Memorial Park

The native Mississaugas of the Ojibway nation had long recognized the mouth of the Credit River as a meeting place, and farther upriver was an important hunting and fishing ground. After 1750, British traders were guided there in the spring and fall to trade for furs, providing goods in advance for furs promised in the next season, a custom of trading on credit that led to the name Credit River. A land treaty signed on August 2nd, 1805, at the Credit River opened a six-mile strip along Lake Ontario from Etobicoke Creek to Burlington Bay for settlement by the British Crown, while reserving to the Mississaugas a one-mile strip on either side of the Credit River and sole fishing and hunting rights to Sixteen Mile Creek and Twelve Mile Creek. In 1796 Governor John Grave Simeoe ordered a Government House built at the mouth of the Credit River to accommodate travelling government officials, and it was later converted to a tavern whose early proprietors included Major Thomas Ingersoll, father of Laura Secord. Peter Jones, Kahkewaquonaby, was the son of British surveyor Augustus Jones and his Mississauga partner Tuhbenahneequay, and as a Methodist minister in his early twenties he devoted himself to helping his people reconcile Native and European lifestyles in the area. European settlement and disease put pressure on the Mississaugas, and in 1826 the remaining members were resettled in a village where the Mississauga Golf Course is now situated; in 1847 a majority relocated near the Six Nations reserve at Brantford, and Peter Jones died ten years later.

Ontario · Canada