When I had first moved to Long Island in New York, one of the things that struck me was that the road network made no logical sense. It seemed as though every little cow and deer path was made into a road. So many curves and turns and weird intersections. A dramatic difference from the orderly, straight lines of Peterborough that I grew up with. Turns out, there's a reason for that.
There was little in the way of European settlement south and west of the Ottawa River in Canada when the British took possession of it from the French. While at first the British were content with continuing the French policy of not encroaching on the peoples of the Great Lakes, the loss of 13 colonies in 1783 and the influx of loyalist refugees fleeing persecution necessitated a rethink. The Great Lakes would be settled after all. And it would be settled in an orderly fashion. There would be no crazy, nonsensical roads. The colonial authorities were committed to ensuring settlement would be neatly laid out in an defined structure.
The crown had recognized First Nations ownership of the land in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. This meant that the land would have to be acquired through treaties with the various First Nations in the region. A negotiation between two sovereign states over territory. While there's a lot of debate about the basic legitimacy of these treaties, and recent scholarship has brought into focus the underhanded tactics the British used to secure those land transfers, they are what opened up Upper Canada/Canada West/Ontario to European settlement.
After the land was acquired, the government required it to be surveyed, with the roads and farming lots laid out in as much of a grid pattern as the realities of the land would allow. The monument at GZ is dedicated to the very first of these surveys. It was this surveying system, laying out townships, that has defined the entirety of colonial settlement in Ontario. All our roads, our farms, our highways, our woodlots, and thus our parklands, conservation areas, and cities. The fundamental realities of life in our great province, and thus of our geocaching, all derive from Governor Haldimand ordering these surveys.
To log this Virtual, you must visit the posted coordinates and do two things:
The first is to take a photo of you, or a personal item, or your GPSr, or a thumbs up, or whatever you're comfortable with, that shows you were here, and include this photo in your found log.
The second requirement is to read the plaque at GZ and send me a message with the answers to the following questions:
- Who did Governor Haldimand task with completing the surveys?
- On what day was the first survey marker planted?
- The land in this area was acquired from which First Nation?
Congratulations skyye53 for being the First to Find!
Logs which do not comply with the requirements will be deleted.
Virtual Rewards 2.0 - 2019/2020
This Virtual Cache is part of a limited release of Virtuals created between June 4, 2019 and December 31, 2020. Only 4,000 cache owners were given the opportunity to hide a Virtual Cache. Learn more about Virtual Rewards 2.0 on the Geocaching Blog.