Waterloo, Ontario
Waterloo is a city in the Canadian province of Ontario. It is one of three cities in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo. Waterloo is situated about west-southwest of Toronto, but it is not considered to be part of the Greater Toronto Area. Due to the close proximity of the city of Kitchener to Waterloo, the two together are often referred to as "Kitchener–Waterloo", "K-W", or "The Twin Cities". Nearby Cambridge, Ontario is also sometimes grouped in, creating KWC or "Tri-cities".
While several unsuccessful attempts to combine the municipalities of Kitchener and Waterloo have been made, following the 1973 establishment of the Region of Waterloo, less motivation to do so existed, and as a result, Waterloo remains an independent city. At the time of the 2021 census, the population of Waterloo was 121,436.
History
Indigenous peoples and settlement
such as the Iroquois, Anishinaabe and Chonnonton lived in the area.After the end of the American Revolution, Joseph Brant, a Mohawk war chief, wanted Frederick Haldimand to give the Mohawk of the Six Nations a tract of land surrounding the Grand River, in return for their loyalty to the British in the war. Haldimand was the governor of Upper Canada at the time. Haldimand's 1784 Haldimand Proclamation granted the land "six miles deep from either side of the beginning at Lake Erie and extending in that proportion to the very head of the said river." Haldimand, who had previously ordered for potential mill sites to be identified in the region, decreed in 1788 that mill sites would be included in the grant. In 1796, Richard Beasley purchased Block Number 2 of the grant from Joseph Brant with a mortgage held by the Six Nations. Block 2, sized at 94,012 acres, was situated in the District of Gore. To meet his mortgage obligations, Beasley had to sell portions of the land to settlers. This was counter to the original mortgage agreement, but subsequent changes to the agreement were made to permit land sales.
Mennonites from Pennsylvania counties Lancaster and Montgomery were the first wave of immigrants to the area. In the year 1800 alone, Beasley sold over 14,000 acres to Mennonite settlers. A group of 26 Mennonites from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, pooled their resources into the German Company of Pennsylvania, which was then represented by Daniel Erb and Samuel Bricker. The company purchased all the unsold land from Beasley in 1803, resulting in a discharge of the mortgage held by the Six Nations. This discharge allowed Beasley to clear his obligation with the Six Nations, and allowed the settlers to have deeds to their purchased land. The payment to Beasley, in cash, arrived from Pennsylvania in kegs, carried in a wagon surrounded by armed guards.
Many of the pioneers who arrived from Pennsylvania after November 1803 bought land in a 60,000-acre tract of Block 2 from the German Company of Pennsylvania. The tract included almost two-thirds of Block 2. Many of the first farms were least 400 acres in size.
Development (19th century)
The Mennonites divided the land into smaller lots; two lots owned by Abraham Erb—who is often called the founder of the Village of Waterloo—became the central core of Waterloo. Erb had come to the area in 1806 from Pennsylvania. He had bought from the German Company Tract and settled where there was enough water power to operate mills. He founded a sawmill in 1808 and grist mill in 1816; they saw business flourish. Other early settlers of what would become Waterloo included Samuel and Elia Schneider, who arrived in 1816. Until about 1820, settlements such as this were quite small. Erb also built what is now known as the Erb-Kumpf House in c. 1812, making it likely one of the oldest homes in Waterloo.The first school in what is now the City of Waterloo was built on land donated by Erb; the log building was constructed in 1820. A larger school house of stone was built in 1842 and was replaced with a brick school building in 1852. Over the decades, the log building was moved, eventually to Waterloo Park, where it still stands. The German spoken in Waterloo County is based upon the 18th century Pennsylvania Dutch dialect. In turn, the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect is based upon the dialect of German spoken in southwestern Germany.
In 1816, the new Waterloo Township was officially incorporated while being named after Waterloo, Belgium, the site of the Battle of Waterloo, which had ended the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. After that war, the new township became a popular destination for German immigrants. By the 1840s, German settlers had overtaken the Mennonites as the dominant segment of the population. Many Germans settled in the small hamlet to the southeast of Waterloo. In their honour, the village was named Berlin in 1833. The first Catholic family to arrive were the Spetz family from Alsace who came in 1828.
By 1831, Waterloo had a small post office in the King and Erb Street area, operated by Daniel Snyder, some 11 years before one would open in neighbouring Berlin. The Smith's Canadian Gazetteer of 1846 states that 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 sawmills in the township. In 1841, the population count was 4,424. In 1846 the village of Waterloo had a population of 200, "mostly Germans". There was a grist mill and a sawmill and some tradesmen. By comparison, Berlin had a population of about 400, also "mostly German", and more tradesmen than the village of Waterloo.
Berlin was chosen as the site of the seat for the County of Waterloo in 1853. By 1869, the population was 2,000. Waterloo was incorporated as a village in 1857 and became the Town of Waterloo in 1876. The Kitchener Public Utilities Commission began providing streetcar service in the region in 1888. In the 19th century, Waterloo was dominated by people of German origin with 76% of Waterloo residents in the 1911 census listing their family origins as being in Germany.
20th and 21st centuries
The Galt, Preston and Hespeler electric railway connected to Waterloo in 1911 and ended service in 1931. The Kitchener Public Utilities Commission stopped providing streetcar service in 1947, and were replaced by electric trolley coaches. Waterloo was incorporated as the City of Waterloo in 1948. The trolley coaches ended service in 1973. In 1911, a plan was mooted to pave King street. William Snider who owned the town square, did not want to pay the higher taxes, which would refused from paving King Street. Snider offered to deed the town square to town, which instead demanded he pay the higher taxes. Snider sold the town square to the Molson Bank, which up a Beaux Arts style bank on the site of the town square in 1914. In 1929, the H.V. McKay company of Australia proposed to open a factory for "one, man, self-propelled combine harvesters". The town provided the land for the factory from the Canada Barrels and Kegs and fixed the tax assessment at $25, 000 per year for the next 10 years in exchange for the factory being built.> In 1911, Waterloo Lutheran seminary, which later became Wilfrid Laurier University, was opened. On 5 May 1916, a group of soldiers sacked the German Acadian Club in Waterloo. In October 1918, Spanish flu reached Waterloo. Over 2,000 people were "down with the malady". By November 1918, the Waterloo Chronicle reported that "twice as many had died from the influenza as had been killed in action in four years of war".The presence of the University of Waterloo in the city caused technological and innovative companies to base in Waterloo, especially companies specializing in computing and software. For example, Research in Motion, which developed BlackBerry, was started by Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin in 1984. In 1965, the University of Waterloo was the second-largest private sector employer. The construction of the buildings for the University of Waterloo made the unemployment rate very low in the 1960s. By 1971, the population of Waterloo had grown 424% since 1945. Kitchener was a working class city while Waterloo was a middle class city. In 1981, the average annual household income in Kitchener was $26, 279 and in Waterloo was $31,224. In 1950, Waterloo had 55 factories that employed 2, 572 people, in 1970 had 79 factories that employed 5,483 workers, and in 1980 there were 132 factories that employed 7,314 workers. The founding of the universities led to the north-eastern area becoming developed as the new housing subdivisions were built while the area around Weber declined. The architecture of Waterloo changed from a more traditional Victorian architecture style to favouring a more streamlined look, incorporating elements from architectural styles such as Postmodern architecture, which ultimately led to a movement to preserve Waterloo's historical core. A 1994 issue of the Financial Post mentioned Waterloo-based companies MKS, WATCOM, and Open Text in a list of the top 100 independent software companies in Canada. In 1960, a study revealed 50% of the buying by Waterloo consumers was done in Kitchener, leading to the city to develop a retail district.
In the 1980s, Waterloo came to have the character of a "post-industrial city". Mennonite farmers continued to come to Waterloo in their horse-powered buggies for shopping while the middle class people drove out to eat and drink at the numerous pubs and hotels out in the countryside.
In June 2011, the Waterloo Region council approved the Ion: a light rail transit line connecting Conestoga Mall in north Waterloo and Fairview Park Mall in south Kitchener. Construction on the Ion began in August 2014. In 2016, two sections of a corduroy road were unearthed. One was in the King Street area of the business district and the second was discovered near the Conestoga Mall. The road was probably built by Mennonites using technology acquired in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, between the late 1790s and 1816. The log road was buried in about 1840 and a new road built on top of it. A historian explained that the road had been built for access to the mill but was also "one of the first roads cut through so people could start settling the area". Ion service began in 2019 and experienced a daily ridership of 25,000 in November 2020.