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Gilberts: A look at Melba Simpson’s Tupperville

As many of you know, I have been co-ordinating a plaquing initiative here in Chatham-Kent for the last three years.

As many of you know, I have been co-ordinating a plaquing initiative here in Chatham-Kent for the last three years.

We are working on 11 new plaques to be unveiled this spring and summer. Look for more information about these plaques over that time.

Gilberts: A look at Melba Simpson’s Tupperville Back to video

We did have 12 plaque nominations to begin with this year. Tupperville was one of them. Unfortunately (for us) Kaelyn Gregory, curator of the Wallaceburg and District Museum, was working on it, and she is moving on to the Homer Watson House in Kitchener.

We certainly wish Kaelyn all the best in her new position, but we will miss her. She was a bright light in the Chatham-Kent heritage community.

That leaves the Tupperville plaque without a rudder, and while in the past I might have taken the reins, I have made a commitment to myself and my loving husband, Jim, that I won’t overtax myself this year. So, with regret, I have dropped the Tupperville plaque from the 2026 list.

However, I had already read Melba Simpson’s book, Tupperville From the Beginning, and thought the least I could do was to share some of the stories in her book, published in the early 2000s.

Melba, I know, had spent many years collecting history in Tupperville and the community owes her a big thank you because, to my knowledge, no one else in Tupperville has done this.

So let’s retrieve a few good stories from Melba’s book. We should start at the beginning and tell you that originally, the community about halfway between Dresden and Wallaceburg was called Starkweather’s Corners.

Asa Starkweather owned a hotel called Starkweathers’ Inn, on the Sydenham River (Big Bear Creek) in the 1860s. He also had a riverboat landing, because at that time steamships regularly plied the river all the way to Dresden.

Starkweather sold his hotel and moved to Marine City to live with his daughter in 1886, and the community was renamed Tupperville, in honour of then prime minister Sir Charles Tupper in the 1890s. At the time, Tupperville was a thriving settlement, like many in Kent County, with plenty of hotels, sawmills, shops and services.

Here are a few of what I think are the more interesting events or aspects of Tupperville, which I read about in Melba Simpson’s book.

Let’s start by talking about one of those sawmills mentioned above. It was owned by John Cooper and wasn’t right in the village. Rather it was in a community called Cooperville, and some of its workers lived in houses adjoining it at the 11th Concession and Prince Albert Road.

On April 23, 1902, it was time to burn some slashings before planting began on the 10th Concession,. Unfortunately, a strong wind came up and it carried some sparks to the mill. Before long, the mill was ablaze and flames soon spread to the wooden houses around it.

Mill workers procured horses and tried to plow the fields to stop the fire from spreading. But the wind was too strong and the bush nearby began to smoke, then burn.

The men cut the horses free and ran for their lives. The fire did not go out until all of Cooperville burned down. In the aftermath, the horses were never found again and the families were all left both homeless and without a livelihood.

Another, more cheerful story comes with the image accompanying this column. The Loyal Orange Lodge stood for many years in the centre of Tupperville, but when that lodge’s membership dwindled, the building was moved to the park as a community hall.

The reason I like this story and the image has to do with a much more recent, social media practice. Take a look at the image and see the letters at the top: LOL.

I’ll leave it there. More on Tupperville next week.

The Gilberts are award-winning historians with a passion for telling the stories of Chatham-Kent’s fascinating past

Gilberts: This Dresden story deserves to be better known

Gilberts: Chatham-Kent set to mark Heritage Week

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