John Meyers

Who was John Meyers?

John Walden Meyers was an Upper Canada businessman and United Empire Loyalist.

He was born Johannes Waltermyer in Albany County, New York on January 22, 1745. He was descended from German immigrants. When the American Revolutionary War began, he left home for Quebec, reportedly receiving bear meat from a friendly native tribe en route. In 1777, he joined the army of Major-General John Burgoyne and served as a recruiter for the loyalist forces, also collecting information for the British and carrying dispatches.

In 1781, he led an unsuccessful raid on the house of Philip Schuyler. Later that year, Meyers became a captain in Edward Jessup's Loyal Rangers. After the war, he was offered a land grant and first settled on Lake Champlain, but was later forced by the British to move further north along the north shore of Lake Ontario in 1785. He was named a justice of the peace in 1788.

In 1790, he settled in Thurlow Township where he built a gristmill near the mouth of Meyer's Creek, now the Moira River. He had one of only two brick houses in Ontario at the time. The community that sprung up there, first known as Meyer's Creek, was renamed Belleville in 1816.