Elliott, Bruce, 2004-2005: Emigrant Recruitment by the New Brunswick Land Company: The Pioneer Settlers of Stanley and Harvey.

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For the Canada Company, a different tactic by the middle 1830s was beginning to prove more effective in drawing immigrants directly to the Huron Tract.   The Company appointed existing local settlers as its township agents, rather than members of the colonial elite or expatriate half-pay officers or imperial civil servants, and it relied upon their contacts with their home regions to stimulate chain migration from specific areas of the British Isles.   The most well-known example is James Hodgins from County Tipperary, Ireland who became the Company's agent for Biddulph Township ⁽¹⁰⁾.   Immigrants from Devon likewise were appointed to oversee settlement in Usborne and Stephen Townships just to the north of Biddulph ⁽¹¹⁾.   The Company successfully cashed in on chain migrations already under way, as immigration of Protestants from Tipperary into the adjoining non-company township of London had been growing steadily since 1818.   This network of internal agents is difficult to document because only the correspondence of the Canada Company's Toronto commissioner with the Court of Directors in London has survived, not the internal correspondence that came to rest in its Toronto office.   The practice is, however, evidenced in the press and in later local histories.
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(10) Bruce S. Elliott, Irish Migrants in the Canadas:   A New Approach (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, second edition, 2004), 137-40.

 

(11) James Scott, The Settlement of Huron County (Toronto, 1966), 167.