Mary Allen Beginnings, Part 1

In Waterloo Region, the story has often been told of how a group of Pennsylvania Mennonites bought a 60,000-acre tract on the Grand River that today contains much of the Kitchener-Waterloo urban footprint.

In 1806 two of these Mennonites, Abraham and Magdalena Erb, came north to take up their land purchase: hundreds of acres that would eventually become the Waterloo city core. 

Click to enlarge. Erb-Kumpf House, 2012. The oldest section is the back of the house, built c.1812 by Abraham and Magdalena Erb.

Within ten years Abraham built a sawmill and gristmill on Beaver (Laurel) Creek, and the Erbs had established Waterloo's first settler homestead. Today, the former mill site lies along King Street, between the railway tracks and Erb Street, while the c.1812 Erb home still stands as the rear section of the landmark Erb-Kumpf House at King and George streets in the Mary-Allen neighbourhood. The original front of the house faced north, towards the mill.

Fifty years later, to the north of Erb’s mill and today’s Erb Street, a small village had grown along the Great Road (King Street). But the Erbs’ vast acreage south of the mill remained undeveloped by the mid-1800s, even though it had changed hands when the Sniders, another Mennonite family, acquired the Erb mill, house and lands in 1829. 

Click to enlarge. A sketch of the village of Waterloo from a c.1853 map of the neighbouring village of Berlin. This is a view looking north along King Street, towards the junction with Erb Street. The Erb/Snider mill occupies the left side of the sketch. Laurel Creek is shown passing beneath King Street. Image courtesy Waterloo Historical Society Collection, Kitchener Public Library, Grace Schmidt Room of Local History.

It was only after the Sniders finally sold the land that the village of Waterloo began to grow more quickly. The way it happened makes for a good story…

In the mid-1800s, non-Mennonites – especially merchants, farmers and skilled trades workers from the British Isles and German-speaking areas in Europe – were streaming into Waterloo County, and would eventually help transform sleepy villages like Waterloo into busy towns. 

But around 1850 the village of Waterloo, which included a hotel, Lutheran church, general store, blacksmith, post office and several breweries, was home to little more than 200 people. Berlin (Kitchener), a short trip down King Street, was much larger, with a population of nearly 800. Preston was larger still, with about 1,100 inhabitants, making it the largest village in the area.

Waterloo had remained small due in part to the reluctance of Mennonite families like the Erbs and Sniders to subdivide their land; the Mennonite settlers were not primarily town-builders. Even so, by the 1830s the Sniders had begun selling off at least a few small lots, and the beginnings of a village with homes and businesses slowly began taking shape.

Enter John Hoffman, Berlin furniture manufacturer and one-time miller. Hoffman was eager to buy, divide and sell the somewhat soggy land that lay to the south of Jacob Snider’s mill in Waterloo. 

Hoffman sensed opportunity when Snider sold the mill and adjacent land to his son Elias in 1853. Although at first Elias Snider refused Hoffman’s offer to buy the 300-plus acres of mostly undeveloped land (centered around King Street, between today’s Erb and Pine streets), he relented the following year, keeping the mill but selling the rest to John Hoffman and Hoffman’s son-in-law, Isaac Weaver, for $37,500.

This sale laid the groundwork for what was likely the first “building boom” in Waterloo, and also led to the creation of the first house-sized lots in today’s Mary-Allen neighbourhood. 

Hoffman set to work immediately. In 1855 the Sniders moved to a farm north of Waterloo, and the Hoffmans moved into the old Snider/Erb house (mentioned above). The land was then surveyed, divided, drawn up onto a tidy map, and auctioned off. 

Click to enlarge, then open image in new tab for full size. Part of the 1855 Hoffman Survey of Waterloo. North is to the left. The village is concentrated north of Erb Street. Hoffman’s house, today’s Erb-Kumpf House (see above), is indicated along King Street, with an area labelled "orchard," dotted with trees, behind it. That area today lies on either side of George Street in the Mary-Allen neighbourhood. Note that Allen and George streets are not present in this survey. Image courtesy City of Waterloo Museum, 2004.14.1

One account of the auction sale described how it was conducted from the back of an oxcart pulled from lot to lot, laden with complimentary food and drink for the bidders. 

The effects of the Hoffman survey and sale, although modest in scale, were immediate. And while the number of new lots created by the subdivision initially proved larger than the demand, and some would sit undeveloped for decades, in less than ten years Waterloo doubled in population, spreading south onto John Hoffman’s survey lands. New shops and small factories were set up, houses were built, and the village grew steadily on...

Note: some of this article is adapted from a booklet I prepared for Bob and Margaret Nally about their house, 189 Mary Street, in 2005. It was re-worked and reproduced here with their kind permission.