Charles Rankin

Charles Rankin, (1797 − 1886 George married Mary Stuart (born in Bunker Hill, Massachusetts to Scottish immigrants Charles, George Junior (who became an army surgeon in India), who also became a land surveyor.

Charles was born in 1797, also in Enniskillen, but after the end of the War of 1812, he accompanied his parents and siblings to Montréal in Lower Canada, where his younger brother Arthur was born in 1816. With the districts around Detroit and Niagara already settled from the previous generation of pioneers (who had settled the area during and after the American Revolutionary War), the government of Upper Canada, under the control of the oligarchical Family Compact, sought to colonize areas which were further away from the American border, which could be a defensible "heartland" for the province. Development agencies like the Canada Company were formed, and by the middle of the 19th century the government would be laying out the colonization roads to key destinations, with townships along the way, creating secure land-based routes between the previously scattered and isolated lakeshore settlements which had been vulnerable to American interdiction and blockade during the War of 1812. Surveyors were suddenly in significant demand, and became an important profession in the province.

On 27 December 1820, the 4th lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, who was also an early advocate of the Canadian Indian residential school system as a means to deepen British control of the province's indigenous population. Initially based in the township of Malden near Amherstburg, Rankin developed a close understanding of the region's natural geography throughout the 1820s. The survey would be finished several years later by a different surveyor, John McDonald.

Owen Sound

Rankin would surface again in 1840, undertaking the surveying of a new township at a strategic location: the intersection of the Sydenham River, the Pottawatomi River, and an inlet on Lake Huron's Georgian Bay, which had been named Owen Sound a few decades earlier by the British explorer William Fitzwilliam Owen. This had been intended as the northern terminus of the Garafraxa Colonization Road, with the road and town site being a part of an 1836 plan by Francis Bond Head, Upper Canada's new, 6th lieutenant governor. In a shift from the policies of Maitland (which leaned toward assimilation and close management of indigenous people), Head believed that indigenous people could never be "civilized", This would only last a few years, however, as the Ojibwe would be relocated to a new reserve on Colpoy's Bay, then again to Cape Croker. and archaeologists working in the 1970s discovered copper caches dating as far back as the Archaic period (8,000 to 3,000 BP, or 6,000 to 1,000 BCE). French documents from the 1650s also alluded to the presence of organized mining efforts by indigenous people, though no concrete archaeological evidence of the methods have been established, and the mining activities may have been confined to placer mining and sifting.

Later life

Rankin continued to live in Owen Sound in a home on the west side of the harbour for much of the rest of his life. His wife, Elizabeth, died in 1872. Mary, his daughter, married Samuel Victor Hutchins, the eldest son of the Reverend Henry Hutchins of Prairie du Sac, Sauk County, Wisconsin. Hutchins worked as a manager at various Molson's Bank locations in Ontario, and later worked in the audit department of the City of Toronto's treasury. They had nine children. His Ontario Heritage Plaque in Owen Sound lists his death as being in 1886.

Legacy

Rankin's legacy largely exists in the form of the many roads and townships he laid out or whose early settlement he was involved in, such as the Garafraxa Colonization Road, which largely still exists in the form of Ontario Highway 6, or most notably, his role in the settlement and founding of the city of Owen Sound. As such, he had a strong role in shaping the modern human geography of much of Southwestern Ontario, especially Grey County and Bruce County. A river in Bruce County, the Rankin River, is named after him.

In 1990, legal proceedings began over a strip of land along the Sauble Beach lakeshore, with the Canadian federal government upholding Saugeen First Nation's claim to it as a part of the Saugeen 29 reserve. Rankin's work as a surveyor came under modern scrutiny when the Saugeen First Nation used it as evidence in their land claims dispute with the town of South Bruce Peninsula, arguing that an 1855 survey map authored by him validated their claims. In another claim filed in 1994, both the Saugeen First Nation and Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation challenged the Crown on its alleged failure to uphold the terms of Treaty 72, which instructed "hat the interest of the principal sum arising out of the sale of our lands be regularly paid, to ourselves and our children in perpetuity, so long as there are Indians left to represent our tribe, without diminution, at half-yearly periods," and requested reparations in the form of $90 billion, as well as the return of unsold Crown lands in the Treaty 72 area, much of it still existing in the form of twenty-metre shore allowances left by surveyors like Charles Rankin. Trial proceedings began in April 2019.