Piecing together the history of Kitchener's Williamsburg neighbourhood

The Williamsburg neighbourhood in southwest Kitchener got off the ground in 2004 with its central plaza as the focal point, but the community has much deeper roots that stretch as far back as the early 1800s. 

CBC Kitchener-Waterloo visited the neighbourhood as part of a Communities in Focus initiative, speaking to residents, business owners and community leaders to get a sense of what makes this part of the city tick.

As part of the project, the CBC team pieced together much of its rich history, too. The area of Waterloo region, which includes Williamsburg, was originally home to the Anishinaabe Peoples, Neutral Peoples and Haudenosaunee Peoples.

Williamsburg was initially a hamlet along Bleams Road which was named after the pioneer Anthony Wilhelm. The area saw people settling around the 1830s with a school house built by the 1840s.

By the 1860s, the community had grown to include a number of businesses like a blacksmith, a shoemaker, tailors, a millwright, as well as a cooper and sawyers.

"It was almost all German speaking with almost equal numbers of Lutherans and Roman Catholics," Karen Ball-Pyatt, manager of the Grace Schmidt Room of Local History at the Kitchener Public Library told CBC News.

She was referencing the book Waterloo Township Through Two Centuries by Elizabeth Bloomfield.

According to a report by the region on local educational buildings, a one-room school house was built along Bleams Road in 1864. The building still stands today.

The schoolhouse is made of grey rubble stone and information from Bloomfield's book shows 24 students attended the school in 1873 and 33 students in 1874, which was the same year the school saw an expansion to accommodate the growing number of children.

According to the region, many well-known families attended the school, including the Steckles, Webers and Henhoeffers. The school closed in 1966 and was sold to private owners. The schoolhouse was deemed a heritage building in 1987.

Bloomfield's book also described the school's caretaker duties. In 1907, a caretaker would make $55 a year by cleaning the school house daily, cutting the grass three times during the summer, cleaning the outhouses twice a year and lighting fires between November and March.

Max Becker's Williamsburg

According to historical research commissioned by RBJ Schlegel Holdings, the company that developed the new Williamsburg suburb, the land that it now sits on was owned and farmed by Max and Florence Becker. 

The research, which was conducted by Ulrich Frisse, president of Historical Branding Solutions, found that Max's parents arrived in Williamsburg from Germany in 1844.

"Max Becker had owned a series of farms in the City of Kitchener," said Vaughan Bender, the chief operating officer of Schlegel. "And as the city would expand, Max would sell and move his farming operation out to the perimeter of the city."

Max and Florence were the in-laws of Ron Schlegel, too, who is the chairman of RBJ Schlegel's board, so the company has familial ties to the land. 

"And this was the last farm that [Max] owned and Ron and his three sons encouraged Max to keep this farm, and to allow them, along with the Becker family, to bring it forward for development and to build a new community to serve the growing City of Kitchener," said Bender.

Construction of the new development began in 2004, and by 2005 Bender said that there were about 8,000 residents in the area.

Today, he said that there are around 15,000 people living there.    

This current Williamsburg project is about 80 per cent complete, and Bender said that the last 20 per cent will primarily focus on increasing the residential density of the neighbourhood near the Sobeys supermarket on Fischer-Hallman Road, north of Bleams Road with additional rental units.

Williamsburg boundaries  

As the hamlet of Williamsburg was forming in the mid-1800s, it was primarily centred around the intersection of Fischer-Hallman and Bleams roads, but according to a City of Kitchener spokesperson, today it now extends from there, further north to Highway 8 and west to Trussler Road. The area is also known as Laurentian West.

Despite the official city boundaries of the neighbourhood, the Williamsburg Community Association says, as of a year ago, the southern border of Williamsburg extends past Bleams Road down to Huron Road.

Merlin Trussler, who has a farm in this part of the city at Trussler and Huron roads, said that his family has been living in the area since the 1840s and had been farming on the land too.

There have been big changes in the neighbourhood during his lifetime: he grew up on the land and remembers when the surrounding roads were gravel with much less traffic. There was less development too. 

 "We're definitely very close to the city in this location and that's a big difference," Trussler said. 

"It was totally rural right up, probably five kilometres from the city when I was a kid. Now we're bordering it, and the traffic and just the way of life – people almost live on their phones right now and I'm not really happy with that."

Williamsburg proper became a part of Kitchener in 1971.