ARMSTRONG, Samuel

Samuel Armstrong walked into the Parry Sound bush in 1867, a twenty-three-year-old Wexford emigrant with enough capital for a stock of tools and dry goods, and opened the settlement’s first general store at McKellar. The store anchored the township through the next thirty years. It anchored Armstrong’s public career for almost as long: fifteen years as Reeve of McKellar, fifteen more as its postmaster, one term for Parry Sound in the Ontario Legislature from 1886, and a quarter-century as Sheriff of the district until his death. A township in the Timiskaming District, incorporated the year he died, still carries his name.

Early life

Born 24 February 1844 at Ross, County Wexford, Ireland, to Samuel Armstrong Sr. and Harriet Hughes, Armstrong came out with his family to Canada West in 1848, the middle of the post-Famine emigration, when he was four years old. The family lived first in London and Toronto before moving north. He was largely self-educated, attending public schools in Thorold and in Toronto, and grew up alongside a younger brother, John, who would become his lifelong business partner.

Road contractor and Muskoka pioneer

In 1862, at the age of eighteen, Armstrong moved north into the Muskoka region, which was then being opened to settlement under the Free Grants and Homestead Act of 1868 and its precursor colonization-road surveys. He and his brother John took contracts building sections of the Northern Colonization Road, part of a twenty-man crew that cut road access into seven previously unopened townships. Armstrong was among the very first non-Indigenous settlers in the district.

Founding McKellar

Five years after his move into Muskoka, in 1867, Armstrong moved west into the neighbouring Parry Sound district and settled with his brother at the intersection of the North Colonization Road and what is now McKellar Centre Road. The brothers together patented Township Lot 20, Concession B, and subdivided it into town lots and streets, effectively laying out the McKellar townsite themselves. Samuel opened a general store there, the first retail operation in the township, and for settlers clearing bush lots in the 1860s and 1870s it was an essential institution: it supplied tools, provisions, and credit, and served as a community gathering point. He later built a sawmill and a gristmill between Owl and Minerva Lakes, and in 1871 he opened McKellar’s first post office inside his store, serving as postmaster for fifteen years until 1886. In 1868 he was named a Justice of the Peace, an appointment the Legislative Assembly’s own roster still reflects: it lists him formally as “Samuel J.P. Armstrong.”

Marriage

Armstrong married Catherine Taylor in 1870.

McKellar Township

When McKellar was organized as a township, Armstrong became its first Reeve, and he held the office almost continuously from 1872 until 1887, an unusually long single-ward municipal tenure that reflects the small population and the dependence of the township’s civic life on the few settlers of some means.

Ontario Legislature, 1886–1890

Armstrong contested the newly created Parry Sound riding in the 1886 Ontario general election as an Independent candidate and won it, becoming the district’s first representative at Queen’s Park in a riding that then covered an enormous geographical area: Parry Sound, Muskoka, and much of what is now the near-north of Ontario, Nipissing, and French River country. His term ran from 28 December 1886 to 26 April 1890, through the 6th Parliament of Ontario, during which he sat on the standing committees on Railways, Privileges and Elections, and Standing Orders. As an Independent he campaigned and voted for prohibition of the liquor trade, for extending the franchise to women, and for more liberal terms on Crown land settlement in the northern districts, positions well to the reforming edge of Ontario politics in the 1880s. He did not seek re-election in 1890; James Sharpe succeeded him in the riding.

Sheriff

In 1895, Armstrong was appointed Sheriff of the Parry Sound judicial district. The office was, at that date, primarily responsible for serving writs, attending the Assizes when they came to Parry Sound on circuit, and supervising the district jail. He held the sheriffship for the rest of his life, continuing in office even after he went blind in his later years.

Death and legacy

Armstrong died at Parry Sound on 3 April 1921, at the age of seventy-seven, still in office as Sheriff. That same year, a newly incorporated township in the Timiskaming District, far to the north-east of the Parry Sound country he had helped open to settlement, was named Armstrong Township in his honour.