Producing Potash at Rockway
A Fifteen Mile Falls Community
This is the second in a series of three essays relating to local trade and communications, the relationships between the Loyalist refugees who came to Niagara in the 1780s and their new environment.
Part 1 - "The Worst in the World!": The Troubled History of Niagara's Roadways examines the state of transportation in Niagara during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and the small communities that formed during this period.
Part 3 - An Inclement Journey Across Niagara, 1803 relates the experiences of Francis Goring, who traveled through the entire Niagara peninsula on foot every winter from 1803-1808, delivering letters for his employer, Robert Hamilton.
“... in this remote corner we are of importance to no body but ourselves.”
Raise your hand if you’ve ever gone for a walk at Rockway Conservation Area. 🙋
If not, you’ve probably driven past it at some point. At the top of the Niagara Escarpment on Pelham Road it’s a beautiful spot for a hike, with a lush canopy of trees and a giant waterfall. Growing up just down the street from Rockway, my family would often go for walks there after church on Sunday. I had no idea as we splashed in the creek and climbed over the rocks that this place was at one point bustling with working people. And this community was just down the road from The Brown Homestead!
The potashery at the Fifteen Mile Falls, known today as Rockway Conservation Area, was an early 19th century enterprise that presents us with a great example of how early trade networks developed on local, regional, and provincial levels.
As early as 1792 there are records of individuals gathering salt from the salt springs within the Fifteen Mile Creek Valley. It was named the Fifteen Mile Creek/Valley/Falls because it was located approximately 15 miles west of the Niagara River. In addition to salt, this also became an early location in the region for manufacturing potash.
This is a story about the relationship between people and their natural environment, and this is also a story of economic development. By investigating the trade networks that appeared at the Fifteen via potash production, we get to see how families worked towards accumulating capital through sharing labour and resources, diversifying commercial interests, and strategically engaging in profitable markets.
What is Potash?
Potash is a manufactured product that was used to make glass, pottery, soap, china & gunpowder, and to dye fabrics. It was produced in Upper Canada during the 1790s, after the first wave of Loyalists settled in the area around the Great Lakes. Merchant records show us that 670 barrels of potash were exported from the province in 1797, but these sources do not detail whether any of it was produced specifically in Niagara (1). As a new colony focused on establishing self-sufficiency, the communities in Niagara did not contribute substantially to provincial potash exports at first.
The first thing these settlers did after finding refuge in Niagara was clear sections of their newly granted land so they could begin farming. Land clearing meant cutting down trees and burning them, resulting in an abundance of leftover wood ash. Families would save small amounts of the ash to make soap for household use, however, potash was also valuable as an export product. So the leftover ashes, which our primary source accounts [keep reading to see which accounts we’re talking about] refer to as “house” or “field” ashes, were sold to potash manufacturers who paid approximately ten pence per bushel to further develop it into potash or pearlash (2). It was then exported from Niagara to Montreal and beyond.
The Fifteen Mile Falls Potashery
So what did the process of making potash look like, exactly? Well, the wood ashes were collected and placed into large wooden vats with small holes in the bottom, and then soaked with water that filtered through the holes (3). This leaching process deprived the ashes of their salts. Lime was also added at this point, sourced from points along the Niagara escarpment, to strengthen the chemical process. The resulting alkali solution was then boiled in large cast-iron vessels known as “pot-ash kettles” to produce black salts, which at that point could be termed “potash” (4). The salts would then be heated further to refine them into a quality acceptable for export, turning a grey/pink colour.
This entire process took place right where the Fifteen Mile Falls, or Rockway Conservation Area, is today, just down the street from The Brown Homestead! Very few primary accounts actually detail these operations locally, especially this early in the Loyalist era, but one collection of account books belonging to Niagara-on-the-Lake miller Daniel Servos containing a complicated array of local transactions offers us some idea of what went on here around the turn of the 19th century (5). Information about potash production is listed in his account books predominantly for the years 1800 and 1801. To be clear, this was in no way a large operation. Still, this small backwoods potashery gives us great insight into what it looked like to be a part of a precarious new business in Niagara at this time. Here’s what we learned from reading these account books.
Daniel Servos was a Loyalist who settled in Niagara township and operated the King’s Mills at the mouth of the Four Mile Creek.
The black triangle represents the location of the King’s Mills at the mouth of the Four Mile Creek. D. Servos is listed here on this map of Niagara Township from 1784.
Servos was actually involved in the operation of two potash manufactories; one near his farm on the Four Mile Creek, and the other at the Fifteen Mile Creek. Partnering with Niagara merchants William & James Crooks and acting as a sort of “site manager,” Servos hired individuals to bring wagon loads of limestone, empty barrels, cords of firewood and provisions for labourers to the Fifteen. The bushels of ashes were locally sourced from families living around the potashery, and the completed product was then brought back to Niagara-on-the-Lake, which at the time was just called “Niagara”. The Crooks brothers would then ship the potash in barrels to their Montreal trade partners Auldjo & Maitland.
Community Significance
The community surrounding the potashery was directly involved in not only the supply of ashes, but also the general production. Many of the farmers living in the south end of Louth Township (present day Jordan & western St. Catharines) and northern Pelham Township also worked at the potashery for a couple of days per year as payment for purchases of household items like linen and tea from Servos, who also operated a small merchant operation at the King’s Mills in Niagara.
The general labour at the potashery provided by community members of the Fifteen included:
Repairing the wagons that transported goods to and from Niagara (Niagara-on-the-Lake)
Building or repairing troughs and vats
Chopping wood to feed the fires
Boiling the potash salts
John Hill of Pelham Township is listed in the Servos accounts as “John Hill Saltboiler,” which directly implies his work in the potash operations at the Fifteen Mile Falls.
Some of the names of these labourers and ash suppliers include (and this is exactly how they are spelled in the accounts) Henry Beamer, Adam Beamer, Philip Beamer, Christian Beamer, Jeremiah Scram, John Schram, John Hill, John Snuer, Jacob Regs, James McLaughlin, John Frolick, William Osterhout, George Lutz, John Lindenberry, John Raising, Christian Bradt, and George Cosby, just to name a few. Do you recognize any of these names? There are still descendants living in the area today.
If you look at this survey of Pelham in 1811, which is the earliest map of Pelham township that we’ve been able to find, you’ll see highlighted the names of those who show up in Servos’ accounts as either having sold him ashes, or providing some form of labour at the potashery. By overlaying this map atop a modern basemap, we can see where some of these individuals and their families would have been living, relative to the Fifteen Mile Falls (Rockway).
The names highlighted in the 1811 survey (left) of Pelham Township [source - The Mini Atlas of Early Settlers in the District of Niagara, 1782-1876], appear in the Servos accounts. Their location atop a modern basemap (above) of north Pelham shows the proximity of their farms to the Fifteen Mile Falls and The Brown Homestead. (click to enlarge)
To make this visualization even easier to comprehend, this GIS snapshot demonstrates the locations of all of the individuals who sold ashes from their farms, as recorded in Servos’ account books. Notice that the majority of ashes being used at the Fifteen Mile potashery (Rockway) came from Pelham and Louth townships, with some coming from Clinton, Grantham, and Thorold townships as well.
Fifteen Mile Falls is marked with a red pin.
As you may already be realizing, these accounts reveal the formation of an industrial hub around the Fifteen Mile Creek as the potashery provided a market for local ashes, an opportunity for members of the community to perform labour and purchase goods, and it was a source of production for a valuable export commodity.
While the history of potash production at the Fifteen may not be well-known to local history buffs, a more commonly shared tidbit from the past is that salt was also mined from this location in the Fifteen Mile Valley towards the end of the 18th century. Salt was a valuable product for families in the area, used for food preservation and seasoning, for setting dyes and tanning hides. According to the NPCA Fifteen-Sixteen-Eighteen Mile Creek Watershed Plan composed in 2008, the Rockway Salt Springs measured “15 feet long, 5 feet wide and 11 feet deep, the salt springs provided the best quality and quantity of brine in the province as well as serving as a local source for salt, which was both costly and scarce. The first salt was produced a year later in July 1793 (Ontario Historical Society 1930)” (6).
The Role of Nature
Participating in this commercial activity at the Fifteen Mile Falls was largely impacted by the local geography. Surveyors originally laid out township perimeters in the 1780s according to natural boundaries such as the Niagara escarpment and the Chippawa Creek (or Welland River), and it is noteworthy that the communities that ultimately formed, especially in the northern part of the Niagara peninsula were often centred around the junctions where the escarpment met the local creek, whether it be the Twelve, the Fifteen, the Twenty, the Forty, etc. In fact, 15 out of 24 of the very first mills built in the Niagara peninsula during the early 1790s were constructed on these creeks atop the escarpment (7). The foundations of local industry developed during the Loyalist period in many ways rested upon such natural intersections.
For the Mississauga people too, natural features denoted boundaries between lands. They called the Twelve Mile Creek the Ash-qua-sing or Esquesing meaning “the Last Creek” or “that which lies at the end” (8). Indicating the creek as the “last” shows that it was a significant boundary forming the perimeter of a particular sphere of influence for them.
Let’s not forget that Daniel Servos and the Crooks brothers were headquartered in Niagara. The Fifteen Mile community’s distance from the Four Mile Creek was an isolating factor because travel back and forth between the two cost them precious time and money. Servos recorded that each round trip from the Four Mile Creek southwest to the Fifteen Mile Falls was a journey of approximately 15 miles and cost between 12-20 shillings depending on the load, which back then could buy a sturdy pair of shoes or a couple day’s labour, meaning that it was crucial to transport goods as efficiently as possible.
“By 3 Loads from the 4 Mile Creek to the 15 … 3 waggons” @ 18 shillings per load
“Memorandum of Potash sent to Montreal, October 24th, 1799” in Personal Account Book 1779-1803, Daniel Servos Records 1799-1826. MS 538. Archives of Ontario.
The wagons (which the accounts imply were constantly in need of repair) could not carry more than a few barrels either; those wagonloads that went back with potash only carried three or four barrels at a time. One barrel of potash weighed about as much as a baby elephant. A record of potash imported from America into the St. John’s customs house of Lower Canada in 1806 notes each barrel weighed the standard 336lbs (9). The Servos accounts do not specify the weight of the barrels filled at the Fifteen, so we don’t know for sure that they all weighed 336lbs, but Servos did leave one record of a transfer of seven barrels to the Crooks brothers in 1799, where he lists each barrel containing approximately 350lbs of potash. You can imagine the degree of difficulty these people faced, loading 3 barrels into their unreliable wagon at the end of a dirt path near the base of Rockway Falls, tipping the scales at over 1000lbs. (keep in mind, the average load capacity of your Honda Accord is only 850lbs).
While the limitations posed by Niagara’s geography, such as its often poor roadways, numerous creeks and the towering escarpment caused these early colonial settlers to form a network of semi-isolated townships centered around the natural intersections like the community at the Fifteen Mile Falls (Rockway), it’s important to note that there was still lots of inter-regional trade happening! Ashes and labourers came from Pelham & Louth, while the wood, limestone, and barrels came from Niagara township (Niagara-on-the-Lake). Further, the financial backing for this enterprise was ultimately centred in Montreal via the Crooks’ business partners. Indeed, geography played a major role in the development of Niagara’s economy, but the settlers weren’t victims of circumstance. These farmers and entrepreneurs effectively wielded their individual agency, using natural resources to their advantage, allowing local production at the potashery to flourish.
Market Impacts - Local Significance
In all of this we see that Servos had become a key facilitator of goods, services, and information within the Niagara Peninsula. According to his accounts, the limestone, cords of wood, and empty barrels used at the Fifteen Mile potashery were sourced mostly from Niagara & Grantham Townships, and transported to the Fifteen. Servos collected cords of wood as payment at his mills, and he often forwarded the wood to the Fifteen Mile Creek for use in the ash boiling process.
The commercial activity happening at the Fifteen held numerous ties back to the King’s Mills in Niagara, because according to his accounts, Servos managed a second small potashery near his farm on the Four Mile Creek. These two manufactories were connected by the labourers who traveled back and forth with food and supplies. Yet, by procuring the ashes from locals, Servos cut down on his own transportation costs while providing another burgeoning community at the Fifteen with a market for their ashes. At the same time he offered a new avenue for them to purchase other household goods such as tea and linens.
You might be wondering, if Servos is a miller, why is he also providing goods for people to purchase? During these early settlement days, many millers became small-scale merchants as a byproduct of their enterprise, hence the term “merchant-miller.”
If you’re like us… seeing the networks forming here may leave some of you feeling like this. There are likely many more connections that we don’t even know about!
When local farmers brought their wheat and corn to be milled, they would pay for the service with a portion of the milled product, or a “toll”, which the miller collected and sold to others, beginning a barter system where other types of farm produce and animal by-products could also be bought and sold from this same central location. Niagara was operating under a debt economy at this time, and bartering was the predominant form of exchange. The linen and tea that Servos sold to families at the Fifteen would not have originated from other Niagara farms, but likely came from the Crooks brothers, who were his connection to Montreal and the greater commercial linkages of the British empire.
Market Impacts - Beyond Niagara
So where did all of this potash from the Fifteen Mile Creek end up going? What sort of impact did this backwoods potashery have in the grand scheme of Upper Canadian commerce?
During the Loyalist era, Niagara merchants facilitated trade in and out of the region, connecting farmers and businesses to external markets in Kingston, Detroit, and Montreal. By the 19th century, Niagara had become a notable contributor to the province’s exports, mostly with products like flour, potash, and lumber. While flour was the most common export, it was an unreliable product, which is why people engaged in other endeavours. In 1802, the amount of flour exported was less than half of the previous year due to a poor wheat crop, but merchants note that “deficiency has been fully compensated by the excess on the pot ash” (10). The earliest record of bulk shipments of potash in the Servos accounts is the sale of seven barrels containing a total of 2494lbs, from the year 1799 (11). Seven barrels was a very small number compared to production happening elsewhere, but it was a start!
The Crooks’ Montreal partners Auldjo & Maitland were also involved in a potashery near Niagara Falls. Chippawa merchant Thomas Cummings and his partner John Muirhead, a prominent magistrate and collector of customs in town, ran a potashery in the early 1790s (12). Cummings owned half of the business and his creditors Auldjo & Maitland financed some of the required materials. However, letters from A & M show that production was poor throughout the early 1800s (13). For six years they urged Cummings to produce more potash and compared his production to that of Robert Hamilton in Queenston and others in the peninsula, writing “we see no reason why you cannot make as much as your Friends at Niagara do” (14). The inability to achieve any sort of large-scale manufacturing was attributed to having “too many irons in ye fire,” as A & M told Cummings it would be better to do a few things well than to do many things poorly (15). However, others like Englishman Hugh Gray asserted that potash manufacturing was not as big of an industry as it had the potential to be because he thought people were, essentially, lazy (16).
Thus we see that potash was being produced throughout Niagara, its trade facilitated through merchants like William & James Crooks, Thomas Cummings & John Muirhead, and Robert Hamilton. Hamilton was Niagara’s most prominent merchant at the turn of the century, and we know his enterprises produced most of the potash in the region at this time, but because there is no collection of his day books, account books or ledgers in existence like there is from Servos, it’s difficult to know what his contributions actually looked like (17).
Not much has been written about Niagara’s early contributions to the provincial potash market. At least 151 barrels originating from “Niagara and Upwards” were received and forwarded from Kingston into Lower Canada in 1803, according to Kingston merchant Richard Cartwright who facilitated this trade (18). Even more was produced in the Midland District, a total of 378 barrels from the vicinity spanning Prince Edward County to Gananoque. These amounts were small compared to the trade going on elsewhere; close to 7,000 barrels were exported from Quebec annually, much of it actually originating from the United States (19).
Conclusion
In 1797, Richard Cartwright wrote from his home in Kingston that “every Day Events happen that are of Importance to all the World, while in this remote Corner we are of importance to No Body but ourselves” (20). This sentiment can be applied to Niagara as well; during the late 18th & early 19th centuries it was just beginning to make its mark in the dynamic economic and political landscapes of Canada. While larger scale merchants and Montreal administrators were aware of the economic potential that Niagara held, the ash suppliers and general labourers at the Fifteen Mile Falls and the small-scale merchants transporting goods and supplies led far more insular lives.
Niagara’s commercial networks operate on a bit of a larger scale these days. We’re connected to news from across the world and can order an iPad or a refrigerator from China at the touch of a button. Still, we are all a part of some smaller community, whether within Niagara or elsewhere. We at The Brown Homestead are proud to be a part of the St. Catharines community, and just a stone’s throw away from Rockway Falls. Maybe this week you can switch up your routine and take the dog for a walk down at Rockway. If you happen to pass by the Homestead on your way there (we’re right across from Shorthills Park) be sure to give us a honk and a wave!
(1) Douglas McCalla, Planting the Province: The Economic History of Upper Canada, 1784-1870, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 251.
(2) These operations are detailed in Archives of Ontario (AO), “Account Book Volume IV 1799-1801,” Daniel Servos Records 1779-1826, No. 42, MS 538.
(3) Hugh Gray, Letters from Canada, Written During a Residence There in the Years 1806, 1807, and 1808, (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1809), 216.
(4) Harry Miller, “Potash from Wood Ashes: Frontier Technology in Canada and the United States,” Technology and Culture Vol. 21, No. 2 (Apr., 1980), pp. 189. https://doi.org/10.2307/3103338
(5) These accounts were sourced from the Archives of Ontario (AO), which carries five volumes of account books, as well as a personal account book. Archives of Ontario, Daniel Servos Records 1779-1826, No. 42. MS 538.
(6) Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority (NPCA), Fifteen-Sixteen-Eighteen Mile Creek Watershed Plan, (2008), 13, accessed from https://npca.ca/images/uploads/common/NPCA-Watershed-Plan-15-16-18Mile-Creek.pdf
(7) Ernest Cruikshank lists the mills in Niagara by 1792, copied from the returns compiled by Surveyor General D. W. Smith in Notes on the history of the district of Niagara, 1791-1793, (Welland: Welland Tribune Print, 1914), 49, accessed from Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/notesonhistoryof26crui/page/n6/mode/2up.
(8) According to historian Donald Smith in his book: Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) & the Mississauga Indians, (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1987), 257, this name was applied to both the Twelve Mile Creek in Bronte, later called Bronte Creek, and the Twelve Mile Creek in St. Catharines.
(9) Gray, Letters from Canada, 180.
(10) Archives of Ontario, Richard Cartwright copied letterbooks, Cartwright family fonds, Series F 24-3, box MU 513, 190.
(11) “Memorandum of Potash sent to Montreal, October 24th, 1799” in Personal Account Book 1779-1803, Daniel Servos Records 1779-1826. MS 538. Archives of Ontario.
(12) E. A. Cruikshank, “A Country Merchant in Upper Canada 1800-1812”, Ontario Historical Society Papers and Records 25 (1929): 146.
(13) Cruikshank, 163. “We approve of the Sale of your provisions-you say nothing as to Potash, we have often urged, especially at this time a prosecution of that business while ye prices continue high of which there is still a prospect; ye expense of kettles & ye erecting ye works being now incurred, it would be wrong to drop it.”
(14) Cruikshank, 165.
(15) Cruikshank, 165.
(16) Gray, Letters from Canada, 215: “There can be no doubt that their time is not fully occupied in the management of their farms; and were they more industrious, it would make up in some measure for the want of population.”
(17) Hamilton was Niagara’s largest landowner and had an estate worth £200,000 when he died in 1809. Historians have had to piece together materials located in archives, universities, libraries, and museums across Ontario and the United States to understand the impressive scope of Hamilton’s enterprises.
(18) Cartwright copied letterbooks, 206.
(19) Gray, Letters from Canada, 172 & 180. An annual average of 22,084 cwt of pot and pearl ashes were exported from Canada each year between 1800-1805.
(20) Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812, (New York: Knopf, 2010), 20.
Bibliography
Gray, Hugh. Letters from Canada, Written During a Residence There in the Years 1806, 1807, and 1808. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1809.
Jackson, John. St. Catharines Ontario: Its Early Years. Belleville: Mika Publishing, 1976.
McCalla, Douglas. Planting the Province: The Economic History of Upper Canada, 1784-1870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.
Miller, Harry. “Potash from Wood Ashes: Frontier Technology in Canada and the United States,” Technology and Culture Vol. 21, No. 2 (Apr., 1980), pp. 187-208. https://doi.org/10.2307/3103338
Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority (NPCA). Fifteen-Sixteen-Eighteen Mile Creek Watershed Plan. 2008. https://npca.ca/images/uploads/common/NPCA-Watershed-Plan-15-16-18Mile-Creek.pdf
Parnall, Maggie and Corlene Taylor. The Mini Atlas of Early Settlers in the District of Niagara, 1782-1876. The Historical Society of St. Catharines, 1984.
Smith, Donald. Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) & the Mississauga Indians. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987.
Taylor, Alan. The Civil War of 1812. New York: Vintage Books, 2011.
Author Bio
Jessica Linzel [M.A. History, Brock University], is the Community Engagement Manager at The Brown Homestead. Jess has studied the history of Niagara since 2016, and her M.A. thesis (2020) focused on economic development in Niagara during the early Loyalist period.