On 6 May 1796, Captain Samuel Smith was awarded a total of 1,200 acres in West Flamborough Township. Three years earlier, according to Mrs. John Graves Simcoe’s diary, he and a hundred men under his command had been sent to “open a road to be called Dundas Street, from the head of the Lake to River La Tranche.” This property was one of the lots he received, but like his other grants in the township and like those claimed by many officers and government officials who received property following the first surveys of the 1790s, it was never settled by the patentee. Captain Smith sold the lot for cash at the conclusion of the War of 1812, one of the many lots in the township purchased by James Crooks. Crooks also sold the lot for cash, making a handsome profit on the transaction when it was purchased by John Warren Ryckman and his wife Martha Smith in 1833.
The Ryckmans were a Loyalist family, originally from New York State. Johannes Ryckmans, John Warren’s grandfather was born in Hackensack, and was thirty-six years old at the time of the Declaration of Independence. He joined the British very early, serving as a guide during the Revolutionary War in the King’s American Regiment of the British Army that was raised in New York City in 1777. All his property was seized by the Rebels and sold, so the family were forced to leave. When they arrived at Sorel, Lower Canada in November 1783, they were almost destitute – the Haldimand Papers noting that they were issued “blankets, shoes, stockings, leggings and mittens.”
Johannes died soon after arriving in Canada and his widow was granted property in Sophiasburgh Township, Upper Canada in 1797, as was their eldest son, Tobias. For some reason the second son, Edward, did not receive a grant of land but after his marriage to Anna Warren, his brother agreed to sell some of his property for cash. Before the transaction was completed, the property was claimed by one of Tobias’ sons which was probably the reason Edward and his wife moved from the Bay of Quinte in 1811, settling in West Flamborough in 1816.
John Warren Ryckman, Edward’s eldest son was involved in Millgrove’s milling industry, owning and operating a steam sawmill, planing mill and a wooden pump factory. As a result of his sudden death in 1851, his estate was not settled until fourteen years later when his many holdings were divided amongst the family. Sylvester Ryckman, one of his sons, who was 21 years old, received this small parcel of land that fronted onto the Millgrove Sideroad.
Sylvester Ryckman married Margaret Jane Kerr of East Flamborough Township in 1865, and is believed to have been the builder of the main part of the present house, probably within a year of receiving the property. Sylvester farmed the property, but was, according to his obituary in the Hamilton Spectator on 11 June 1879, an amateur detective and genealogist, “working on the claim for the Estate of Anneke Jans Bohardus which was thrown out of court and has since been proved many times over to be in error.” The article continued, describing Sylvester as coming from “an old United Empire family who are believed to be amongst the more likely heirs to the estate referred to, and Mr. Ryckman spent not a small portion of his later days in hunting up the pedigree of this family, which he leaves most complete.”
Margaret Jane, Sylvester’s wife had died earlier in 1875, probably from complications following the birth of their fourth daughter. After Dylvester’s death in 1879, the house and property were sold.
The original location of the house was very close to the road but when the hydro towers were erected across the township in 1909, the house was moved west to its present location. Several additions have been made to the house since its construction, making it one of the largest frame homes in the township. It had a succession of owners after the Ryckmans until it was purchased in 1926 by William Francis Mason and his bride, Estelle Mitchell. Francis or Frank, as he was called, was born in England in 1894 and as a Doctor Barnado boy, came to Canada at the age of thirteen, one of the tens of thousands of poor, orphaned and slum children who were sent by the British government to solve the soaring demand for cheap labour on Canadian farms and “to empty the English workhouses.”
On arriving in Hamilton, Frank was apprenticed as an agricultural labourer and eventually came to work on the Roland Cummins farm, across the road from this house. In 1915, he enlisted in the Canadian army and a year later was shipped to England and then to France. He was seriously injured while taking part in the great battle at Passchendale, November 1917 and was hospitalized, first in France, then England and finally at the Military Hospital in Burlington. Frank returned to Millgrove in 1920, working on the Cummins farm and then his own small holding, the Sylvester Ryckman’s property. Following their marriage, Frank and Estelle Mason became deeply involved in many village activities and organizations, from the Library Board to the Dramatic Society and were part of the vibrant Millgrove community for the rest of their lives.
© The Waterdown-East Flamborough Heritage Society 2009, 2024.
