Founding of Almonte

Reuben Sherwood and Associates commenced surveying the old Ramsay Township (which included the land where Almonte is currently located) in 1820 and completed it in January of 1821. Land could not be granted to settlers until the survey was complete.

In the Bathhurst District papers, in the list of military settlers from Perth is a notation that on December 11th, 1822, David Sheppard received Lot 15E and Lot 16E Concession 9 (the two one-hundred acre lots that make up most of present day Almonte) “on conditions”.  He was to have a saw mill and grist mill erected within a certain time.  He built a sawmill which burnt down before it was able to be used. Financially incapable of building another, he sold it to Daniel Shipman.  Daniel Shipman was a United Empire Loyalist who had been living in Leeds County; he took over the lots and in 1823 erected both a sawmill and grist mill.

Text on the Plaque

The sawmill and grist-mill completed here on the Mississippi River in 1823 by Daniel Shipman provided a nucleus around which a community known as Shipman’s Mills had developed by 1824. About 1850 two town plots were laid out here – “Victoria” by Edward Mitcheson and “Ramsayville” by Daniel Shipman. They were combined in 1853 as “Waterford”, which in 1855 was renamed “Almonte”, probably after Juan N. Almonte, a famous Mexican general and diplomat. The opening of several woollen mills and the completion of a railway to Brockville, fostered the growth of Almonte, which by 1870 was one of Ontario’s leading woollen cloth manufacturing centres. Incorporated as a village in 1871, with a population of about 2,000, Almonte was proclaimed a town in 1880.