The Rise and Fall of a French Royalist Settlement in Upper Canada After the 1789 Revolution

The tyrants of 1789–94, after imprisoning and murdering thousands of innocents on the basis of their class, religion, dissent, and regional character, drove thousands of refugees to flee to neighbouring countries. The majority found safety and succour in England, at a time when a superb parliamentary aristocracy was nearing its peak. And of the émigrés who fled, some even made it to Canada, where they tried to establish a Royalist colony.
On Nov. 22, the Executive Council of Upper Canada selected the townships of Uxbridge, Gwillimbury, part of Whitchurch, and another near Whitby, for refugees “whose character and behaviour appear to entitle them to the King’s beneficence because they endeavoured to maintain the cause of the late King of France against his ferocious oppressors just as American Loyalists had supported their sovereign against the swindling transactions of the American Revolution with its bitter fruits.”
There, the little French Royalist colony was named Windham in honour of the War Minister, but was often called Puisaye Town.
The following year, they were given rations and agricultural implements to develop their farms along Yonge Street in the townships of Markham and Vaughan. Puisaye himself was promised 5,000 acres but may have actually received as little as 850 acres. Other nobles in the expedition got comparable grants: the Count of Chalus got 650 acres, for example, and the Count of Allègre, 450.
He was correct.
“I fear the Count de Puisaye is beginning to grow sick of his Colonial Project,” Peter Russell, the Administrator of Upper Canada, wrote to the ex-Governor, John Graves Simcoe. “He now thinks the distance too great for navigation, the roads impracticable, and the consequent difficulties of transport insuperable, and in short that his people are unequal to the hardships of reducing such heavy timbered forests into cultivation. He therefore wishes for some situation on the Lake where the nobles, aged, and women may engage in less laborious occupations.”
Some quasi-aristocratic characteristics remain. A piece of the more rural northern part of the colony, which stretched along Yonge Street up to Souffville Road, is now occupied by the Summit Golf & Country Club. There aren’t many farms; it’s mostly housing now.