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It started as a small Irish settlement in the middle of a large Scottish settlement. The deal was, you take a long boat ride (one or two months) to a new and large continent where you take some sort of horse drawn device, for a couple of weeks, until you're in the middle of the middle of nowhere. Your new home is yours as long as you, in the first two years, build a 16' by 20' structure that is suitable to live in, clear two acres of land, and build half of the road in front of your property. The other two things you had to do was feed yourself and stay alive.

The area developed into a cash crop type of farming where whatever was surplus after your own family and animals were fed was driven by horse and sleigh to Prince Albert Ontario where the terminal was. The grain (mostly wheat) was then taken to Oshawa (on Lake Ontario) where it was shipped to Toronto or other major centers.

Derryville, was a one day ride to Prince Albert and was right on Center Road (now # 12 highway), which was the main road through Ontario County, so Derryville was not only a farming community, but it was a stop off point for anyone hauling their wheat from further north. There was a hotel, a blacksmith shop, a general store and even a cheese factory. A happening little community.

The building of roads turned out to be a little harder than it looked when they drew these grids on a desk in Britain. They didn't take swamps and creeks and rocks and hills into consideration, that would have made it too hard to draw. Roads were built and over a lot of years all of the land was settled and Derryville prospered.

Then came the automobile and electricity. It took a long time for either of these to creep north to Derryville, but they did, and it had a devastating effect. Electricity came to the larger towns (with rivers and railway tracks) and not to farms or concession roads. From this came the community locker. The community locker was a large freezer where all of the farmers could freeze their meat. A major innovation and convenience, and all you had to do was drive a few extra miles into town. This was easy now that automobiles had been around long enough that almost everybody had one.

First the hotel closed, then the blacksmith shop, the cheese factory went down in around this time too. The general store stayed open and a gas station went in, the church still thrived and Derryville weathered the changes quite well.

Derryville was right on top of one of these hills they missed in Britain. This hill was a thorn in everybody's side, it was hard to climb when it was wet and muddy and almost as hard to go down. The Ontario County Roads Department used to buy corn from Levi Westcott to lay down on the hill in the mud so horses could climb it. Later when the road was paved and only big trucks had a hard time climbing it, a whole new problem arose. The 11th concession, which crossed the other way through Derryville was just a little north of the crest of the hill so you couldn't see if anything was coming when you were crossing the highway. Eventually there was a major crash and a lot of local boys got hurt really badly.

To me, tearing down an entire community seems like a pretty extreme solution to the problem, however, that's what happened. All of the houses were torn down, they bulldozed the hill until you could almost see to cross the road, the signs were taken down and they started leaving it off of maps. This devastation never left my mind until I realized that the stories and memories still live as long as they're being told. Hear them, pass them on and Derryville will live on.