On 23 April (St George's day) 1827 John Galt, William Dunlop and Charles Prior took part in a ceremony which marked the founding of the beautiful Canadian city of Guelph in Ontario. John Galt wrote in his autobiography -
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| Picture source - The Watt Institution |
"... a large maple tree was chosen; on which, taking an axe from one of the woodmen, I struck the first stroke. To me at least the moment was impressive, - and the silence of the woods, that echoed to the sound, was as the sigh of the solemn genius of the wilderness departing for ever."
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The town was named Guelph in honour of the British King George IV and was laid out to a precise plan drawn up by John Galt. Although he is probably best known in Scotland as a novelist, Galt is esteemed in Guelph as the city's founder.
Galt's plan reserved land for churches and schools. As this extract from his autobiography shows,
Galt considered education to be extremely important -
“Education is a consideration so important to a community
that it obtained my earliest attention, and accordingly in planning the town, I
stipulated that the half of the price of the building sites should be
appropriated to endow a school, undertaking that the Company, in the first
instance, should sustain the expense of the building, and be gradually repaid
by the sale of the town lots. The
school-house was thus among the first buildings undertaken to draw settlers.”
Galt's own schooldays were spent in Greenock.
He was a founding member of the Canada Company, set up to develop land
and encourage settlers to what was then known as Upper Canada.
In his novel Bogle Corbet: or The Emigrants (1831), John Galt describes life as a settler - leaving homeland and family, starting in a new, unknown place, clearing forests, building homes, the extreme weather conditions - it is not an autobiography, but Galt was writing from his own experiences and that of many of the people he met during his time in Canada.
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