Dresden is an agricultural community in the municipality of Chatham-Kent in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Located on the Sydenham River, it is named after Dresden, Germany. The main field crops in the area are grain corn, soybean, and winter wheat, and the principal horticultural crops are tomatoes, sweet corn, and carrots.
Dresden was the home of Josiah Henson, an African-Canadian former slave, abolitionist, and minister, whose life-story was an inspiration for the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. The Henson homestead is a historic building near Dresden.
From 1948 to 1956, Dresden was the focus of a campaign by the National Unity Association, led by Hugh Burnett, for racial equality and social justice. The resultant passage of Ontario's Fair Employment Practices Act (1951) and Fair Accommodation Practices Act (1954) paved the way for the enactment of human rights legislation across Canada.
An H chondrite-type meteorite fell near Dresden in 1939.
History
Before European settlement
Dresden lies within what was, in succession, the province of Quebec (from 1763), Upper Canada (1791), the Canada West division of United Canada (1841), and after Confederation, Ontario (1867).
In the late 18th century, the future site of the community lay in Kent County in the Western District. The region was covered with a largely unbroken, mainly hardwood forest. Deer, bears, wolves, foxes, and wild turkeys roamed in abundance. First Nations peoples used fire in order to make clearings for camps, improve the habitat of game animals, and prepare ground for cultivation. A network of foot and portage trails was well established, often running parallel to or between major waterways and along lake shorelines. Forest cover is estimated to have been over 80%.
Treaties
In 1790, leaders of the Odawa, Potawatomi, and Chippewa First Nations, together with leaders of the Huron Nations of Detroit, signed a treaty with the British Crown. Known as Treaty No. 2 or the McKee Purchase, it ceded a large tract of land lying between Lake Erie and the Thames River, including the area currently known as Chatham-Kent. Subsequently, Treaty No. 25, the Longwoods Treaty, was signed in 1822 between leaders of the Chippewa First Nation and the Crown. It confirmed provisional agreements, reached in earlier years, for the Chippewa to cede an area to the north that adjoined much of the upper boundary of the McKee Purchase.
These treaty boundaries have largely not been surveyed. A map produced by Ontario's Ministry of Indigenous Affairs shows present-day Dresden inside the area ceded by the 1790 McKee Purchase, with the northern outskirts close to the area demarcated by the 1822 Longwoods Treaty. Today's community may lie partially in both: Camden Gore, which became part of the site of Dresden, was excluded from the scope of the 1790 treaty, while included in the 1822 one.
Paving the way for settlement, systematic surveys along the Thames and the Sydenham began in the 1790s under Patrick McNiff and Abraham Iredell, who were deputy surveyors, successively, of the Western District.
Settlement
The first settler recorded on the present-day site of Dresden, in 1825, was Gerard Lindsley, who moved there from the Thames River Settlement. In 1846, Daniel VanAllen, a Chatham merchant, bought the Lindsley farm and laid out a town plot. Around the same time, William Wright surveyed and settled what became the southern part of Dresden, then known as Fairport.
By 1849, a steam-powered sawmill and a grist-mill in the neighbouring Dawn Settlement were helping drive the economy of a logging-based community slowly expanding on both banks of the head of navigation of the Sydenham River.
Underground Railroad
The Dawn Settlement was a community composed of refugees from slavery and freedmen and women, and an important end-point of the Underground Railroad's overland and maritime routes. Dawn developed around the British-American Institute, a vocational school whose principal founder, in 1842, was Josiah Henson.
The grounds of the Settlement are now the site of the Josiah Henson Museum of African-Canadian History (formerly Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site). The Museum lies just outside modern Dresden's borders at the corner of Park St. and Freedom Road (formerly Uncle Tom's Road).
Growth and founding
Dresden's post-office opened in 1854, and the first permanent crossing over the Sydenham, a wooden swing-bridge, was erected in 1864. By 1865, Dresden was starting to enlarge, with an estimated population of 500; its principal business was the shipping of squared-up timber, staves, and cordwood. Logs were also driven or rafted downriver to other sawmills. An ashery and a tannery were in operation.
The community's growth in the two decades after 1870 was rapid. In 1872, Dresden was incorporated as a village. The logging, lumber and cordwood industries expanded, supporting woodworking factories producing hubs, spokes, wheels and other components for carriage and wagon manufacturers and shops both local and further afield. The first newspaper, The Gazette, launched in 1870. It was succeeded in 1873 by the long-running Dresden Times. In 1882, Dresden was granted the status of a town, with Alexander Trerice, a lumber merchant, as the first mayor. An impression of the town's layout and locale around this time compared to modern Dresden can be gained from an interactive 1876 map of Kent County.
Development
In the 1880s, clearing the Sydenham of hardwood logs that had sunk during their driving and rafting, together with improvements to Dresden's turning-basin, gave a boost to the shipbuilding industry and the shipping trade. Shipbuilding, which had started in the early 1870s, saw the construction of a variety of vessels, many steam-driven, for carrying freight and passengers and for pleasure-cruises.
However, railways began to out-compete the Sydenham's schooners, barges, brigs and packet freighters when a spur from the extension of the Erie & Huron Railway from Chatham to Wallaceburg reached Dresden in 1883. A railway was also used to move logs from the northern forest tract to the banks of the Sydenham: from 1884 to 1897, a narrow-gauge line using Shay locomotives was laid by the Dawn Tramway Company for this purpose. On reaching the river, the logs were boomed and then towed downriver to sawmills. Using the Erie & Huron as a right-of-way for siting poles and wires, telephone service arrived in 1885. The main sewer was laid in 1887. The steady expansion of the town and the farms around created a strong demand for bricks and agricultural drainage tiles, and several manufacturers were in operation from the 1870s onwards.
By 1890, an estimated population of 2,500 inhabited a town with electric street-lighting, brick-built business blocks, a town hall, a fire hall with a steam-powered fire-engine, a division (district) court, several churches, two public schools, a private bank, and two hotels. Industrial establishments included roller mills (replacing earlier grist-mills), sawmills, planing mills, a washing-machine factory, a sorghum syrup factory, a foundry, and a machine shop.
As the forest was clear-cut and thinned, the 1900s saw the waning of logging and lumbering, and a move into other industries. Several involved the processing of the crops, fruit, and vegetables harvested from the farms now rapidly expanding in the region: enterprises included a flax mill, two apple evaporators (to dry and preserve the cored and sliced fruit), and a large, though short-lived, beet sugar factory. A vegetable-canning factory was more successful: it was bought by the upcoming Canadian Canners company. After a succession of owners, in 1947 it was replaced with what eventually became today's Conagra tomato-processing plant. A factory for making an innovative type of stove-damper also prospered. In addition, from the turn of the century, a trend for using concrete blocks instead of stone and brick in foundations and many non-domestic buildings led to their manufacture in Dresden until the 1950s.
Farmers' needs were served by suppliers of agricultural implements, builders' by providers of paint, cement, and hardware, and home comforts were available from, among others, tailors, milliners, dressmakers, an optician and jeweller, suppliers of textiles and ready-to-wear clothing, grocers, a confectioner, and a piano and organ 'emporium'. A 1913 Goad fire insurance map, updated from 1889, details the physical characteristics of the town's buildings, streets and infrastructure, and notes the availability of a steam-propelled fire engine. Sheets are numbered 1 to 3. The key to the map's symbols is on sheet 2.
Domestically, wood gave way to coal for cooking and heating, with coal supplanted by natural gas from the 1910s on. In 1920, a water tank was erected to maintain pressure in the mains network, which used river water. Pumped well-water was piped from 1943, to be replaced in 1958 by treated water from the Sydenham. St. George and North Streets were paved in 1922, and the sewer network was extended in 1931. When sewage mains were installed throughout the town in the mid-1970s, the two streets were again resurfaced. In 1933, a modern concrete bridge over the Sydenham, in use today, replaced an older iron one.
The 20 acre ( 8 ha) industrial park, set up in 1964 in the southeast of the town to help diversify Dresden's economy, had a slow start; though by 1975, after an expansion and utilities upgrade in 1974, occupiers included Dresden Produce (a turkey-meat packager), Parking Structural Foam, Canadian Canners, and National Hardware Specialities. The latter, which had moved from Wallaceburg to Dresden in 1951, became Canada's largest producer of zinc die-cast pulleys, and also made sanitary hardware and automotive castings. Employing 120 people at its peak, it closed down in 1991. Greenmelk, another Wallaceburg-based firm, expanded into Dresden in the 1940s, producing animal-feed supplements from alfalfa and other crops, only to close in the early 1960s.
Military service
No. 6 Company of the 24th Kent Battalion of Infantry, formed in 1866 and first based at Dawn Mills, was stationed in Dresden from 1872. The Battalion disbanded in 1892. Some local men were among the 8000 or so Canadians who fought with or alongside British forces in the South African War.
Around 110 men from Dresden served in World War I, judging by the number of maple leaves (each representing a person) on the service flag made by the local chapter (formed in 1914) of IODE. The Dresden Cenotaph, erected in 1923, records 24 names of those killed in action or who subsequently died of their injuries. For World War II, the Cenotaph records 14 names, and for the Korean War, two.
In 1945, the Chatham-based radio station CFCO began broadcasting a weekly program that featured a regular "Welcome Home" slot for returning servicemen and women, including those from Dresden. Numbers grew as the year wore on. Dresden arranged "welcome home" meetings for returnees from overseas, giving each a gold ring in remembrance of their service. The returned men soon revived the original branch of the veterans' organization the Royal Canadian Legion, and constructed a Legion Hall near the bridge over the Sydenham.
Floods
Since the late nineteenth century, floods have frequently inundated the part of Dresden lying between a large oxbow meander of the Sydenham. Before the forest in the watershed was cleared, its trees and vegetation had reduced peak water-flows by slowing runoff into the river. Extensive tile-draining of the cleared land also contributed to higher, faster river inflows. Ice-jams in the waterway during spring thaws, exacerbated by log-jams caused by floodwater sweeping stacked logs into the river, made matters worse. A major flood in 1947, when the area alongside the Sydenham was occupied by many of Dresden's larger businesses, was devastating. Another in 1968 was also very destructive.