THE DUNLOPS IN SIMCOE COUNTY (continued)

Orillia Bay from Couchiching Park
(From A History of Simcoe County, by Andrew F Hunter.
Originally published in 1909, and reproduced by
Mackinaw Productions www.mackinaw.on.ca in 1998.)

Orillia is in the heart of Ontario's tranquil Lake Country, and is located on the shores of Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching.  The first permanent European settlers to the area were a group of seventeen Scottish families from Sutherlandshire, who settled in West Gwillimbury in 1819.  Around 1831 or 1832 there was another, larger, influx of Scots, this time from Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire.  And there was yet another group of Scots who arrived from Dumfrieshire between about 1832 and 1850.  The Scots were not alone, however, in settling Simcoe County, the French-Canadians and Irish were well represented, and other groups arrived in somewhat smaller numbers from time to time.   The main stream of settlers was between about 1832 and 1840; so our Dunlops arrived at the tail end of the rush for settlement. Coldwater Road, mentioned in the Orillia Times obituary above as having been the site of Thomas Dunlop's farm, was originally a long Indian portage (where boats were carried between navigable waterways) of fourteen miles, from Lake Couchiching where Orillia now stands, to Coldwater on Matchedash Bay. The same obituary tells us that son Alexander built the first road between Orillia and Atherley (about 3 1/2 miles east of Orillia).  It is known from Hunter's A History of Simcoe County (pp. 102-103), that an Alexander Dunlop was involved in organising a petition in February 1845 for a new road somewhere in the vicinity of Gloucester Road.  It can be reasonbly assumed, one might suppose, that that was Alexander of the above obituary, our Alexander, and that the new road may well have been the one from Orillia to Atherley referred to in the obituary.

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