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Scholarship Challenge 2022: Multiplying UE Scholar Opportunities
The 2022 Scholarship Endowment Fund Challenge is well underway with just 9 days left to help us meet or exceed our goal. All donations since the first announcement on 15 May will be included because the “new” committee needed help to get this launched. As Chairperson of the committee I want to thank Doug for working with us to make the challenge visible and for including all the interesting information about our scholars that you have read over the past month.
The details at Scholarship Challenge 2022 show that as of Friday 12 August, your donations have surpassed $7,900, less that $200 from our target of $8,088.
Multiplying UE Scholar Opportunities continues until August 22, 2022 with updates as often as possible. Please join the challenge by donating – the instructions are there to mail a donation, or to donate online via Canada Helps – and watch our success as we meet the challenge goal of $8088.
Your end-of-campaign donation of whatever amount would help achieve the goal, and help our scholars continue their excellent research. Donate today.
Christine E. Manzer UE, Scholarship Committee, Chair.Scholarship@uelac.org

Open House Today: Old Trinity Church, Middleton, NS
Sunday, August 14, 2022, 2 – 4 p.m.
49 Main Street, Middleton, NS
Program: 1. Historical Presentation; 2. Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Quiz (with Pins awarded to winners); 3. Cemetery Tour
Come celebrate the 231st anniversary of Old Holy Trinity Church and the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee!
Col. Samuel Vetch Bayard, United Empire Loyalist, helped build this church in 1789 with other Loyalists and was one of the first Wardens.
Other Loyalists who were members of vestry included Thomas Barclay, Gen. Timothy Ruggles, Ezekiel Welton, John Wiswall, Captain John Van Buskirk, Captain Christopher Benson, John Slocumb & John Ruggles. The original church bell made in England in 1792 is still use to be viewed.

Today held in my hands Bible published in 1786 and used by Rev. John Wiswall in 1789 at Old Holy Trinity Church in Middleton. He was born in Boston, a Loyalist forced to flee during American Revolution. Oldest book of any kind I have come that close to & with an amazing history.

“At a Parish meeting legally assembled at Trinity Church on Saturday the 28th September 1799 the following persons were unanimously chosen Church Officers for the ensuing year:
John Ruggles & Mr. Ezekiel Welton – Church Wardens; James Eager, Noah Warner, J. Wiswall, Jr., William Bass, Fairfield Woodbury, Jonathan Smith, Cephus Welton, David Nichols, George Nichols, Christopher Benson, Joseph Dodge & William Covert – Vestry Men
Rev. John Wiswall – Vestry Clerk”
Both Wardens and many members of Vestry were United Empire Loyalists who had arrived in Wilmot, Nova Scotia after #AmericanRevolution as refugees.

Order of Service from United Empire Loyalist Bicentennial Service at Old Holy Trinity Church in Middleton, Nova Scotia held in 1983. Was anyone who sees this there then?

Today (Aug 11) helped prepare Old Holy Trinity Church in Middleton for Open House on Sunday afternoon with hanging of new flags. Also amazed to look at “Book of Common Prayer” published in 1783, a rare old book used by Rev. John Wiswall, UE Loyalist & 1st clergyman to reside in Wilmot.
Old Holy Trinity Church: https://oldholytrinitychurch.ca/wp/
Questions to Brian McConnell UE, Chair, Old Holy Trinity Charitable Trust, brianm564@gmail.com

The Loyalist Three Rs Revisited: Refugee William Harding
copyright Stephen Davidson UE
(Editor’s Note: In March of 2013, Stephen Davidson wrote a series of articles on The Loyalist Three Rs. For the next three weeks, he will once again return to the trio of categories into which the Loyalists fell.)

While Canadian history favours the Loyalists who became refugees following the American Revolution, there are actually two other categories for that portion of the colonial population that maintained their allegiance to the British crown. There were also the “resident” Loyalists who remained in the United States despite having supported a united British Empire, and the Loyalists who, overcome by homesickness or economic necessity, decided to return to the new North American republic.
An examination of the wider spectrum of loyal Americans enriches our understanding of the trials and difficulties felt by people whose only “crime” was to maintain the political allegiance they had held all through their lives. Over the next three weeks, we’ll consider the Loyalist refugee William Harding, the resident Loyalist Anna Rawle, and the Loyalist returnee Robert Fowle.
Of course, William Harding, a carpenter from Newburgh, New York, had no idea that he would become a refugee within seven years of siding with the British. Great Britain was, after all, the head of an empire and the greatest sea power of its era. Its victory over thirteen rebelling colonies was a foregone conclusion.
Born in 1745 (either in New York or in Derry, Ireland just before his family migrated to New York), Harding was 31 years old when he went to New York City and formally entered into royal service. Since the summer of 1775, the British had placed the Asia, a 64-gun man-of-war in the Hudson River to block access to the colony’s interior and as an ever-present threat to New York City. When the area around Manhattan Island fell to the British in the fall of 1776, Harding –in his own words—“went on board the Asia and joined the British at New York soon after it was taken”.
Initially, the British command drew on Harding’s familiarity with the region to employ him as a spy and as a pilot for His Majesty’s ships. His service took him away from his wife Leah Gillies and his four children: Nancy Ann, George, William Jr. and Sarah. Shortly after joining the British, local Patriots seized his sloop, the Debby — a vessel worth £250. Rebels also took three horses and a cow from the Harding farm.
Harding later served in the Loyal Refugee Volunteers under Major Thomas Ward, and (at some point after 1777) Sir Henry Clinton dispatched him to fight Patriots in Trenton, New Jersey. He was wounded and taken prisoner during a battle with General Anthony Wayne’s army. Sentenced to be hanged, Harding was put in irons in a dungeon for three weeks. He made his escape by bribing the sentries.
Undaunted by his treatment at the hands of rebels, Harding continued to serve the British upon his return to Bergen Neck, New Jersey.
Harding’s exploits as a soldier under Major Thomas Ward gained him a fair bit of attention in print.
The August 20th edition of the New York Gazette and the Weekly Mercury reported:
“Tuesday Evening last, Capt. William Harding, with about 40 Men belonging to the Refugee Post on Bergen Neck, made an Excursion to Newark in Jersey, with an Intention of surprising a Party of Rebel … Men, stationed at that Place…they took 4 Prisoners, and collected about 30 Head of Cattle, which they conducted back with them to Fort Delancey, on Bergen Neck.”
A month later the same newspaper noted:
“On Wednesday evening last a party of Refugees, from Fort deLancey, on Bergen Neck, consisting of only eleven men, under the command of Captain William Harding, made an excursion to Closter, in Jersey, being 25 miles from said post, where they surprised and made prisoners of a Rebel Guard of six men, belonging to the noted Captain Blanch, and also collected fifteen head of cattle: all which they conducted with them back to Fort DeLancey, notwithstanding they were followed in their return for near twenty miles, by at least three times their number, under the command of a Colonel Goetschius, and the said Blanch, but without their venturing to make any attack, except now and then exchanging a few long shot at a very respectable distance.”
Thanks to the research of Todd Braisted, we have the perspective of one of the six Patriots captured by Harding:
“On the sixth day of September 1781, myself with five others, while in arms at Closter was taken by surprise of the enemy, who was led to the place of nightly seclusion, to which were accustomed to retire…not daring to sleep in our houses. This place of seclusion was in the thick woods, and near it were driven our horses and cattle for safety. They were led to it by one Samuel Cole, who perpetrated this act of treachery: he was of Closter, a Tory resident of our neighbourhood… At our capture, one Elias Day was pierced through the thigh with a bayonet, and myself was slightly wounded in the arm with a like weapon, by Captain William Harding the chief of the gang; who saith, it was only his intention to make me feel a little for abusing Sam Cole, their guide.”
In the fall of 1782, Harding’s commander received orders to abandon their post at Fort DeLancey. Members of the Loyal Refugee Volunteers became the first organized group of Loyalist refugees to be evacuated to Nova Scotia. When the 360 soldiers and their dependents were organized into companies of settlers, 37 year-old William Harding served as one of the companies’ captains. His leadership skills. which had been honed during wartime, were put to use to effect an orderly evacuation of refugees.
The Harding family sailed to Annapolis Royal on board the Amphitrite. Family legend has it that one of the Hardings jumped out of their boat as it neared land, swimming to the beach to be the first one to arrive in their new home. After a chilly winter in Annapolis Royal, William Harding decided to take his family across the Bay of Fundy. At first, the Hardings settled in Maugerville on the St. John River, then Belleisle Bay, and finally in Saint John.
Harding established a tannery in the city of Loyalists and with his wife Leah became charter members of Saint John’s first Baptist congregation. When a grand jury of 19 men was convened to consider evidence in the city’s first murder trial, Harding was made one of the jurors.
In early October of 1784, the Loyalist jurors heard the evidence of three of the accused murderer’s neighbours. They had to “answer to such questions which shall be then asked … by the Supreme Court“. There was sufficient evidence for the grand jury to issue an indictment, and they charged the accused woman with the murder of her husband. Having done their civic duty, Harding and the other members of the colony’s first grand jury returned to their everyday responsibilities.
In January of 1818, William Harding was in his 73rd year. Whether prompted by age or a debilitating health condition, the old Loyalist decided to compose his will. It is a testimony to how well the veteran of the American Revolution fared in his land of refuge. The will deeded the family tanning yards that occupied four city lots to his youngest son Thomas Harding. William’s seven children (Thomas, Mary and Elizabeth had been born after the Hardings settled in New Brunswick) were to share the residue of his estate. On March 24, 1818 just two months after writing his will, William Harding died.
In addition to the legacy he left his heirs, William would be remembered in a Saint John Street name. Harding’s Point, land along the St. John River that was granted to William upon his arrival in the colony, still bears his name.
As a Loyalist refugee, William Harding fared better than many of his peers. Next week’s Loyalist Trails will consider a Loyalist woman who decided to remain in the United States following the revolution.
To secure permission to reprint this article contact the author at stephendavids@gmail.com.

Book: The Colonists’ American Revolution: Preserving English Liberty, 1607-1783
By Guy Chet, an early-modern historian (17th-18th century), teaching classes on Revolutionary America, Atlantic piracy, and military history.
Published by Wiley-Blackwell, Sept. 11 2019
Most U.S. History textbooks track the origins and evolution of American identity. They therefore present the American Revolution as the product of a gradual cultural change in English colonists. Over time, this process of Americanization differentiated and alienated the settlers from their compatriots and their government in Britain. This widely-taught narrative encourages students to view American independence as a reflection of emerging American nationhood. The Colonists’ American Revolution introduces readers to a competing narrative which presents the Revolution as a product of the colonists’ English identity and of English politics. This volume helps students recognize that the traditional narrative of the Revolution is an argument, not a just-the-facts account of this period in U.S. history.
Written to make history interesting and relevant to students, this textbook provides a dissenting interpretation of America’s founding―the Revolution was not the result of an incremental process of Americanization, but rather an immediate reaction to sudden policy changes in London. It exposes students to dueling historical narratives of the American Revolution, encouraging them to debate and evaluate both narratives on the strength of evidence.
More description at the publisher, Amazon (US and CA), etc

Ties of Kinship: The Treaty of Niagara
The Treaty of Niagara is seen by some as marking the true founding of Canada.
Written by Philip Cote and Nathan Tidridge — Posted April 30, 2018 at Canada’s History
Until recently, both Confederation and the Indian Act that flowed from it eclipsed most of the Treaty relationships in the minds of the non-Indigenous population of Canada. Today the country finds itself returning to the Treaties and rekindling the relationships that sustained the many peoples on these lands for centuries prior to 1867.
Part of this national introspection is the rediscovery by non-Indigenous peoples of the ancient and enduring relationships between First Nations and the sovereign that were enshrined in such Treaties as the 1764 Treaty of Niagara.
For generations, history textbooks have described the Royal Proclamation of 1763 as the “Indian Magna Carta” — a document from which Indigenous rights originate in their relationships with Canada. Yet, as Elders and Knowledge Keepers across the continent have reminded us, King George III’s proclamation is only half of the story (specifically, the non-Indigenous half). Read more…

THE KING’S COLOUR: Loyal She Began, Loyal She Remains
by Stuart Manson August 2022
The August 2022 issue of The King’s Colour has been published.
Titled “Loyal She Began, Loyal She Remains”
The Latin motto of the Province of Ontario is Ut incepit fidelis sic permanet, which translates to “Loyal She Began, Loyal She Remains.” For some, it’s a stirring reminder of Ontario’s origins, which also resonates in the present.
The motto appears in the province’s present armorial bearings (commonly called coat of arms, pictured below). It alludes to the year 1784 when the first non-Indigenous, permanent settlers in the region — the United Empire Loyalists — arrived en masse. They were political and military refugees, ousted from their former homes in the Thirteen Colonies due to their support of the Crown during the American Revolutionary War.
The Broadside can be accessed on The King’s Colour page, or directly here.
Visit Stuart’s website for more details about Stuart and his services.

The Abdication(s) of King George III (JAR)
by Bob Ruppert 9 August 2022 Journal of the American Revolution (JAR)
On April 1, 2015, Queen Elizabeth II announced the creation of the Georgian Papers Programme. It is a ten-year project to transcribe, digitize, conserve, catalogue, and disseminate close to 425,000 pages related to England’s Hanoverian monarchs located in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. Most of the papers are personal and official correspondence—the remaining are household administrative records. The process is a collaboration between the Royal Archives, King’s College London, the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Upon the Programme’s completion, all of the papers will be made available online to historians and the public alike. Within the 425,000 pages are 33,000 related to the reign of King George III. Two of those pages, apparently written in March 1783, are entitled “A Draft of a Message of Abdication from George III to the Parliament.”
King George had already drafted an abdication on March 27, 1782 titled “Message from the King”. Read more…

Colonel Daniel Hitchcock of Rhode Island (JAR)
by Damien Cregeau 11 August 2022 Journal of the American Revolution
As a collateral descendant of Daniel Hitchcock (first cousin, nine times removed), I have always been fascinated by the short but important life of this colonel from Providence, Rhode Island, who was taken by illness following the Battle of Princeton at the young age of thirty-seven. Likely because there is neither an existing house nor a portrait of him, Hitchcock is largely forgotten despite the fact that he had served as a colonel in the Continental Army in five battles in the Revolutionary War by January 1776.
Hitchcock was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on February 15, 1739, son of Capt. Ebenezer and Mary (Sheldon) Hitchcock. He was the youngest of fourteen children. Daniel attended Yale, but unfortunately his mother Mary died in January 1760 when Daniel was twenty, and she did not live to see him graduate a year later in 1761. Read more…

Common Place: Bad Money and the Chemical Arts in Colonial America
Zachary Dorner, University of Maryland, College Park.
Depending on one’s relationship to the monetary regime, coining could either appear a heinous offense that threatened the ruling order by undermining public trust in its currency, or a creative solution to the shortage of specie across much of the Atlantic world.
A notice in the Virginia Gazette from October 1752 announced the capture of four men in North Carolina accused of making their own doubloons, pistoles, pieces of eight, and half pistereens: a practice called coining. Despite the notice’s small size in the newspaper, coining could have quite large implications for the monetary regime and consequences for those who attempted it. Among the conspirators were Daniel Johnson (alias Dixon) “a Chymist, or Doctor,” Patrick Moore “a Taylor by Trade,” and William Jillet “a Blacksmith,” who had set up their forge in a swamp about thirty miles upriver from New Bern, the colony’s capital at the time. The coastal basin around New Bern featured meandering streams and low-lying swamps bisected by the free-flowing Neuse River that connected Pamlico Sound to points inland.
A swampy area described on later maps as the Dover Swamp lay to the west along the river’s southern bank and was known to be difficult to navigate, muddy, and full of mosquitoes. Such an area offered the coiners a secluded place beyond state auspices to do the work of making and testing coins—including shaving and melting metal, applying corrosive mineral acids, and rubbing, biting, and polishing the coins—yet one still connected to riverine travel routes. Read more…

The Chef Recreating 18th-Century Recipes From a Thrift-Shop Find
Bake an old-timey cake from this handwritten cookbook.
by Reina Gattuso 5 Jan 2021
Lucinda Ganderton had the book hidden in the bottom of her shopping trolley. Around two years ago, she had taken a trip from London to Brighton, England, to visit Paul Couchman, a food historian and chef whom she met on Instagram. Ganderton, a textile artist whose family had once owned an antiques auction house, and Couchman, who specializes in 1830s British cookery, connected over a shared love of antique kitchenware. Ganderton was clearing out her house when she found a few objects she thought might spark Couchman’s interest.
“First time I went down, I took this massive great bag with the jelly moulds,” she says. “I hadn’t told him about the book. I was like, ‘By the way I’ve got this.’ And his face just lit up.” The “this” in question was covered in weatherbeaten leather, its binding grayish and nondescript. But inside was a treasure trove of more than 150 yellowing, rag-paper pages containing dozens of recipes for everything from catsup to plague cures, written out painstakingly in a few different people’s handwriting.
The compilers hadn’t signed their names or specified the book’s place of origin, but they did date some of the entries: one compiler noted 1780; another, in tiny letters on the back inner binding, wrote that the book was finished in 1831. Read more…

French Cooking Terms
By Geri Walton 6 January 2016
French cooking terms in the Victorian Era had their origins in the Middle Ages. That was because French food was similar to Moorish cuisine and it did not change until Catherine de Medici married Henry duc d’Orléans (who later became Henry II of France). When Catherine came to France in 1533, Italy was the leader in cuisine, and she brought with her numerous Italian chefs, who were busy creating many wonderful and unique Italian delicacies, such as macaroni, manicotti, and lasagna. Catherine’s fine cooks then introduced their culinary secrets to the French court and skilled culinary craftsmen soon began to emerge in France. By the 17th and 18th centuries, haute cuisine or “high cuisine,” developed in France, along with the idea of “French cooking.”
English author Isabella Mary Beeton, more popularly known as Mrs. Beeton, became interested in cooking and began to write and sell cook books in the 1800s. Because French cooking was all the rage at the time, she wanted to include French cooking terms in her best seller, The Book of Household Management. Her book was published in 1844, and the French cooking terms she used in her book are listed in this article.
Of the 55 terms listed how many do you recognize? How many would you actually use yourself? …doug loyalist.trails@uelac.org

Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)
Myseum of Toronto
On the 80th anniversary of the Slavery Abolition Act of the British colonies, Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) on August 1, 1914. The UNIA was founded to spur the movement for the empowerment, solidarity, and unity of people of African descent worldwide, including here in Toronto.
Garvey believed in political and economic independence to advance the conditions of Black people globally in order to combat the lasting consequences of the trans-atlantic slave trade and ongoing anti-Black racism. Garvey himself was a leading figure of the Pan-African movement, which encouraged a return to Africa for people of African descent and an end to neo-colonial rule on the continent. Pan-Africanism is based on the idea of a shared history and a common destiny for those of African ancestry.
Born in Jamaica in 1887, Marcus Garvey founded the UNIA in Kingston, Jamaica, at the age of 26. In 1916, the UNIA’s headquarters were moved to Harlem, New York, in order to gain momentum for the organization.
By the early 1920s, the UNIA had over 1100 divisions worldwide in North, Central, and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Australia. In Canada alone, 32 divisions spanned the country from Nova Scotia to British Columbia
Sources vary about the location of the first UNIA division in Canada, but it is generally understood that a division was founded in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in 1918 to support West Indian migrants working in mines. Other divisions rapidly followed; the Montreal branch opened in June 1919.
The Toronto UNIA division was officially founded on December 1, 1919.
In Canada, Garvey’s impact was resounding and his legacy can still be noticed today. In Nova Scotia, the Glace Bay UNIA is active and runs a cultural museum and an annual summer festival in his name. The Montreal UNIA is active as well. Read more…

UELAC Loyalist Directory: New Contributions
Entries which have been added, or revised, this week, with thanks:

  • Jo Ann Tuskin on behalf of Ronald Brooks has contributed information about
    • Hannah Schaver Sypes/Stooks from the Province of Pennsylvania was married to Jacob Sypes in 1756. Jacob, a Loyalist, died in 1776 and Hannah remarried, to Loyalist Edward Stooks. They and children from both marriages settled in the Home District – specifically Bertie Twp, Welland Co, Upper Canada
  • Thanks to Vancouver Branch (Linda Nygard, Linda Drake) and they with Jim Bruce at Dominion Office for the for data about the two Jeremiah Frenchs:
    • Jacob Vandusen from New York Province married Mary French, served in the Kings Royal Regiment of New York and settled in Montague Township, Lanark County, Ontario
    • John T. Manzer was probably settled in New York Province before the war, married Martha Patience Parent, served in 2nd Battalion Delancey’s Brigade and settled in Queensbury, Queens Co, NB
    • Benjamon Kilborn from Litchfield Connecticut, married Hannah Stoddard and then Lucy Bishop, suffered imprisonment & loss of property and resettled in Eastern District – Elizabethtown and Kitley Townships, Leeds County, U.C.
    • Jeremiah French Sr. was born in 1712 and served as a Loyalist
    • Lieut. Jeremiah French Jr. was son of Jeremiah Sr., from Manchester, Vermont, married Elizabeth Wheeler, served in Queen’s Loyal Rangers and King Royal Regiment of New York and resettlefd at Eastern District at Maple Grove, Cornwall Twp, Stormont Co, Ontario
  • and thanks to Kevin Wisener who submitted the following Loyalists who were recorded in a “Muster Roll of the following Discharged & Disbanded Soldiers and other Loyalists with their respective families who arrived from Shelburne Nova Scotia on the 17th September 1784 and are preparing to settle at the Island of Saint John [Prince Edward Island]”.

If you are willing to submit some information, send a note to loyalist.trails@uelac.org
All help is appreciated. …doug

From the Twittersphere and Beyond

Last Post: YOUNG, John (Jack) Frederick Gordon Young
John passed away peacefully in Alliston at the Matthews House Hospice on July 26, 2022 at the age of 77 – surrounded with love by his family.
John is proudly part of the United Empire Loyalist lineage of Adam Young, dating back to the 1780’s in the initial creation of Canada with fighting & farming in the Niagara region and along the Grand River in partnership with the people of the Six Nations Indian Reserve and eventually with their own Young Tract of land in Haldimand County. He is also proud of his heritage on his mother’s side where his great grandmother succeeded from the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory near Belleville. Read more…

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