The Founding of Burlington

Every street you have walked today was somebody's decision. In 1810, James Gage bought about 340 acres from the trustees of Brant's estate — Augustus Jones and Catherine Brant — and set about turning lakeshore farmland into a town. He laid out the grid himself, and called it Wellington Square: for the Duke of Wellington, and for the square shape of the survey.

Brant Street became the town's spine, with wharves, warehouses, and mills clustering toward the lake, and the settlement grew into a grain port that mattered. If the surname rings a bell, it should: the Gage family farmhouse in Stoney Creek survives today as Battlefield House, the museum of the June 1813 battle.

Gage's townsite did exactly what he hoped. Wellington Square grew, merged with Port Nelson in 1873, and became the Village of Burlington. Gage named the town for the Duke and the surveyor's square — and his own name faded from the map, which may be the natural fate of a man who names things after other people.

Before it was Burlington, this patch of lakeshore was Wellington Square — and the name is a two-part story. "Wellington" honored the Duke of Wellington, fresh from defeating Napoleon; "Square" described the shape of James Gage's survey. In 1826 a post office opened, making the place official in the way that mattered.

What made it matter was wheat. Flour mills, warehouses, and wharves lined the shore, and produce shipped out through the busy docks of Wellington Square and Port Nelson while lumber from the surrounding forests competed for deck space. This was a working waterfront, not a resort town.

The railway would eventually end the era of the little commercial wharf — iron rails beat wooden piers — but by then the town had its momentum. In 1873 Wellington Square and Port Nelson merged into the Village of Burlington, and the old name slipped into the history books. The Duke of Wellington, one suspects, never knew he briefly owned a town in Upper Canada.

Here's the twist in the port story: in 1826 the colony cut a canal straight through the Burlington Beach sandbar so schooners could sail “right up to Hamilton's doorstep” — and Hamilton became the region's great port instead of Wellington Square's little wharves.

By the mid-1840s Wellington Square was humming: a steam grist mill, a foundry, a tannery, a pottery, stores, taverns, and tradesmen of every description. It was a respectable little industrial port — and then the railway arrived and made it bigger.

Construction on the Great Western Railway began in 1851, and on January 17, 1854, the first train ran from Niagara to Windsor; Hamilton celebrated two days later with parades and fireworks, business suspended for the occasion. The line came to this area in 1854, and suddenly grain and lumber could leave in any weather, and people could arrive just as easily.

The plaque on this corner marks the moment as a turning point, and it was: over the following decades the railway steadily replaced the little commercial wharves as the way goods moved. Wellington Square stopped being a port town and started being a railway town — the first of several reinventions that would eventually make it a city.

Stand here long enough and you can almost hear it: in June 1813, the War of 1812 came within earshot. The British were camped at Burlington Heights — the ridge at today's Hamilton, near Dundurn Castle — when, on the night of June 6, about 700 British regulars and a small Indigenous contingent under John Norton slipped out and launched a surprise night attack on the American camp at Stoney Creek.

It worked. The attack threw the much larger American force into confusion in the dark, stalling the invasion's momentum, and the British marched back to Burlington Heights.

The Heights mattered beyond that one night. After withdrawing from Fort George, the British regrouped there, and it served as a key base for the Niagara frontier through the rest of the war. So while Burlington itself never saw battle, the ridge just down the road helped decide the fate of the peninsula — and the Gage family farmhouse at Stoney Creek became the battle's most famous landmark.