Ireland's History Ireland was undergoing massive structural changes as Britain’s Industrial Revolution was kicked off through great textile inventions. Cheap cotton cloth was flooding out from new factories in Lancashire and beyond, devastating the handweaving industry in Ireland and in Britain too. Ireland’s linen industry plunged into decline after 1780. While Ulster’s business leaders created their own mills, they could not halt the deteriorating Irish economy. As if that were not enough, Ireland was also adversely affected by Britain’s continuing d deadly struggle with France and Spain for dominance of the newly disovered areas of the world. Social unrest was rising. The potato famines lay ahead. The period from 1780 to 1800 was a period of great unrest within Ireland. In 1796 Wolfer Tone, an Irish rebel leader led a force of 14,000 French soldiers to Ireland, but storms wrecked the convoy before a single soldier reached Irish soil. In 1798, the British supressed an uprising with great difficulty, leading to the Act of Union of 1800, which created a political entity called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. |
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1801 - Fleeing Ulster for Scotland "Thanks to their Scottish background, their horizons extended beyond Ireland’s shores. They had a keen sense of the underlying issues shaking their world. And in 1801, when son James was only four or five years old, they gathered up their belongings and made their way to Belfast. There, they got a boat across the Irish Sea and settled around Glasgow, where Edward could work as a weaver." If not already worse than those in Ireland, conditions in Scotland and Glasgow were awful. Glasgow would soon be called the worst city in Europe for housing and health. The Hammond’s first son, James, had been born in Ireland. In Glasgow, the Hammond family grew in the decade from 1800 to 1810, with sons William and Edward then daughters Margaret and Jane, and lastly, John in 1825. These children grew to adulthood in the turmoil of the early 1800's. And like (others) across the sea in Ireland, they began to look for some escape. Their eyes turned out across the Atlantic.
| Frying pan into the fire - the Horror of the Clearances
The ravages affecting Ireland were starting to devastate Glasgow, and things were to continue to deteriorate. Leading up to 1800, Scotland had been a world leader. John Knox, the leader of the Scottish Presbyterianism movement, was a strong believer in education, and Scotland had an advanced educational system with much higher levels of educated citizens compared to other countries of the British Isles as well as other European countries. Edinburgh University’s medical program provided doctors to all of Europe. The linen industry was also taking advantages of technology advances of the industrial age. The good news didn't last. The thin soil could not support the exploding population. Farmers started to move to the towns to work in manufacturing, highlanders moved to Glasgow and Edinburgh. Wool prices doubled in the 1770's, kicking off the traumatic “clearances” where estate owners simply evicted tenants from their farms to make more room for the flocks of sheep. The infant cotton industry thrived in Glasgow; in 1814, weavers were “aristocrats of industry” but their time was short-lived as power looms were already being introduced. In 1815, Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo; thousands of demobilized soldiers were looking for jobs. By 1816, Glasgow was deep in depression. Children worked 17 hours a day in the factories. The weavers struck for increased wages but the owners ignored them and in the ensuing violence, three weavers were hung. |
| The Children leave For Canada - 1830 Four of Edward's six children chose to join the wave of people venturing to Canada, where they could remain in Empire and joined the wave of emigrants leaving Glasgow for Canada in the 1830's. First, second son, William, set out to become a hotel keeper in Hamilton, Ontario, while third son, Edward, on his arrival, travelled further west to Listowel and the fertile farming area of what is now southern Ontario. He settled and farmed there. Daughter Margaret had married Michael Alexander in Scotland and the couple had two sons before setting out for Canada. Instead of continuing on to southern Ontario, they turned up the Ottawa River, and settled at Fitzroy Harbour on the Upper Canada side (now Ontario) where two more children were born. Later, they moved across the river to what was then Bristol adjacent to Clarendon and Onslow. Daughter Janet, who didn’t marry, remained in Scotland, as did fourth son John. Oldest son James, Irish-born and Scottish-raised remained in Glasgow for the time being trying to scrape out a living. He married Betty Keading in 1822. Sons John and George, were born in Glasgow. Finally, about 1834, James's family followed his sister Margaret Alexander to Fitzroy Harbour in the Ottawa River valley in Canada.
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Upper Canada
In 1791, one generation after it's conquest of the French in Canada, the British Government divided the province of Quebec into two parts: Upper Canada and Lower Canada (Quebec) to accomodate the Loyalists pouring into the country following the American revolutionin order to create two entities so that each could be accorded the institutions and rules that it would support. Unfortunately, the French inhabitants considered that while still under the British crown, they would have some independance with their "own" province. Combined with agricultural crisis among French farmers in the St. Lawrence valley and the far-off autocratic rule of Britain, this led to the Rebellions of 1837-1838 in Lower Canada, led by Louis Joseph Papineau. Repercussions were swift and brutal. Any thought of self-government was quashed in 1840 and, following the Durham Report, Britain officially returned to assimilation policies. between Upper & Lower: Ottawa Valley Philemon Wright first settled beside the Chaudiere falls in the Ottawa Valley in the early 1800s. In 1805 he started his logging enterprise, kicking off a period of enormous prosperity by 1830, complete with industry barons with names now enshrined into Ottawa etymology such as E. B. Eddy, Booth, Bronson, Gilmour and MacLaren. The first house in Westboro, Maplelawn, the stately manor house at 529 Richmond Road, was built for William Thompson in 1831-34. In the early 1800's, Charles Shirreff migrating from Leith, Scotland with his family in 1818, founding Fitzroy Harbour, . He was deeded a large land grant around Fitzroy to employ more immigrants from Scotland and Ireland. With the financial support of Britain, Charles started work on a canal to connect the Ottawa River to Georgian Bay. Some of the early work can be found on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River near the Hydro Damn in Fitzroy. Despite strenous lobbying by Charles, funding from the British government dried up, killing the project; thirty years later, Colonel By built the Rideau Canal and founded Bytown, later to become Ottawa, capital of Canada. (A fascinating urban myth persists that Fitzroy Harbour could have become the capital of Canada.) |