The post Sunderland Directory appeared first on The Sunderland & District Historical Society.

This presentation is based on a talk by historian Larry Doble as he explores the origins and early settlement of Brock Township in this presentation to the Durham Region Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society.

The post The History of Brock Township appeared first on The Sunderland & District Historical Society.

Right Handle and Markings

Right Markings

Right Tip

Left Whole Sword

Left with Handle and Markings

Left Markings

Left Tip

Jim Bagshaw did on-line research on the www.vikingsword.com website. Experts in the Ethnographic Arms & Armour forum identified the following characteristics of this sword:
It is a classic Dutch style naval boarding or “scheepshouwer” cutlass.

It has a clamshell hilt with an open guard.

Dutch East India Company Flag

The East India House by Reinier Vinkeles, 1768

VOC-Amsterdam

The sword was produced for The Dutch East India Company (De Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie) as evidenced by their symbol. This company was established in 1602 with the aim of sending ships to Asia to buy pepper and spices. It later supplied weapons to various countries.

The A, represents the kamer of Amsterdam, one of the chambers in the VOC hierarchy representing key ports.

The 1787 stamping indicates the year of manufacture. It is interesting to note that the other side of the sword is stamped 787. According to the experts, the missing digit on one side is fairly

Dimensions

• blade length – 24.25”
• blade width at the ricasso – 3.15 cm
• overall length – 28.75 “
• curvature – 1.8 cm
• thickness of blade – .7 cm at ricasso (Guard)

The post William Bagshaw’s Sword appeared first on The Sunderland & District Historical Society.

William Bagshaw was born on February 13, 1783 in Alstonefield, England. He entered the British Army in 1804, and eleven years later found himself standing in the ranks of the 33rd Regiment of Foot on the field at Waterloo as Napoleon’s last great gamble broke against the allied line. For that service, in 1819, the Crown entitled him to two hundred acres in Upper Canada, a standard form of compensation extended to veterans of the period.

The entitlement was formalized in a Crown Patent dated April 10, 1833, when Bagshaw, by then recorded as a Yeoman of the Township of Brock, received title to Lot Number Four in the Ninth Concession, County of York, Home District. The patent carried the usual Crown reservations of gold and silver mines, white pine timber, and survey roads, along with a handwritten clause requiring him to erect a dwelling and take up residence within three years. Bagshaw remained in Brock Township for the rest of his life, where he died on May 12, 1861.

The grant is to William Bagshaw of the Township of Brock in the County of York in the Home District, Yeoman (Yeoman means a farmer or landowner.) Containing Two Hundred Acres being Lot Number Four in the Ninth Concession of the said Township of Brock

Several standard Crown reservations appear:

• Gold and Silver mines reserved to the Crown
• White Pine trees reserved to the Crown
• Survey roads reserved
• Conditions regarding settlement

Settlement Conditions
One important handwritten section states that within three years the grantee must erect and build a good and sufficient dwelling house and become resident. These were normal settlement requirements.

Chronology :

• 1804 – William Bagshaw enters the British Army.
• 18 June 1815 – Fights at the Battle of Waterloo (33rd Regiment of Foot).
• 20 October 1819 – Receives entitlement to 200 acres in Upper Canada for military service.
• 10 Apr 1833 – Crown Patent signed.
• 21 Apr 1833 – Entered by the Auditor.
• 24 Apr 1833 – Recorded and indexed in the land records.
  Book 46, folio 575
• 1833 – Crown Patent issued for Lot 4, Concession 9, Brock Township.
• Later becomes established in Brock Township, where the family remains.

William Bagshaw
200 acres
Brock Township
Recorded April 24, 1833
Book 46, Folio 575

The post Upper Canada Crown Patent (Land Grant) issued under King William IV appeared first on The Sunderland & District Historical Society.

For four generations, the most cherished possession of the Bagshaw family of Brock Township was a small six-barreled pistol, handed down, like the name William itself, from father to son. By family tradition it had ridden at Waterloo in the hand of a British cavalryman, fortunate to come away alive from the great contest against Napoleon. It is a splendid story, and almost certainly an impossible one. The pistol itself says so.

The man at the head of the line was William Bagshaw, born in Staffordshire, England, on February 13, 1783. In the spring of 1817 he left for Upper Canada and took up two hundred acres of bush in Brock Township, in what was then the County of Ontario. He prospered there in the manner of the useful pioneer: “Squire” Bagshaw, justice of the peace and the township’s first postmaster, a man who married couples, buried the dead, surveyed his neighbors’ farms, and settled their disputes.

His wife, Sarah (Bolton) Bagshaw, born in 1786, was left behind in England while William broke ground on the homestead, and for two years his letters failed to reach her. Believing herself a widow, she went into mourning, until at last a letter arrived to report that her husband was alive and landholding in Canada. On Easter Sunday, April 18, 1819, she boarded a sailing vessel with eight children. The crossing took eleven weeks and three days. A broken leg kept William from meeting them at York (now Toronto), so Sarah set out on foot with the children and walked some forty-five miles to Quaker Hill, near Uxbridge. Reunited at last, the family was raising the walls of its log shanty, on Lot 5 of Concession 9, on Christmas Day, 1819. From that one-windowed cabin, its chinks packed with lime mortar and its roof laid up of basswood troughs, came seventeen children and a homestead that descended through the generations: a hewn-log house in 1830, and a fine stone residence in 1890 that was still standing when this story was first set down.

The heirloom that anchors the family’s memory is a percussion pepperbox revolver, roughly ten inches in length, its six barrels turned from bright steel and its engraved frame dressed with silver. Each barrel was charged from the muzzle with powder, wad, and ball, and fired by a percussion cap seated at the breech, so that six shots stood ready without reloading. Stamped into the metal are the words that settle the question of its age: “J. R. Cooper’s Patent.”

That mark belongs to Joseph Rock Cooper, a Birmingham gunmaker active from the late 1830s into the 1860s, and remembered above all for his pepperbox pistols. The design the Bagshaw gun carries rests on Cooper’s English patents of 1840 and 1843. The pistol was therefore made in the early-to-middle 1840s, a full generation after Waterloo, which was fought in June of 1815.

Here the cherished tradition meets two facts it cannot survive. The first is mechanical: the percussion cap that fires this gun was a technology of the 1820s and after, unknown on the field at Waterloo, and the multi-barreled pepperbox was a creature of the 1830s and 1840s entirely. The second is the family’s own chronicle. William Bagshaw was settled in Brock Township by 1819, fully two decades before this pistol was so much as filed and engraved on a Birmingham bench. Whatever a Bagshaw may have carried against Napoleon, it was not this gun, for this gun did not yet exist.

How, then, did it come to a pioneer farmhouse in the Ontario bush? The honest answer is that no document yet located will say, but the likeliest paths are not hard to imagine. A pepperbox of the 1840s might have been sent out from England to relations already established in Canada; it might have been purchased outright in York or Whitby, where British goods moved freely; or it might have come west in the hands of a later Bagshaw and, in time, drifted backward through the family’s memory until it attached itself to the founding patriarch and his Waterloo. Heirlooms gather such legends the way a barrel gathers patina. The wonder is not that the story grew, but that the gun beneath it is the more interesting object once the legend is lifted away.

For what the Bagshaw pistol truly belongs to is one of the briefest and most colorful moments in the history of the handgun: the crowded heyday of the multi-barreled pepperbox, a compact and affordable repeater that put six shots at an ordinary person’s fingertips in the years just before Samuel Colt’s single-barreled revolver swept the whole type into obsolescence. It is a creditable piece of English gunmaking at its mid-century best, and almost certainly it reached the Bagshaws in Canada, the prized possession of a prospering settler family rather than a souvenir of a European battlefield.

The gun never saw Waterloo. It saw something rarer: the long, ordinary endurance of a family that crossed an ocean, walked to its own front door, and kept one small thing safe for a hundred years.

The family narrative follows a 1950 account of the Bagshaws of Sunderland and Brock Township, corroborated against Ontario genealogical records. The firearm’s date rests on the “J. R. Cooper’s Patent” marking and the documented dates of Joseph Rock Cooper’s English patents of 1840 and 1843.

The post A Gun That Never Saw Waterloo appeared first on The Sunderland & District Historical Society.

Step back in time as you explore Sunderland’s historic downtown. This self-guided walking tour leads you to many of the village’s most significant buildings and landmarks, revealing the people, events, and stories that shaped our community.

Sunderland Historical Walking Tour Map – Printable chart to carry

• 01. Sunderland Museum and Historical Society
• 02. Saint Andrews United Church
• 03. Sunderland Town Hall
• 04. Dr. Joseph Henry Oliver Home
• 05. St. Mary’s Anglican Church
• 06. Dr. James McDermott Home
• 07. The Fogg House
• 08. The Blacksmith Shop
• 09. The Nipissing House Hotel
• 10. Stop 4 Variety
• 11. The Old Drug Store
• 12. The Gigantic Hand Saw, Guardian Pharmacy
• 13. Flindell’s Fresh Mart
• 14. The Beall Block
• 15. The Harness Shop
• 16. Taylor’s Store & The Home Bank
• 17. The William Doble Home
• 18. The Sunderland Presbyterian Church
• 19. Doyle’s General Store
• 20. The McDermott Block (1949 Fire)
• 21. The Sunderland Telephone Company
• 22. James Doble Home
• 23. William Nassau Doble Home
• 24. Thomas Welsh Home
• 25. Robert Doble Home
• 26. CIBC Bank
• 27. Brock House Hotel
• 28. Home Hardware
• 29. The Early Undertaker
• 30. The Printing Shop
• 31. The Magic Door
• 32. The Royal Canadian Legion
• 33. 108 River Street
• 34. “Old” Fire Hall
• 35. The Sunderland Memorial Arena

View the original video walking tour

The post Historical Walking Tour of Sunderland appeared first on The Sunderland & District Historical Society.

Graeme Powell has written a play that will be presented at the Scugog Shores Museum by Theatre on the Ridge from September 9 to 20, 2026. Buy Tickets

John Laun

Piggyland Ad

Where visitors viewed sows

Burning down

Before and After

Auctioning the assets

Where John Laun lived

Bomb shelter where John hid

Investors purchased a sow for $92 and 6 months of feed for $45. John would look after the care of the sow and guaranteed a $60 profit on the sale of the sow and numerous piglets in 6 months. Early investors got paid dividends and quickly spread the news to future clients about this profitable scheme.

John Laun formed a company called the Associated Livestock Growers of Ontario, or in short ALGO Sunderland Limited. He personally bought the 94-acre farm from the Wilson family for $18,000 and immediately sold it to Piggyland for $85,000 using the investors’ money. He had his other company, Tula Construction Ltd., build all of the barns, pig houses, dance floor and restaurant at a huge profit, again using money from the investors.

Piggyland had about 75 workers, and many stayed in the Brock Hotel or were boarded in local homes. In the summer, some workers lived in the Ruddy School on the third concession of Brock. Most local businesses were paid for the supplies and equipment.

John set up a showcase building with glass display windows to draw in more investors. Many of the investors were from urban areas and came out on weekends to see their livestock. Adults could enjoy dining, dancing and gift shops, and for children, carts for Shetland pony rides, playgrounds and free ice cream. A changeable name tag on the pens helped you to identify the sow you bought. Once you left the viewing area, the name on the tag got a new name. There were supposed to be 18,000 sows in the system, but there were really only 1,500 animals on the site. Investors were paying for sows and feed that did not exist. John Laun spoke seven languages and easily produced ads all over the world to attract new immigrants to buy into his scheme. Those clients obtaining fantastic dividends readily convinced their friends and neighbours about this “sure thing“ investment.

Things started to go wrong when the sows began dying. Unheated pig pens, improper feed, malnutrition and disease were killing so many pigs that they were buried by bulldozers in huge pits. New pigs coming on site were overcrowded in trucks and often died on route due to heat and suffocation. Dividend cheques were overdue.

John Laun and his wife had gone on a business trip to Germany when news of the swindle hit the press. Over $1,800,000 had been taken in through investments, but in the account ledgers, only $250,000 in dividends and $650,000 in feed costs and other expenses were recorded. About 1,135 investors were now going to get one cent back on the dollar.

John Laun hired Peter Beekmann, a German and qualified swine specialist, to try to turn things around. Beekmann saw the horrible situation, and he immediately quit and warned authorities. His poor English skills and the fact that he was a new immigrant, however, made people tell him to not “rock the boat.“

The Bomb Shelter

In 1962, John Laun owned a home in nearby Blackwater, just south of Sunderland. Fearing the worst at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he had Tula Construction build a concrete bomb shelter in his basement. The shelter had a built-in vault, two safes and consisted of 5 rooms. It is rumoured that this is where he may have hidden when the RCMP came looking for him. Other stories suggest that he left for Mexico in a Cadillac three days before the fraud became public.

In 1965, John Laun was arrested and detained in Barcelona, Spain, at the request of the Canadian government. O.P.P officers were sent to Spain to interrogate him about the fraud while he was in prison. Unfortunately, John Laun used the money from his scheme to make bail and disappeared.

The Auction

The auction was held on June 27,1963, and around 3,000 people were present. The revenue from the sale by Danbury Sales Ltd. of Toronto was about $70,000. Items included restaurant equipment, trucks, cars, a house trailer, farm machinery, household furniture and antiques from Laun’s 12-room Blackwater home, as well as 300 cases of canned food and $3,000 worth of liquor from the bomb shelter. In a panic, some investors went to Piggyland to get their pigs and learned that by Ontario law, they would have to pay for an investigation before they could obtain the livestock.

After Piggyland closed, the property was bought by Merlin “Mickey” Carley, and it was changed into a private rehabilitation centre called Sunnyhill to help those in need. A small factory was set up to generate income and produce and distribute a meat substitute for vegetarians. This venture by Carley Foods lasted only a short time. In the property sale advertisement, Mr. Carley was asking $55,000 for the 94-acre farm, which encompassed a brick bakery, an 18-room home, and 4 large barns.

On early Wednesday morning on July 28, 1999, fire destroyed the main Piggyland building. Thirty firefighters from several stations fought the blaze. At a later date, other remaining structures were removed as a controlled practice burn exercise by the fire department to eliminate the potential hazards of the abandoned buildings.

Play

A play about Piggyland was developed at Sunderland Public School by Ron Woitzik’s Grade 8 class several years ago and presented at the Sunderland Town Hall.

Larry Doble
President Sunderland Historical Society.

• ALGO Pricing List
• 1963 McLean’s Magazine article, Piggyland McLeans

The post The Story of Piggyland appeared first on The Sunderland & District Historical Society.