“The thick roof
Of green and stirring branches is alive
And musical with birds that sing and sport
In wantonness of spirit; while below
The squirrel, with raised paws and form erect,
Chirps merrily. . .

Bryant.

THIS small old county (named after a British Secretary of State) was first surveyed at the end of the eighteenth century, when it had three rows of townships. Now it has but five townships in all, of which three front on the Rideau and two on the St. Lawrence. The two latter are named respectively Edwardsburg, after the Duke of Kent, and Augusta, after George Ill’s second daughter. The county town, Prescott, from which a car ferry giving connection with the New York Central Railway plies, winter and summer, across the St. Lawrence, is partly in one of the townships and partly in the other.

Ages ago the neighbourhood of Prescott and of Spencerville, in Edwardsburg, were favourite Indian resorts. At the latter place is a great embankment, three and a half acres in extent, in the shape of a moccasined foot, where numerous Indian relics have been unearthed. Clay pipes, fragments of pottery, and implements for dressing skins have been discovered in company with the bones of human beings, sharks, and walruses, on terraces from one to two hundred feet above the level of the water, whilst rooted in the earth above them are the stumps of enormous pine-trees.

It almost goes without saying that the first white settlers in this county were Loyalists. At the close of the War two Provincial corps, under Majors Jessup and Rodgers, after wintering at St. John’s in Quebec, came up the St. Lawrence to take ud lands in Leeds and Grenville counties. At that time not a tree had been cut by an actual settler from the eastern boundary of our Province to Kingston, a distance of 150 miles. In a paper read a few years ago by Mrs. Burritt to the Women’s Historical Society of Ottawa are quotations from the reminiscences of one of the children of the pioneers, old Sheriff Sherwood, who remembered seeing the cutting of the first tree in Grenville County, the planting of the first hills of corn and potatoes, and recalled with affection the memory of a little dog, named H Tipler, at one time the only domestic animal in the district. “Tipler” was a mighty hunter, and had vast opportunities to exercise his powers, for deer and other game abounded in the woods. Wild plums, cranberries, and other berries were all to be had for the gathering, while, as to the wealth of provision from lake and stream, no modern “fish story” sounds at all astounding beside the marvels gravely recorded in diaries and papers of the fishings of those old days. The pity of it all seems that our modern apostles of “conservation” were not born a century earlier.

But wild meat palls on the appetite of civilised man, for he has acquired tastes which nothing save his own labour can satisfy. The pioneers longed for bread, but it does not appear that those of Grenville County shaved in the distribution of hand-mills made by the Government, so they had to depend at first on home-made substitutes for mills. The more enterprising settlers planted a great stump firmly in the ground, burnt out its heart, and within the hollow pounded their Indian corn into meal with the trunk of a young ironwood tree made into a pestle. This simple contrivance was of little use for wheat, but the Indian meal made fine porridge, which the English-speaking people called “samp” and the Dutch “suppawn.” When, after a few years, horses were brought into the country, the pioneers took their grist to mill along the frozen river, which in those days made a fine winter road, though, added the old settler referred to above, “Providence only sent the ice-road when it was needed,” and later, in not one winter for fifty years, would it have been possible to take loads of grain upon the ice.

In very early days Grenville was fortunate enough to have a doctor, but it was years later before the first minister settled in the county (though one came to Leeds in 1811), and persons wishing to get married had to go to a magistrate.

The first settlers “who went back and settled on the Rideau” were named Burritt. During the Revolutionary War two brothers, Stephen and Adoniram Burritt, fighting on the king’s side, found a young American lying wounded after the Battle of Bennington in Vermont. They carried him to a place of safety, and he was nursed until well. A year later the brothers were arrested and taken to Bennington Jail. Luckily for them, the American whom they had befriended was set to guard them, and he planned their escape.

Stephen Burritt, as a U. E. Loyalist, drew lot 29 in the first concession of Augusta. Thither he brought his father and family’, and there the old man lived to be nearly a hundred. But Stephen, alter the exciting work of the War, could not at once settle down. He tried fur-trading, and went on an exploring expedition to the Rideau. Striking the river at Cox’s Landing, he made a raft and floated down to a place now called after him, Burritt’s Rapids. There he settled, but the Indians regarded him as an interloper. While he was chopping in the woods one attacked him, but Burritt had the better of it, and, standing over the prostrate red man with an axe, forced him to beg for mercy and promise friendship. Once made, the promise was kept faithfully, and in after years Burritt and the Indians were fast friends.

The adventurous young fellow”, carrying his supplies for thirty miles into the wilds, had taken a wife to the Rapids. Soon after their arrival the pair were attacked by fever. Not a neighbour was within reach, and, unable to leave their beds, they lay for three days expecting death. But a band of Indians arriving at the Rapids proved very “Good Samaritans.” The squaws nursed the invalids back to life, and the braves harvested Burritt’s little crop of corn. Burritt lived to be a prosperous and important man in the country, but he never forgot his debt to the Indians. He kept open house for them, and sometimes when he went down in the morning lie found them in possession of tlie place. Stephen’s son, born at the Rapids in December 1793, was the first white child born on the Rideau.

The town of Prescott was founded by Colonel Jessup in 1810, and it was on the homestead of the first pioneer that Fort Wellington was afterwards built.

From Prescott on a wintry February day in 1813 went forth the force, led by one of the gallant Maodonells, to avenge, by the capture of Ogdensburg, with many prisoners and much booty, the recent raid upon Brockville. In 1822 a West Indian merchant, Hughes by name, erected at Prescott a stone windmill (which in 1873 was transformed into a lighthouse), on Windmill Point.

Once at least during the rebellion in 1838 this building did duty as a fortress. Earlier in the year there had been organised along the frontiers of the United States societies called “Hunters' Lodges,” the object of which was to help the Canadian rebels to over turn the Government; and in November two hundred of these Hunters, led by a Pole named Von Schultz, who regarded the Canadians as grievously oppressed, crossed the St. Lawrence and landed near Prescott.

Von Schultz expected to be hailed as a deliverer, but the country people did not flock to his banner. Armed steamers patrolling the river rendered retreat impossible, and after a fight, in which many of the Hunters lost their lives, Von Schultz took refuge in the windmill. Here he held out for three days, till Colonel Dundas arrived from Kingston with artillery and opened a heavy fire on the mill. Several Canadians were killed, but resistance was useless, and soon Von Schultz surrendered at discretion. A hundred of the daring aggressors were thus made captive, to be tried by court-martial at Kingston and London.

Von Schultz was ably defended at his trial by a young barrister, who afterwards won wide fame as Sir John A. Macdonald. But his eloquent plea was unavailing. The Pole was condemned to die, and was executed at Kingston on a December day, with nine of his followers. lie left four hundred pounds to the widows of the Canadian militiamen who had fallen in the fight, and perhaps his fate seems the more tragic because he realised before his death that he had been acting under a mistake.