Richard Perry (1797-1879) and Susannah Proctor Perry (1798-1874)

Richard and his wife Susannah made a wrenching decision to leave a troubled Ireland in the year 1831 and strike out for a new life in Canada.  It meant leaving behind parents, and brothers and sisters and cousins and all that they knew of that intimate, known world of Tipperary.  They were part of an exodus of some 60,000 Protestant Irish who would immigrate to Canada and the States between 1829 and 1832 long before the Great Famine swept through their homeland. They were not destitute.

Young, healthy and in their early thirties they started off on the ocean voyage with their four children - John, nine years old, Henry, seven, Ann, five, and little Hannah, age three.  Travelling with them was an orphaned niece of Susannah’s, whose name was Susannah Lee, a girl of 15.  The long ocean voyage had started as a great new adventure, but it took its toll on the family when little Hannah died and was buried at sea.  Later in that same year, Susannah had a baby girl who would carry the name of her dead sister and become the second Hannah.  This Hannah would never marry, nor leave her parents, but would stay with them a dutiful daughter until her death at age 45 in 1877.  She would outlive her mother by a few years, but not her father.

Richard Perry arrived with enough funds to make a down payment on a l00 acre lot of Crown Land.  He made an application to the Commissioner of Crown Lands, Peter Robinson, Esq., “to purchase the W 1/2 of Lot 24 in the 7th Concession in King, York, on the 8th of July, 1831.”[1]  A clerk penciled in that “the 100 acres appear to be vacant, subject to special disposition”.  Richard Perry was allowed to occupy the lot and carry payments at  “7/6 per annum”.  The Perrys would become pioneers on forested land, untouched by any other occupant.  They would start to clear the forest, would build a shanty first, followed later by a two storey log cabin.  They would plant crops, do their road clearance and fence their land, as required by law, and start their new life.

One early family historian wrote a description of her grandparents’ log house.[2]

“. . . a large kitchen with a fireplace, two bedrooms and an upstairs, not finished very well, where the hired help slept.  After a while they added a frame part to it - a large living room and two bedrooms.”

It must have been a crowded house as the years went by.  It was not until September 18, 1839, that the Crown officially deeded the land to Richard.  The Perrys had successfully established themselves in Upper Canada.  Richard and Susannah added four more sons to their family during that period from the initial settlement to the receipt of their land deed - Thomas, born in 1833, William, 1834, Richard, 1837, and Matthew, 1839.  Their last child, Samuel, was born in 1841.  He probably died in his first year, for he does not lie in the Lloydtown Anglican Church Cemetery where so many Perrys can be found.  The earliest grave there is dated 1842, the year one acre of land for the cemetery and a church site was donated by Thomas Tyson.

While it is not officially known how closely the Proctor family of Tipperary, who also took up land in Lloydtown, were related to Susannah, there is likely a family connection.  John Proctor, owner of Lot 20, Concession 7, arrived in the same year [3] as the Perrys along with his wife Mary Hill and several children.  Old family letters indicate that Susannah was John’s sister.  Perhaps the two families were not all that close since the Perrys were Church of England, and the Proctors, Wesleyan Methodists.  As the years passed, and grown sons of both families began farming nearby, more than a dozen Proctors and Perrys bought adjacent properties facing the 8th Concession Road, while others bought land elsewhere around Lloydtown. 

Lloydtown was (and still is) a small village on the Holland River named for Jesse Lloyd, a Pennsylvania Quaker, who first built a mill by the river in 1812.  By the time the Perrys arrived, the village was thriving and boasted the first post office in King township.  The local families were mainly from England and Ireland.  An itinerant Anglican minister made the rounds of the township on horseback, and on September 8, 1834, he recorded the baptism of  “Thomas, son of Richard and Susan Perry, born 2nd March, 1833”.  The Godmother was Susan Lee.  It would seem that both Susannahs were known as Susan.

An entry dated October of 1837 from the journal of another itinerant minister, the Rev. Featherstone Lake Osler, mentions the Perrys.

“Thursday morning early started for the house of a Mr. Perry in the Township of King, having sent notice some days previous that I would preach there.  About 30 or 40 assembled.  Performed Divine Service, married a couple, baptized a child.  Reached home late in the evening.”

The village of Lloydtown would play a key role in the 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion, in that it was the hotbed of the rebellious plotting in the province.  In fact, it carried the nickname of “Rebel Town” for many years afterwards.  Allegiances broke along religious lines with the Anglicans tending to be Loyalists, and the Methodists and Quakers supporting the Reformers’ cause.  The Perrys, loyal to the Crown and the established government, wanted nothing to do with the Reform movement.  They had had enough of that sort of thing in Ireland with the ongoing Catholic harassment  of the English Protestant minority landowners.  From our study of earlier Irish Perrys, there is no doubt that this particular Irishman was as strong-minded and outspoken as some of the relations he left behind.  In a book published in the late 19th century [4] , this comment  appears about the patriarch Richard:

“his strongly imbibed Conservatism, and his genuine attachment to old-fashioned political ideas may have at times have caused him to ill-conceal his dislike to the Reform element.”

So much so, that on December 4, 1837, when the ragtag group of Rebels from Lloydtown started out on their early morning march for Yonge Street 12 miles away, heading to Toronto, Richard Perry was ready to change the course of history by himself, if necessary.  In the same book, this account describes his part in the Rebellion:

            “After seeing the rebels leave with their pikes painted red and shouting treason, he and his son John set off on horseback before dawn the day of the Rebellion to warn the militia at Bond Head.  They took 65 rounds of cartridges and an offer of their services to the commanding officer, Col. Dewson, who was in command of the volunteer corps for the area.  The gallant colonel complimented Mr. Perry upon his vigilance and declared he was the only one who up to that time was prepared to meet the insurgents.”

Thirteen year old Henry, armed and ready, was left at home to guard his mother and the other children.  The Rebellion almost fizzled out the day after the march on Toronto.  It was over by the end of December.  In 1838, the government built a barracks in Lloydtown to train a volunteer militia.  This was the same pattern established by the British in their governing of Ireland in the early part of the 19th century - establish local barracks to protect those loyal to the Crown.  The barracks was undoubtedly unpopular in “Rebel Town”, but the Anglican preacher came regularly to preach to his flock in the militia, and the Perrys  became friends with the new commander and his family.

St. Mary Magdelene Church was officially opened on January 1, 1842, on land across from the barracks.  The Rev. Henry Bath Osler, the younger brother of Featherstone Lake Osler, was its first rector.  He ministered to his Lloydtown flock for 31 years as well as serving as an itinerant missionary around the countryside.  As will be seen, the Perry family would continue to have a strong association with their church and cemetery for several generations.

At the time of the Canada Census of 1851, [5] all but one of the Perry children were still living at home with their parents. Only the oldest daughter Ann was not enumerated in the family homestead.  It is believed she married John Wilson of West Gwillimbury in 1849.  Susannah Lee had also left home when she married Peter Shanks circa 1837.   The census gives a picture of the Perry farm mid-century.

None of the younger children were in school, but that is explained by the fact that there was no public school in Lloydtown until 1850.  The farm consisted of 200 acres now, with 160 under cultivation.  The family owned cattle, horses, a large flock of sheep and some 20 pigs.  The women had churned 500 lbs. of butter.  One hundred lbs. of wool had been shorn from the sheep, and mother and/or daughter had woven 20 yds. of fulled cloth and 30 yds. of flannel for the family’s needs,  some of it possibly for the market. In pioneer Canada the women were the weavers, and mothers passed on the skill to their daughters.  In the Census of 1861, Ann Wilson is listed as a spinster.  By 1851, Lloydtown had a fulling and carding mill where raw wool could be processed ready for spinning and weaving.  Before then, this was a laborious, hand process.  In true pioneer fashion, the family was also tapping the maples and producing maple sugar, some 40 lbs.  Richard had planted 40 acres in wheat and had a crop of 800 bushels.  Other large crops were peas, oats, potatoes and hay.  It was a prospering operation run by a family blessed with many sons and a few, hardworking women.

At the same time as  the Perrys cleared more land and planted more crops, other farmers were doing the same thing.  The village of Lloydtown was also growing to meet the needs of these local farmers. In Smith’s Canada, 1851, is the following description:

            “. . . large tracts of land bordering the road, covered with wood . . .  a large portion of the stumps still standing in the fields . . . (the ) houses and farm buildings are poor, with few exceptions. (The village) has a population of 350, and (on the river) can be found a grist mill, saw mill, and a carding and fulling mill.  There are two tanneries, a post office, two churches (Episcopal and Methodist). “

This was the village’s heyday.  As the forest was cleared for planting, the flow of water in the streams was reduced, and the mills were unable to function on water power.  Lloydtown would remain a rural village in a farming community, bypassed by the railway and major roads.  The Perrys had put down roots here.  Not only would generations of them continue to live on the land as their ancestors had once done in Tipperary, but those who left the place carried with them the memory of Lloydtown and passed it down to their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Joan Barrett

April, 2007

[1] King Township Papers,  Archives of Ontario

[2] The Pioneering Perrys, by Violet Perry McCullagh, 1968

[3] Canadian County Atlas Project

[4] History of Toronto and County of York, Ontario,   vol. 2, Toronto, 1885,  by C. Blackett Robinson

[5] The census  enumeration was taken the preceding fall