Oxford County is a regional municipality in the Canadian province of Ontario. Highway 401 runs east–west through the centre of the county, creating an urban industrial corridor with more than half the county's population, spanning 25 km between the Toyota auto assembly plant in Woodstock and the CAMI General Motors auto assembly plant in Ingersoll. The local economy is otherwise dominated by agriculture, especially the dairy industry.
The Oxford County regional seat is in Woodstock. Oxford County has been a regional municipality since 2001 but has retained the word "county" in its name. It has a two-tier municipal government structure, with the lower-tier municipalities being the result of a merger in 1975 of a larger number of separate municipalities that previously existed before the restructuring. It also comprises a single Statistics Canada census division, and a single electoral division for federal and provincial elections for which the precise boundaries have been revised from time to time. For part of its history, it was divided into two ridings, Oxford North, for federal and provincial elections, and Oxford South, for federal and provincial elections, for each of which see their own pages. Oxford County had its own school board until 1998, when it was merged into the Thames Valley District School Board. It had its own Health Unit until 2018, when it was merged into the Southwestern Public Health Unit.
Local government Oxford County consists of eight lower-tier municipalities (in order of 2021 population): City of Woodstock (46,705) Town of Tillsonburg (18,615) Town of Ingersoll (13,693) Township of Norwich (11,151) Township of Zorra (8,628) Township of East Zorra-Tavistock (7,841) Township of South-West Oxford (7,583) Township of Blandford-Blenheim (7,565)
Local municipal governments in Ontario exercise authority delegated to them by the provincial government, which may choose at any time to increase or decrease the powers given to them through enabling statutes. In the early days of Upper Canada, the relevant legislation provided for convening an annual meeting of property owners in each township, who were obligated to choose such officers as a township clerk, a constable, property tax assessors and collectors, fence viewers and pound keepers.An act for the nomination and appointment of parish and town officers in this province, passed by the Upper Canada legislature in 1792, required the annual township meeting to be convened on the first Monday in March. In the early 1830s, that was changed to the first Monday in January. It was a matter of pride in each township to keep track of population growth, and several townships were divided as they grew, giving separate town meetings and local officers to East, West and North divisions of Oxford-on-the-Thames, East and West divisions of Nissouri, and East and West divisions of Zorra.Thomas Shenston in his Oxford Gazetteer (1852) gives the separation dates in each township and sample assessment rolls enumerating the local residents in each as the townships grew and divided.
The individuals were responsible for the administrative work necessary to enforce the laws of the province and to carry out decisions made at the district level by the area's Justices of the Peace, appointed by the Governor, who met periodically at the designated district courthouse for deliberations known as Quarter Sessions. The paternalistic authority of the Governor and his chosen Justices of the Peace continued as the hierarchy for local government until 1841. From the earliest days of settlement, the District Court was convened in the Long Point Settlement, first at Turkey Point, then at the village of Vittoria. It was moved to London in 1826. The Brock District, containing Oxford County's territory, was then split off from the London District in 1840.
By the time a courthouse had been built for the Brock District at Woodstock, legislative changes were introduced by the province to provide for election of district council members from each township to take over the local government role from the Justices of the Peace, but appointment of the warden and senior administrative officers for each district council remained the responsibility of the provincial government.A useful summary of the development of local government is provided on the website for the County of Oxford Archives in the descriptive material for the Brock District records contained in its collections.
District councils were abolished and replaced with fully elected county councils by the implementation of the Baldwin Act in 1850. The provincial legislation defined the structure for fully-elected local municipal government in Ontario for the next century. In addition to defining the powers of the county council, the legislation created authority for township councils and provided for creation of village, town, and city councils. Woodstock, Ingersoll, Tillsonburg, and other communities within Oxford County were in time incorporated under those provisions as separate municipalities.see Shenston's Oxford Gazetteer (1852) and Walker and Miles, Oxford County Atlas (Toronto, 1876) for capsule histories of separate municipal governments within Oxford County.
At around the same time as the Baldwin Act came into force, some of the townships that had been included in the Brock District were severed off to become parts of a new Brant CountyBurford and Oakland townships were added to Brant County. Thomas Shenston, Oxford Gazetteer (1852) and a reconfigured Middlesex County.West Nissouri township was added to Middlesex and a portion of North Dorchester township was added to Oxford. Thomas Shenston, Oxford Gazetteer (1852) Norwich Township was divided into North and South in 1855. In the 1960s, the Ontario government began simplifying the structure of local government in select parts of the province, and the process reached Oxford County in 1975, when the number of separate township and village councils was reduced to the current five townships. Three urban municipalities also remained: Ingersoll, Tillsonburg, and Woodstock. The county boundaries were also enlarged to include the entire urban areas of Tavistock in the north and of Tillsonburg in the south.For the 1975 legislation, and its updates, see https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90c42
History
The geographical area that is now Oxford County was populated with Neutral/Attawandaron longhouse villages for many centuries but was abandoned to First Nations nomadic peoples by the 1650s, as a result of warfare with Iroquois and epidemics resulting from European contact. The land was acquired by the Crown by three treaties, signed in 1792 (by chiefs of the Mississaugas First Nation),Known as the Between the Lakes treaty, it corrected an error in an earlier treaty that had failed to properly describe the western boundary intended. in 1796 (by chiefs of the Chippewas First Nation)Known as the London Purchase, it also covered the land in Oxford north of the Thames River but only as far up as the line of the Governor's Road: in other words, the land that became North Oxford township. and 1827 (by chiefs of the Chippewas).Known as the Huron Tract Purchase, Treaty 29, which included the land that had already been surveyed out and added to Oxford County as Zorra and Nissouri Townships. They depended for their certainty on an earlier treaty known as the McKee Purchase of 1790, signed at Detroit with 35 chiefs from the Potawatomi, Wyandot, Ojibwe, and Odawa First Nations.
Oxford County was created by the legislature of the province of Upper Canada in 1798 by an enactment that came into force at the beginning of 1800. The immediate purpose was for better organization of the local militia and the improvement of the social order by the appointment of a lord lieutenant, part of the aristocratic framework for the new province that had been put in place by Governor Simcoe. The county lieutenant appointed for Oxford was William Claus, a grandson of Sir William Johnson and then head of the Indian Department responsible for oversight of the Six Nations settled along the Grand River tract running north and south on the eastern boundary of Oxford.William Claus, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Vol. VI
As first established, Oxford County consisted of the townships of Blenheim, Burford, Oxford-on-the-Thames, Blandford, Norwich, and Dereham (lands to the north of the Thames River had not yet been purchased by the Crown). The first three had been receiving settlers since the summer of 1793, under the leadership of Thomas Hornor (Blenheim), Benajah Mallory (Burford), and Thomas Ingersoll (Oxford-on-the-Thames), each of whom was also captain of the militia in his respective township. Claus remained resident in Niagara, and his appointment as the Crown's head for the county set off a rivalry between Hornor and Mallory for the prestige of appointment as Claus's resident deputy lieutenant within the county, eventually won by Hornor.Major R.C. Muir, The Early Political and Military History of Burford (1913) Thomas Ingersoll left the county, but the rivalry between Hornor and Mallory for pre-eminence continued for more than a decade, as Mallory was elected as the county's representative in the legislative assembly for Upper Canada in 1804 and again in 1808. All of that was swept away with the coming of the War of 1812. Appointed temporary administrator of the government, General Isaac Brock moved Claus to the head of the Lincoln Militia and appointed Henry Bostwick to head the Oxford Militia, thus passing over Hornor for any role in the war effort (Bostwick was the son of a former associate of Thomas Ingersoll). Mallory lost the 1812 election and turned traitor during the war by defecting to the American side as a captain in a volunteer corps.Hornor and Mallory biographies including bibliographies are available in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography online.
By the end of the first quarter-century of its development, Oxford's population was nearing 2,000 people, but many problems were holding back its development. Robert Gourlay, a Scotsman whose wife had inherited nearly 1,000 acres in Dereham township (around today's Mount Elgin), made the journey to Oxford in 1817 to inspect the prize but could not believe that the township was still a complete wilderness. He began a public movement to find solutions through public gatherings and newspaper advocacy all over Upper Canada but in return was prosecuted and jailed by the government for sedition. Gourlay's two-volume Statistical account of Upper Canada, compiled with a view to a grand system of emigration, published in London in 1822, presented a detailed analysis based upon reports submitted to him by citizen groups in 57 townships who yearned for improvements. Gourlay spent the next 35 years away from Canada but returned to his land in Oxford in 1856 to run for election.A full-length biography of Gourlay was published in 1971 by a Toronto writer, Lois Darroch Milani, who grew up in Oxford at Wolverton.Milani, Robert Gourlay, gadfly: the biography of Robert (Fleming) Gourlay, 1778–1863, forerunner of the rebellion in Upper Canada, 1837 (Toronto, 1971),