At the apex of the social scale, measured in proportion to one’s wealth, religious or cultural attainments, stood those families who deliberately advertised their prominence through such ostentatious dwellings as the Dunsford’s ‘Beehive’, the Mossom Boyd house in Bobcaygeon and the Mackenzie estate in Kirkfield.

At the earliest opening of what were then the back townships of Fenelon Falls and Verulam in the Newcastle District, a remarkable collection of English gentlemanly society gathered. This society consisted of such well known personalities as John and Anne Langton, known through their published letters, half pay officers, such as Admiral Van Sittart on the north shore of Balsam Lake in Bexley, professionals, such as the Reverend Dunsford, and merchants such as Wallis, Need and Boyd; men who began the lumber and grist mills and canal works at Fenelon Falls and Bobcaygeon.

This backwoods society of gentleman farmers and rising mercantile capitalists was a remarkable transplantation of English cultural and educational attainments to a rugged, sparsely settled region far from the goods and diversions offered by an urban or an agriculturally mature area. This society flowered in a brief effervescence of sailing regattas, hunting parties, university club, sketching, polished letters, emigrant guides and even novel writing. This gentleman’s backwoods society stretched from the Traill’s at Lakefield to the half pay officers settled in or near Beaverton in Ontario County. On the west side of Lake Simcoe stood the mansion of Captain E. Steele in Simcoe County and so on across the province.

In the wake of the post Napoleonic depression and disbandment of the huge military services, scores of lower gentry, half pay officers, and rising mercantile families, such as the Langtons, left Great Britain for fairer prospects in the new world. After a brief period of reproducing the social forms of the past, these, often propertied, immigrants were assimilated into Canadian society; often in its mercantile branches since they brought capital with them. This soon established them as part or even initiators of the local mercantile elite of mill owners, wholesale buyers of primary products, or as leading professionals in the fields of medicine, law and government services.

This backwoods society, however, soon disappeared as it proved unable to transplant the social and political forms of English gentry life to a raw land where labour and initiative were at a premium; where the business of developing the countryside could not wait for the social subordination involved in these families’ self-assumed prerogative to rule (often strengthened by being appointed a Justice of the Peace to the Quarter Sessions) before there was anything or any great numbers of people to rule over.

Canadian society has changed a great deal from when fortunes could be made from local natural resource exploitation, as in the case of the Boyds’ lumber business, William Cottingham’s mills at Omemee, the Hogg and Lytle grain business in Mariposa or from railway building and speculation, as in the spectacular example of Sir William Mackenzie and the Canadian Northern or as in the more local example of George Laidlaw, a railway promoter for the Toronto and Nipissing, who eventually resided at the ‘Barracks’ on the former property of Admiral Van Sittart on the north shore of Balsam Lake.