Charles Rankin, was an early Irish-born and Scottish-descended settler and land surveyor in Upper Canada.
12 Facts About Charles Rankin
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Charles Rankin is significant due to his role in the surveying and early settlement of large areas of Upper Canada, including much of the Bruce Peninsula and south shore of Lake Huron, and notably the city of Owen Sound.
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Charles Rankin's ancestors had originally migrated from Ayrshire, Scotland, to participate in the 17th-century Plantation of Ulster.
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Charles Rankin was born in 1797, in Enniskillen, but after the end of the War of 1812, he accompanied his parents and siblings to Montreal in Lower Canada, where his younger brother Arthur was born in 1816.
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On 27 December 1820, Charles Rankin was appointed deputy provincial land surveyor for Upper Canada's Hesse District by Peregrine Maitland, the 4th lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, who was an early advocate of the Canadian Indian residential school system as a means to deepen British control of the province's indigenous population.
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Charles Rankin began surveying his first colonization road, the Garafraxa Colonization Road from Oakville to Owen Sound, in 1837, but was only able to survey as far as Arthur when the Upper Canada Rebellion broke out.
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Telfer would quickly begin to oversee the construction of buildings and settling of Europeans in the town site laid out by Charles Rankin, along with a number of buildings in the Ojibwe settlement to the northwest, which became the Newash or Nawash "Indian Village" and was an official reserve.
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Charles Rankin was the aunt of John Leech, the noted English caricaturist and illustrator for Punch.
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In 1847, Charles Rankin had a brief period of activity on Lake Huron's north shore as well as its south shore, joining his brother, Arthur, in surveying around present-day Bruce Mines in the early 1840s.
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Charles Rankin returned to surveying even more townline roads, townships, and township plots around Georgian Bay throughout the 1850s, notably the townships of Artemesia, Arran, Minto, and Southampton.
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Charles Rankin was present at the signing of the 1854 Saugeen Surrenders, which saw the signing away of the original Saugeen Ojibwe reserve lands for settlement in exchange for the currently-held five tracts.
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Charles Rankin continued to live in Owen Sound in a home on the west side of the harbour for much of the rest of his life.