Kitchener, Ontario

Kitchener is a city in the Canadian province of Ontario, about west of Toronto. It is one of three cities that make up the Regional Municipality of Waterloo and is the regional seat. Kitchener was known as Berlin until a 1916 referendum changed its name. The city covers an area of 136.86 km², and had a population of 256,885 at the time of the 2021 Canadian census.
The Regional Municipality of Waterloo has 673,910 people as of year-end 2023, making it the 10th-largest census metropolitan area in Canada and the fourth-largest CMA in Ontario. Kitchener and Waterloo are considered "twin cities", which are often referred to jointly as "Kitchener–Waterloo", although they have separate municipal governments.

History

Pre-contact indigenous history and land use

Indigenous people have long lived in and around what is today Kitchener-Waterloo. During the retreat of the last glacial maximum, the Waterloo Region was isolated by the ice to the north, east, and west and by Lake Maumee III to the south. However once the ice retreated the landscape opened up for nomadic populations to hunt, camp, and thrive; though not many sites from the Paleo-Indian Period have been documented in the region thus far.
The Archaic Period still primarily consisted of nomadic hunter-gatherer communities spread out across the landscape. Advancements in technologies including less portable stone tools such as axes and adzes, more intricate tools made of animal bone such as fish hooks, gorges, and harpoons, and the entrance of Indigenous copper tools into the archaeological record is characteristic of this time period. More than two dozen archaeological sites from the Archaic Period have been documented in the Waterloo Region alone including campsites, tool manufacturing sites, and cemeteries.
Archaeologist Gary Warrick of Wilfrid Laurier University dates the expansion of the Neutral people to the Kitchener-Waterloo area sometime in the 1300s in what is referred to as the Woodland Period. A history states that at least two "aboriginal settlements from the 1500s can now be identified near Schneider and Strasburg Creeks" with some artifacts having been found under the city from a thousand years ago. The Iroquoian people grew crops such as corn, beans and squash. The finds include the remains of a First Nations village, estimated to be 500 years old, discovered in 2010 in the Strasburg Creek area of Kitchener. The inhabitants are thought to be ancestors of the Neutral Nation; artifacts found include the remains of longhouses, tools made of bone and of stone and arrowheads. One archaeologist stated that they discovered "artifacts going back as far as 9,000 years".
In 2020, a site at Fischer-Hallman Road was found to include artifacts from a "Late Woodland Iroquois village" that was inhabited circa 1300 to 1600. Archeologists found some 35,000 objects including stone tools and a 4,000 year old arrowhead.
To date, there are more than 18 Late-Woodland Period village sites documented in the Waterloo Region.

Early European settlement

German company tract

Kitchener stands on a part of the Haldimand Tract, the lands of the Grand River valley purchased in 1784 by the British from the Mississaugas in order to grant it to the Six Nations for their allegiance during the American Revolution. Between 1796 and 1798, the Six Nations sold 38,000 hectares of this land to loyalist Colonel Richard Beasley. The portion of land that Beasley purchased was remote, but of great interest to German Mennonite farming families from Pennsylvania. They wanted to live in an area that would allow them to practice their beliefs without persecution. Eventually, the Mennonites purchased all of Beasley's unsold land, creating 160 farm tracts.
Many of the pioneers arriving from Pennsylvania, known as the Pennsylvania Dutch or Pennsilfaanisch-Deitsche, after November 1803 bought land in a 60,000-acre section of Block Two from the German Company, which was established by a group of Mennonites from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The tract included most of Block 2 of the previous Grand River Indian lands. Many of the first farms were least 400 acres in size. The German Company, represented by Daniel Erb and Samuel Bricker, had acquired the land from previous owner Richard Beasley; he had gotten into financial difficulties after buying the land in 1796 from Joseph Brant, who represented the Six Nations. The payment to Beasley, in cash, arrived from Pennsylvania in kegs, carried in a wagon surrounded by armed guards.
The first settlers in the area of what would become the village of Doon arrived in 1800. They were two Mennonites from Franklin County, Pennsylvania who were also brothers in law, Joseph Schoerg and Samuel Betzner Jr. Joseph Schoerg and his wife settled on Lot 11, B.F. Beasley Black, S.R., on the bank of the Grand River opposite Doon, and Betzner and his wife settled on the west bank of the Grand, on a farm near the village of Blair.
The homes built by the next generation of these families still stand as of March 2021, on what is now Pioneer Tower Road in Kitchener and have been listed as historically important; the John Betzner homestead and the David Schoerg farmstead were erected circa 1830.
By 1800, the first buildings in Berlin had been built, and over the next decade, several families made the difficult trip north to what was then known as the Sandhills. One of these Mennonite families, arriving in 1807, was the Schneiders, whose restored 1816 home is now a National Historic Site and museum in the heart of Kitchener. Other families whose names can still be found in local place names were the Bechtels, the Ebys, the Erbs, the Webers, the Cressmans, and the Brubachers. In 1816, the government of Upper Canada designated the settlement the Township of Waterloo.
Much of the land, made up of moraines and swampland interspersed with rivers and streams, was converted to farmland and roads. Wild pigeons, which once swarmed by the tens of thousands, were driven from the area. Apple trees were introduced to the region by John Eby in the 1830s, and several gristmills and sawmills were erected throughout the area, most notably Joseph Schneider's 1816 sawmill, John and Abraham Erb's grist- and sawmills, Jacob Shantz's sawmill, and Eby's cider mill. Schneider built Berlin's first road, from his home to the corner of King Street and Queen Street. The settlers raised $1,000 to extend the road from Walper Corner to Huether Corner, where the Huether Brewery was built and the Huether Hotel now stands in the city of Waterloo; a petition to the government for $100 to assist in completing the project was denied.

Settlement before Ebytown (1804–1806)

Members of the Eby family, most notably Benjamin Eby, began migrating to the German Company Tract lands in the first decade of the 19th century. The Ebys were an old Swiss Mennonite family with an association with religious non-conformist movements in Europe going back possibly as far as the Middle Ages, and who were early followers of Anabaptism. Jacob Eby, an ancestor of the Ebys who migrated to Upper Canada, was a Mennonite bishop in the Swiss canton of Zürich in 1683. The family first migrated to the Palatinate, then to Pennsylvania, settling in Lancaster County. In Lancaster County, members of the family, such as Peter Eby, continued to act as Mennonite religious leaders. The Ebys became involved in early land settlement of the German Company Tract, with a number arriving between 1804 and 1807 and taking up farming plots.
Two brothers, George and Samuel Eby, arrived in 1804 and settled on Lot 1 of the German Company Tract, near the area of what would become downtown Kitchener. George Eby's farmstead was located one mile southeast from the future Berlin town core. It was later owned by Jacob Yost Shantz, who built a large farmhouse there in 1856 at what became the corner of Maurice and Ottawa Streets. Samuel Eby settled on the northwest part of Lot 1 and soon became a close associate of the Mississaugas who lived in the area, selling whisky to them.

Ebytown to Berlin (1806–1852)

Later named the founder of Berlin, Benjamin Eby. The settlement was initially called Ebytown, and was at the south-east side of what later became Queen Street. Eby was also responsible for the growth of the Mennonite church in Waterloo County. By 1811, Eby had built a log Mennonite meeting house first used as a school house, but later also housing religious services. A new meeting house, known as Eby's Versammlungshaus, near Stirling Avenue, replaced the log house in 1834, while a schoolhouse was built on Frederick Street about the same time.
Benjamin Eby encouraged manufacturers and craftsmen to relocate to Ebytown. Jacob Hoffman came in 1829 or 1830, and started the first furniture factory. John Eby, druggist and chemist, arrived from Pennsylvania in about 1820, and opened a shop to the west of what would later be Eby Street. At the time, settlers commonly formed a building "bee" to help newcomers erect a log home. Immigration from Lancaster County continued heavily in the 1820s because of a severe agricultural depression there. Joseph Schneider, from that area, built a frame house in 1820 on the south side of the future Queen Street after clearing a farm and creating a rough road; a small settlement formed around "Schneider's Road", which became the nucleus of Berlin. The home was renovated over a century later and still stands.
The village centre of Ebytown was established in 1830 by Phineas Varnum, who leased land from Joseph Schneider and opened a blacksmith shop on the site where a hotel would be built many years later, the Walper House. A tavern was also established here at the same time, and a store was opened. At the time, the settlement of Ebytown was still considered to be a hamlet.
Friedrich Gaukel, another prominent early local figure, purchased the Varnum tavern site in the early 1830s, along with other lands around the growing village. In a November 1833 transaction, he purchased lands located along the village's main street from Joseph Schneider. The deeds of sale for this transaction are the earliest recorded use of the name Berlin to refer to the community.
The 1826–1837 cholera pandemic affected Bridgeport in 1832 and Berlin in 1834. Hamilton, then a significant port of entry for immigrants to Canada, was linked to the 1832 outbreak, which also affected other nearby settlements such as Guelph and Brantford. At Bridgeport, two English families who had recently arrived from Suffolk contracted the disease after passing through Hamilton, and several died after arriving at the community. They also spread it to an already-settled family, the Hemblings, a number of whom also died, including adults. Orphaned children from these families were later adopted by local Mennonites.
The Smith's Canadian Gazetteer of 1846 describes Berlin as: "... contains about 400 inhabitants, who are principally Germans. A newspaper is printed here, called the "German Canadian" and there is a Lutheran meeting house. Post Office, post twice a-week. Professions and Trades.—One physician and surgeon, one lawyer, three stores, one brewery, one printing office, two taverns, one pump maker, two blacksmiths." The Township of Waterloo consisted primarily of Pennsylvanian Mennonites and immigrants directly from Germany who had brought money with them. At the time, many did not speak English. There were eight grist and twenty saw mills in the township. In 1841, the township population count was 4,424.
The first cemetery in the city was the one next to Pioneer Tower in Doon; the first recorded burial at that location was in 1806. The cemetery at First Mennonite church is not as old, but contains the graves of some notable citizens, including Bishop Benjamin Eby, who died in 1853, Joseph Schneider, and Rev. Joseph Cramer, founder of the House of Friendship social service agency.