Guelph

Guelph (/ˈɡwɛlf/ ^ⓘ GWELF; 2021 Canadian Census population 143,740) is a city in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Known as "The Royal City", it is roughly 22 kilometres (14 mi) east of Kitchener and 70 km (43 mi) west of Downtown Toronto, at the intersection of Highway 6, Highway 7, and Wellington County Road 124. It is the seat of Wellington County, but is politically independent of it.

Guelph was established in the 1820s by Scottish novelist John Galt, first superintendent of the Canada Company, who based his headquarters and home in the community. The area—much of which became Wellington County—was part of the Halton Block, a Crown reserve for the Six Nations Iroquois. Galt is generally considered Guelph's founder.

For many years, Guelph ranked at or near the bottom of Canada's crime severity list. However, the 2017 index showed a 15% increase from 2016. It had one of the country's lowest unemployment rates throughout the Great Recession. Much of this was attributed to its numerous manufacturing facilities, including Linamar.

First Nations peoples inhabited present-day Guelph as early as 11,000 years ago. Before colonization, the area was considered by the surrounding Indigenous communities to be a "neutral" zone and was inhabited by the Neutral Nation. According to the University of Guelph, "the area was home to a First Nations community called the Attawandaron who lived in longhouses surrounded by fields of corn". The majority of this nation, about 4,000 people, lived in a village near what is now the Badenoch area of Puslinch, near Morriston. In 1784, the British Crown purchased a tract of land, that included present-day Guelph, from the Mississauga people for approximately £1,180.

John Galt, the first Superintendent of the Canada Company, was hired to help colonize Upper Canada. He selected Guelph as the headquarters of this British development firm. Galt was a popular Scottish poet and novelist who also designed the town to attract settlers and farmers to the surrounding countryside. His design intended the town to resemble a European city centre, complete with squares, broad main streets and narrow side streets, resulting in a variety of block sizes and shapes which are still in place today. The street plan was laid out in a radial street and grid system that branches out from downtown, a technique which was also employed in other planned towns of this era, such as Buffalo, New York.

The founding was symbolized by the felling of a tree by Galt and William "Tiger" Dunlop, who would be significant in the history of Goderich, Ontario, on April 23, 1827. That was St. George's Day, the feast day of the patron saint of England.

The name Guelph comes, via the Italian Guelfo, from the Bavarian German Welf. It is a reference to the House of Welf, and was chosen to honour King George IV—the reigning British monarch at the time of the city's founding—whose family, the Hanoverians, descended from the Welfs. It is for this reason that the city has the nickname The Royal City. The directors of the Canada Company had actually wanted the city to be named Goderich, because Viscount Goderich had helped form the company, but reluctantly accepted the name Guelph.

Galt constructed what was one of the first buildings in the community to house early settlers and the Canada Company office; "The Priory" (built 1827–1828) was located on the banks of the Speed River near the current River Run Centre for performing arts and could house up to 100 people. The building eventually became the Canadian Pacific Railway Priory station on the Guelph Junction Railway before it was eventually torn down and removed. A historical plaque commemorates John Galt's role with the Canada Company in populating Upper Canada's Huron Tract, calling it "the most important single attempt at settlement in Canadian history". (Galt was responsible for finding settlers for the 42,000 acre Halton Block that would become Guelph and its townships but also for the one million acre Huron Tract that stretched to Goderich, Ontario.)