This Heritage Paper looks at the history of a Mountsberg property that has been owned by only two families since its creation. The house at 99 Mountsberg Road is being considered for Heritage Designation under Part IV of the Ontario Heritage Act by Flamborough LACAC and may well be the last building that is so designated by the town.
Located at 99 Mountsberg Road (NW. 1/2 Lot 11, Concession 12) in the former township of East Flamborough and now the Town of Flamborough, the Kerr-Woolsey house and property have known only two family names directly related to its ownership – that of Kerr and Woolsey.
The property, originally 200 acres in extent was first surveyed by John Stegman, but for over three decades was undisturbed except for occasional groups of Indian hunters. Settlement was extremely slow in this northern part of East Flamborough because of its isolated location and lack of access. Considerable property was set aside as Clergy Reserves by the Constitutional Act of 1791 and almost all the remaining lots, (including Lot 11, Concession 12), in Concessions 11 to 13 were granted to the four brothers and heirs of General Sir Isaac Brock who had been killed at Queenston Heights in 1812.
Eventually the British Crown through the Canada Company began to encourage settlement in this large tract of virgin land by the sale of Clergy Reserves. The Brock family also slowly began transferring title to a few of the their lots to Canadian trustees.
During these early sales, a re-survey of lots northwards of the 11th Concession Road became necessary between 1835 and 1836, due to errors made by the first surveyors. This resulted in the creation of a new east-west road between the 12th and 13th Concession Roads to provide access for the few settlers who had become stranded by the surveyor’s realignment – as a result the lots in the 12th Concession were cut in half, the properties all fronting onto a road allowance.
On 19 January 1849 all the Brock heirs and heiresses, known collectively as Ferdinand B Tupper et al, put the remaining Brock lands in trust to George Brock of Niagara in order to make sales easier for settlers. Exactly four years later, he was replaced by John De Haviland Uttermark of Guernsey, England who was appointed trustee of all unsold lands. Finally on 11 August 1857, Lot 11, Concession 12 was finally disposed of by the Brock family – one of their very last Mountsberg properties to be sold. The purchaser was Robert Kerr who paid £125 for the 100 acres and who had been living on the lot and paying taxes since 1840 according to the East Flamborough Township Assessment Rolls.
On 1 December 1840 Robert Kerr had married Isabella Weir, daughter of Thomas and Isabella Weir of County Sligo, Ireland, immigrants to Upper Canada in 1837. According to the 1842 Assessment Roll, he had cleared 16 acres of bush and by the 1851 Agricultural Census Returns, Robert had 50 of his 100 acres under cultivation and owned, among other things, 12 head of cattle and 20 sheep. The family’s first house was almost certainly log, but by the 1861 Census Returns, Robert Kerr had built the present two storey sturdy fieldstone farm house fronting onto Mountsberg Road.
A large family of ten children were born between 1841 and 1858. Robert appears to have been a prominent citizen in the Mountsberg community, listed as a member of the Reserve Militia in 1864-65 and Recording Steward and Secretary of the Methodist Episcopal Church Sabbath School until his death on 22 March 1866 at the age of 49 years, when he was described as “a kind husband, affectionate father, good neighbour and a friend to the church”. Robert Kerr was also a prosperous man when he died. Beside the home farm which in 1861 had been valued at $4,000, there were implements at $100, Horses at $200 and Livestock at $574. He also owned 100 acres of Lot 12, Concession 12, as well as two lots in Freelton and another parcel of land outside Wenworth County. He was buried in the Mountsberg Methodist Episcopal Church Cemetery, near to the three young sons who had predeceased him.
Isabella Kerr, Robert’s widow followed the wishes of her husband’s will and stayed on the farm which became the property of John R. Kerr when he reached the age of 21 years in 1868. About 1875 John married Annie McLean of Puslinch Township and a year later moved to Brantford where he owned a glove factory and ran a coal business.
William Henry Kerr, the second son farmed both the Kerr properties after his brother left for Brantford, living with his mother and younger sister, Louisa, on the home farm. During the early years of the 1880s, as members of the Kerr family began to disperse from the Mountsberg area, Thomas Woolsey, a young man who had been working for his brother-in-law, George Stanley Nicholson of Concession 6, East Flamborough Township came to work for the Kerrs as a farm labourer.
In 1883 William purchased his brother John’s other East Flamborough property of Lot 12, Concession 12 and a year later married Jane Reid of Georgetown. About the same time Thomas Woolsey met and began courting Susan Smye who worked for Mrs. William Laking at their Mountsberg mill. On 23 December 1885 they were married at Grace Anglican Church Waterdown and moved into the Kerr home farm. Within a year, William Kerr and his wife moved to a farm in the Scotch Block area of Esquesing Township, Halton County, leaving Isabella in the care of the Woolseys who stayed on, planning to make it their home.
When the 1891 Census Returns were compiled in April of that year, the household consisted on Thomas Woolsey, his wife, Susan, their first child, Margaret aged 4 years, Isabella Kerr aged 66 years and a 14 year old Irish boy as farm help. According to Woolsey Family History, Isabella Kerr continued to live in the house under the terms of her husband’s will until almost the end of her life when she moved to Brantford and died at her son John’s house on 4 April 1892. With the death of Isabella, the Kerr connection to the house ended and a year later John R. Kerr sold the property to Thomas Woolsey for $5,000. Thomas was forced to take a mortgage of $4,000 with Johnathan Wingrove of Mountsberg which was not discharged until almost 50 years later.
Five children were born to Thomas and Susan during their early years on the property, all attending the old Mountsberg School on Centre Road, although the youngest two also briefly attended Beechgrove School. In 1907, Thomas had the large wooden barn that is still standing on the property constructed by William ‘Billy’ Kitchen and his men, one of four that they built in the area during the year.*
Susan Woolsey died in 1916, leaving Thomas and their eldest son William on the farm alone. In 1941, just four years before he died, Thomas Woolsey finally discharged the mortgage on his property that was held by the surviving executors of Johnathan Wingrove’s estate. Following his father’s death, Robert Garnet Woolsey who had graduated from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto in 1927 and had moved to Brooklyn, New York, returned to Canada and in 1947 bought the farm from his brothers William and Stanley and his remaining sister, Bertha Gartley-Nicholson. Stanley, who had been working with his father on the farm together with his wife Gladys Stone, afreed to live in the house and to continue farming the property. About 1962, Robert Garnet Woolsey had semi-retired, working part time at the Ontario Hospital in Hamilton, so he came to live on the farm with his wife Beatrice Mast until his death in October 1968. He left his estate in trust with Canada Permanent, later Canada Trust who in December 1998 transferred ownership of the house and property to his daughters, Elizabeth Woolsey-Donatelli and Beatrice Woolsey, the present owners.**
© The Waterdown-East Flamborough Heritage Society 2000, 2023.
Editor’s Note:*The barn no longer stands on the property. All that remained at the time of this transcription were remnants of a tower silo.
**This article was published February of 2000.
