Charles Rankin, (1797 − 1886 or 12 October 1888) was an early Irish-born and Scottish-descended settler and land surveyor in Upper Canada (the predecessor to the province of Ontario, Canada). He is significant due to his role in the surveying and early settlement of large areas of Upper Canada, including much of the Bruce Peninsula and south shore of Lake Huron, and notably the city of Owen Sound. Born in 1797 at Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Ireland, he died in either 1886 or 1888 in Owen Sound, a city whose founding he had been instrumental in.
Biography
Early life
Rankin's father, George Rankin, was born in 1762 at Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, in what was then the British-governed Kingdom of Ireland, and which today is a part of Northern Ireland. His ancestors had originally migrated from Ayrshire, Scotland, to participate in the 17th-century Plantation of Ulster. George married Mary Stuart (born in Bunker Hill, Massachusetts to Scottish immigrants) and the couple had seven children: John (who became a medical doctor in Picton, Ontario), Charles, George Junior (who became an army surgeon in India), James (died young), Susan, Kate, and Arthur, the seventh child, who also became a land surveyor.
Charles was born in 1797, also in Enniskillen, but after the end of the War of 1812, he accompanied his parents and siblings to Montréal in Lower Canada, where his younger brother Arthur was born in 1816. The elder Rankins would later move to Amherstburg, York (now Toronto), and finally Bytown (now Ottawa), but Charles' life would diverge from theirs before that point.
Surveying career
Deputy provincial surveyor
After the War of 1812, Upper Canada experienced a significant immigration wave. Militiamen and soldiers received land grants, and the re-fortification of the north shore of the Great Lakes during the war enriched the merchants, farmers, and mill owners who supplied the forts. With the districts around Detroit and Niagara already settled from the previous generation of pioneers (who had settled the area during and after the American Revolutionary War), the government of Upper Canada, under the control of the oligarchical Family Compact, sought to colonize areas which were further away from the American border, which could be a defensible "heartland" for the province. Development agencies like the Canada Company were formed, and by the middle of the 19th century the government would be laying out the colonization roads to key destinations, with townships along the way, creating secure land-based routes between the previously scattered and isolated lakeshore settlements which had been vulnerable to American interdiction and blockade during the War of 1812. Surveyors were suddenly in significant demand, and became an important profession in the province.
On 27 December 1820, Charles Rankin was appointed deputy provincial land surveyor for Upper Canada's Hesse (or Western) District by Peregrine Maitland, the 4th lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, who was also an early advocate of the Canadian Indian residential school system as a means to deepen British control of the province's indigenous population. Initially based in the township of Malden near Amherstburg, Rankin developed a close understanding of the region's natural geography throughout the 1820s. He would not stay there, however. In the early 1830s, he would survey a number of townships scattered throughout the province in rapid succession: in 1830, Eldon and Fenelon in what would become Victoria County (now the city of Kawartha Lakes); in 1831, Presquisle or Presqu'ile Point; in 1833, the Nottawasaga Bay area (where he settled on some of land west of the present town of Thornbury); and in 1834, Loughborough (now the community of Sydenham in Frontenac County), Gore, Crowland (now a part of the city of Welland in Niagara Region), Humberston or Humberstone (now a part of Port Colborne), and Blanford or Blandford (now the township of Blandford-Blenheim in Oxford County). He began surveying his first colonization road, the Garafraxa Colonization Road from Oakville to Owen Sound, in 1837, but was only able to survey as far as Arthur when the Upper Canada Rebellion broke out. The survey would be finished several years later by a different surveyor, John McDonald.