The sympathies of our primitive Tunkers beyond the Ridges, were, as we may suppose, with this section of the fatherland Mennonists.
Thus, to get the clue to social phenomena which we see around us here in Canada, we have to concern ourselves occasionally with uninviting pages, not only of Irish, Scottish and English religious history, but of German and Netherlandish religious history likewise. Pity 'tis, in some respects, that on a new continent our immigrants could not have made a tabula rasa of the past, and taken a start de novo on another level—a higher one; on a new gauge—a widened one.
Though only a minute fraction of our population, an exception was early made by the local parliament in favour of the Mennonists or Tunkers, allowing them to make affirmations in the Courts, like the Quakers, and to compound for military service.—Like Lollard, Quaker and some other similar terms, Tunker, i. e. Dipper, was probably at first used in a spirit of ridicule.
Digression to Newmarket and Sharon.
When Newmarket came in view off to the right, a large portion of the traffic of the street turned aside for a certain distance out of the straight route to the north, in that direction.
About this point the ancient dwellers at York used to take note of signs that they had passed into a higher latitude. Half a degree to the south of their homes—at Niagara, for example—they were in the land, if not of the citron and myrtle, certainly of the tulip-tree and pawpaw—where the edible chestnut grew plentifully in the natural woods, and the peach luxuriantly flourished.
Now, half a degree the other way, in the tramontane region north of the Ridges, they found themselves in the presence of a vegetation that spoke of an advance, however minute, towards the pole. Here, all along the wayside, beautiful specimens of the spruce-pine and balsam-fir, strangers in the forest about York, were encountered. Sweeping the sward with their drooping branches and sending up their dark green spires high in the air, these trees were always regarded with interest, and desired as graceful objects worthy to be transferred to the lawn or ornamental shrubbery.
A little way off the road, on the left, just before the turn leading to Newmarket, was the great Quaker meeting-house of this region—the "Friends' Meeting-house"—a building of the usual plain cast, generally seen with its solid shutters closed up. This was the successor of the first Quaker meeting-house in Upper Canada. Here Mr. Joseph John Gurney, the eminent English Quaker, who travelled on this continent in 1837-40, delivered several addresses, with a view especially to the re-uniting, if possible, of the Orthodox and the Hicksites.
Gourlay, in his "Statistical Account of Upper Canada," took note that this Quaker meeting-house and a wooden chapel at Hogg's Hollow, belonging to the Church of England, were the only two places of public worship to be seen on Yonge Street between York and the Holland Landing—a distance, he says, of nearly forty miles. This was in 1817.
Following now the wheel-marks of clearly the majority of vehicles travelling on the street, we turn aside to Newmarket.