Background
Timothy Rogers was born into poverty in Lyme, Connecticut on May 22, 1756. He was born out of wedlock and treated like an orphan.
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Timothy Rogers
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He spent most of his childhood hired out to earn his own keep, and had only three weeks of formal education. This was a common pattern in those days. The family would buy, or be granted, a plot of undeveloped land, develop it, sell it and take the profits to buy a bigger plot.
“In 1797 Timothy Rogers placed before his Monthly Meeting ‘a desire to go westward to look for some new settlements’.
But he met with no encouragement from the overseers of the meeting so he dropped the subject for a time.” However, the sense of calling remained and “Rogers came to Yonge Street from Vermont in 1800…. He obviously liked what he saw, for he agreed to settle forty farms of two hundred acres each in the district.
The Yonge Street settlement grew into the town of Newmarket. In 1809, Timothy Rogers started a second Quaker colony in Pickering.
He believed this was his calling in life.
In his journal, he declared, “lieutenant is well known I have a great gift from the Lord to settle new country. I have settled eight new farms or plantations, laid out one town, where I went first. “ There were already Quaker colonies at Pelham in the Niagara Peninsula and Adolphustown on the Bay of Quinte that had been started by refugees fleeing persecution by Patriots during the American Revolutionary War.
Rogers saw the need to have a Quaker meeting house at a central location between Newmarket and the earlier colonies.
Rogers started by buying 800 acres and then moving “his family from Yonge Street to Duffin’s Creek, where he operated what was probably the first grist and saw mill in the township.” In 1810, he “went back to the United States and returned with another company of settlers who were settled in Pickering Township, east of Duffin’s Creek. Foreign his services Timothy Rogers received a grant of several hundred acres of land near the present village of Pickering.
He is buried in the Friends Cemetery in Pickering. His journal has been re-published by the Canadian Friends Historical Association.
His descendants went on to become one of the leading families in telecommunications in Canada, including: the Canadian radio pioneer, Edward South. Rogers, Senior;Edward Samuel Rogers who founded Rogers Communications Incorporated.
And, Edward Rogers III Deputy Chair of Rogers Communications Incorporated. Another branch of his family is active in the Canadian Friends Historical Association.
