Clinton Township included the villages of Beamsville, Vineland, Campden and Tintern. Many of the early settlers were Mennonites who emigrated from Pennsylvania.
Beamsville, Ontario was named after Jacob
Beam, a United Empire Loyalist. Jacob and Catharine, along with their daughter
Catharine and son-in-law Samuel Merrell, immigrated to Canada from New Jersey
in 1788, and founded Beamsville. It was located on the Great Western Railway.
In 1898, hockey players in the town of Beamsville were the first to make use of
a hockey net.
In 1970, the Town of Beamsville was amalgamated
with Clinton Township and half of Louth Township to form the larger Town of
Lincoln. Beamsville is in the heart of Ontario’s wine country in the Niagara
Peninsula. Many wineries from the area have received top awards, including
Grape King at the Niagara Grape & Wine Festival, as well as international
awards.
Vineland is bordered by the
Twenty Mile Creek and Jordan to the east, Lake Ontario to the north, Beamsville
to the west, and Pelham to the south. Vineland is primarily an agricultural
community with many fruit farms and wineries. Vineland’s fruit crops include cherries,
peaches, apples and pears.
Most of the early settlers of
Jordan were German in origin, and were devout practicing Mennonites. With a
large natural harbor at the mouth of Twenty Creek, Jordan became a busy
shipping center for the export of logs for boat masts, tan bark, hides, ashes
used in industrial centers for the manufacture of soap, as well as grain,
flour, fruit and fruit products. A small ship building industry existed for a
time on the banks of the Twenty.
Ball’s Falls is a historical ghost town
located in the Niagara Region and dates back to the early 19th
century when it was established by Jacob Ball, a United Empire Loyalist. After
the American Revolution, Jacob and his family were forced from their home and
potash works in New York. Twenty Mile Creek, which runs through the area, has
two waterfalls. The Ball brothers built a grist mill, a saw mill at the lower
falls and a woolen mill at the upper falls. In the late 1850s, the Great
Western Railway was established and many industries moved away from here to be
closer to the railway. In 1962 Manly Ball sold the land to the Niagara
Peninsula Conservation Area and the town, now known as Ball’s Falls, is a
tourist attraction.
The first settlers of Campden were former members of Butler’s Rangers
who were granted land for their services to the Crown following the American
Revolution. Benjamin Doyle was one of these and he severed part of his land to
the newly arrived Pennsylvania Dutch, which included Jacob Moyer and his seven
sons. In 1862 when a post office was established, the hamlet was named Campden.
5600 King Street West, Beamsville – The property was a Crown Grant of 52 acres to a loyalist from New Jersey named William W. Kitchen around 1790. He married Alice Beam and together they had nine children. William and Alice’s youngest son, Jacob married Jane Dennis. Their only son, William Dennis Kitchen married Margaret Henry and built the house in 1885 on the bench of the escarpment, just west of the Thirty Mile Creek. The house was built in the Queen Anne Revival style with red bricks. The turret has square and rounded cedar shingles, topped with a finial. There are two tall corbeled chimneys, and a hipped roof with a flat belvedere. The gables have carved fretwork brackets and barge board. The tall bay windows are topped with segmental arches and decorative keystones. The front porch has an overhead balcony, and like the side porches, features turned posts, balustrades, spandrels and brackets. Purchased by the Longwell family in the 1920s, Doug and Jean Longwell continued to live there until the 1980s. From 1999 to 2009, the house was owned and restored by Norman and Sherry Beal, who transformed the property into an estate winery. In 2009 Wendy Midgley and her husband Chef Ross Midgley purchased the Kitchen House and the Coach House from the Beals.5053 King Street, Beamsville – Beam Barnes House c. 1855 – The property was originally granted by the Crown to Samuel Corwin in 1803. His wife was Anna Beam, daughter of Loyalist pioneer Jacob Beam. Her brother, Jacob Beam Jr. built the house between 1852 and 1855. The frame house is an early version of the Gothic Revival style. Notable features are steeply pitched gable roofs with carved finials and cut out quatrefoils worked into the barge board on both the front façade and east wing. The veranda has simple square posts, and the front door has a paned transom and sidelights. The tops of the slender but widely framed windows are surrounded with shaped lintels and decorative keystones.5074 King Street, Beamsville – bay window with iron cresting above4918 King Street, Beamsville – Woodburn Cottage – The land was originally deeded by Crown Patent to Jacob Beam in 1801. The house built about 1834 for James B. Osborne, a merchant, postmaster and private banker. He was a prominent member of the community. The name “Woodburn†is said to have derived from James Osborne’s second wife’s family. The house is Regency Cottage in style. It is built of Flemish double stretcher bond red brick on top of a fieldstone foundation. The front façade has an impressive double door with sidelights and a fan transom housed in an arched brick surround. Flanking the doorway are four large, shuttered windows, each with twelve panes and flat stone lintels on top. The hipped roof has double-flued, corbeled chimneys on each corner and has a large belvedere on top.4277 William Street4271 Queen Street, Beamsville – Originally built as a school in 1847, the house is supported by a rubble stone foundation and hand-hewn beams. The house has a pitched gable roof and large double-hung windows. There are two pairs of smaller windows in both the front and back gables. It is now the Adult Learning & Resource Center for Niagara West.5567 Fly Road – The property was originally a Crown grant to Paul Marlatt in 1796. The Marlatts were part of the Huguenot migration from France to Virginia in the late 17th century. They moved to this area in the 1780s-1790s. James Durham bought the property in 1830 and he had the house built in 1832. The two-storey white stucco house has multiple-paned 12-over-12 windows and sidelights flanking either side of the front door.5031 Philp Road – Tufford Easton House – 1906 – Four-square asymmetrical 2½ storey house has a hip roof with a triangular-pediment-gabled dormer. It has a Queen Anne style wraparound veranda supported by seven square pillars.5499 Philp Road – The present house, of Neo-Classic Vernacular design, dates to about 1850 and utilizes hand-hewn beams and Flemish and triple brick construction. The five-bay façade has original windows and doors, with the front door flanked with sidelights and overhead transom. The main barn is a good unaltered example of an early 1800s Loyalist Barn in the English three bay style.4157 Maple Grove Road, Beamsville – St. Helen Roman Catholic Church4337 Ontario Street, Beamsville – hipped roof, cornice brackets, voussoirs and keystones3150 Culp Road, Vineland – Overholdt House – The house was built in 1900 by a wealthy shipping merchant named Moses Overholdt. Built in red brick in the Queen Anne style, the house features a hipped room with diamond-shingled gables with Palladian windows on the sides, a three-storey hexagonal tower protruding from the northwest corner and topped with a finial, a wrap-around veranda with double piers on large bases, a tall corbeled chimney, and segmented, double-hung windows throughout.3812 Main Street, Jordan Station – The Honsberger-Griffith house was erected in 1851 by Michael Honsberger, a local merchant and Post Master in the Village of Jordan. The house was built in the Georgian style using local bricks.4225 Fly Road, Campden – The Henry W. Moyer-Humphrey House was built circa 1870 in the hamlet of Campden in the former Township of Clinton. This house is believed to be the first brick house in the hamlet; several members of the Moyer family have lived in the house. Henry W. Moyer was a tinsmith, auctioneer, insurance agent and the first postmaster. It is a classic 1½ storey farmhouse with Gothic ornamentation on the three gables and the full-width veranda. The front façade has two front doors and two windows with finished cut and tooled stone doorsteps and window sills. The steps are positioned to the right of centre. Each of the five square posts is decorated with spandrel brackets and decorative scrolls. The pitched roof has a front central gable with a carved finial. The center pointed arch window has sidelights supported by double header brick. The gable has decorative barge board. The windows are six-over-six panes.
