From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Cornish/Colin H. Williams
Early Cornish interest in Canada grew from the flourishing pilchard and cod fisheries off Newfoundland. From the 1560s until the mid-seventeenth century, Cornish merchants engaged in a triangular trade which involved the shipping of Newfoundland fish to southern European countries in return for wine and fruit. Many of the crews, who established small fortified encampments in Newfoundland, were not trained seamen but farm workers. During the winter they would return to Cornwall, and indeed permanent settlement was rare before the nineteenth century. Occasionally Cornish individuals were sent to Canada on military duty; one such was John Pedlar, who served with the Royal Navy at Halifax in the late eighteenth century.
In the following century, Cornishmen worked on canal-building projects and applied their masonry skills to fortifications across British North America, including those at Halifax, St John’s, and Kingston. Cornish migration to Newfoundland in the early part of the niineteenth century was affected by the fluctuating fortunes of the fishery, while the Maritimes became home to a number of Cornish farmers, fishermen, and labourers as well as to stonemasons who contributed to an evolving vernacular architectural style drawn both from the West Country and from New England. To the east, agricultural depression after 1815 prompted substantial Cornish emigration, which increased steadily until the Rebellions of 1837-38 in Upper and Lower Canada. High emigration rates prevailed again in the “Hungry Forties,” a period when conditions in Cornwall were desperate because of the potato blight and the inability of small, poorly managed farms - which concentrated to an excessive degree on the cultivation of wheat - to produce large surpluses.
It has been estimated that, from 1831 to 1860, about 42,000 emigrants left Cornwall and the neighbouring port of Devon for the Canadas and that 6,200 of these were Cornish migrants from the region around Padstow. The peak years, with over 1,700 migrants, were 1832, 1842, and 1845, while from 1847 to 1857 an average of 2,407 migrated per annum. Falmouth, Truro, Saint Ives, and Penzance all had regular sailings for Quebec but the principal port was Padstow, from which 1,731 Cornish migrants sailed for the Canadas in 1842. From the 1850s ships from Plymouth picked up passengers at Falmouth and Penzance and consequently these migrants were counted among the Plymouth statistics. All Cornish migrants were registered as English settlers, since officially Cornwall was an English county rather than a separate Celtic state.
A number of the early Cornish migrants to North America were miners. The discovery of vast amounts of lead ore and lesser amounts of copper attracted Cornish miners from 1830 to the late 1840s. The first large wave of industrial migrants consisted of the so-called hard-rock miners, in contrast to the surface miners who had earlier left for the New World. By 1850 there were an estimated 7,000 Cornish miners and dependants in the upper Mississippi region. Their skills enabled them to take over surface “diggings” and construct the deep shafts necessary for the extraction of copper, lead, and zinc ores. Further evidence of their impact is the fact that, as technological inventions (such as the safety fuse for blasting, invented by the Cornish engineer William Bickford in 1831) became standard, Cornish dialect words entered the mining vocabulary as technical terms (for example, “lode,” for ore deposit; “kibble,” for bucket; “collar,” for the mouth of a mine shaft; “jig,” for a vibrating machine used in the crushing of rock).
The majority of Cornish miners in the Mississippi region left for California during the gold rush of 1848-49. Others went to the copper country in Michigan’s upper peninsula where Pendarvis is preserved as a “Cornish Miners’ Colony and Restoration.” Some miners crossed Lake Huron to work the Bruce mines in northern Ontario, which were acquired in 1847 by the Montreal Mining Company and immediately became the first successful copper mine in Canada. Every miner there was Cornish until the 1860s. The company operated as a private fiefdom, and the social conditions were appalling. The work itself was dangerous and physically demanding, with up to 350 men and boys on a single shift. By 1865 Bruce Mines, with about 2,000 residents, was the second largest town in northern Ontario; close by were two other mines, Wellington and Copper Bay, opened in 1853 by the West Canada Mining Company. In 1876 the Bruce mines closed, and, while some of the miners moved west, many turned to agriculture and logging, living in camps at Kirkwood and Plummer along the Thessalon River and at Ophir, Galbraith, and Dunns Valley. When the mines reopened in 1898, new Cornish migrants arrived. They led a less isolated existence than their predecessors since roads and railways now ran west to Sault Ste Marie and east via Thessalon to Toronto.
Cornish settlement in British Columbia was sporadic until the Fraser River gold rush of 1858 and the Cariboo rush of 1860. Williams Creek was the principal mining settlement and gold production there peaked in 1863, spawning other discoveries at Kootenay in 1864, Big Bend in 1865, the Omineca River in 1870, and Cassiar in 1873. Sophisticated, capital-intensive methods of gold extraction using hydraulic power extended the life of the original workings and Barkerville emerged as the new centre of production following the construction of the Cariboo wagon road in 1865. Cornish miners, surveyors, and hydraulic engineers, as well as Cornish migrants who moved north to escape the Civil War, were pivotal in the development of this industrial region, which soon had a population of about 30,000. Their influence is evidenced by the names of some of the area’s prominent early figures: Joseph Pascoe, Sam Passmore, G.L. and M.S. Pendergast, Charles Yelland, John and William Tyack, William Trestrail, William Trevilcock, William Tremaine, and Edwin and William Treleise.
Although the hard-rock miners are the best-known of the nineteenth-century Cornish migrants to Canada, the majority were from an agricultural background. They settled across the country but mainly concentrated in Ontario and British Columbia. Several bought their land outright but most were farm labourers who worked for others or operated rented farms until they could purchase their own. Faced with the task of clearing the land, as well as the challenges of life in an unremitting climate, some returned. But most prospered and established clusters of Cornish families alongside Welsh, Norwegian, and German settlers. The core areas of Cornish settlement in Ontario were Whitby, Brooklin, and Oshawa in Ontario County, Darlington, Bowmanville, Solina, Newcastle, Orono, Leskard, Port Hope, Welcome, and Osaca in Durham County, and Hamilton Township and Cobourg in Northumberland County. Cornish place names include New Liskeard in Ontario, Varcoe near Winnipeg, Penzance in Saskatchewan, and Falmouth in Nova Scotia. .
Cornish settlers made a significant economic contribution during the second half of the nineteenth century. George Henry Pedlar, whose parents had immigrated to Oshawa in 1841, founded in the late 1860s the successful Pedlar Industries, which specialized in supplying the metal goods, stoves, roofing material, and prefabricated metal buildings so essential to the construction of continental railway systems and the development of the prairies. Oshawa grew as a manufacturing centre to support agricultural diversification between 1851 and 1891 and attracted Cornish workers in the metallurgical and service industries. Pedlar Products, as it is now known, still exists as a major exporter to Japanese and American auto manufacturers. In the twentieth century, Cornish Canadians have included many skilled tradesmen. During the rebuilding that followed the fire of 1916 at the Parliament buildings, Cornish masons were responsible for carving the new stonework and other Cornish craftsman designed the ironwork around the Parliamentary Library.
In the period from 1861 to 1900, about 185,000 people migrated from Cornwall, of whom some 10 percent went to Canada, although it is unknown how many subsequently moved from Canada to the United States. Such was the emigration culture during this period that fully 44.8 percent of the Cornish male population aged 15 to 24 migrated overseas, principally the United States, Australia, South Africa, and Canada. In the twentieth century, it is estimated that about seven or eight thousand Cornish men and women have emigrated to Canada, and a very speculative estimate of the size of the Cornish population in Canada today is fifteen to twenty thousand. All figures for Cornish emigration to Canada are probably on the low side, since the vast majority of people of Cornish descent describe themselves as either English or British in answer to census questions about their national origin.
