Piecing together the history of Kitchener's Williamsburg neighbourhood

The Williamsburg neighbourhood in southwest Kitchener got off the ground in 2004 with its central plaza as the focal point, but the community has much deeper roots that stretch as far back as the early 1800s. 

CBC Kitchener-Waterloo visited the neighbourhood as part of a Communities in Focus initiative, speaking to residents, business owners and community leaders to get a sense of what makes this part of the city tick.

As part of the project, the CBC team pieced together much of its rich history, too. 

Williamsburg was initially a hamlet along Bleams Road which was named after the pioneer Anthony Wilhelm. The area saw people settling around the 1830s with a school house built by the 1840s.

By the 1860s, the community had grown to include a number of businesses like a blacksmith, a shoemaker, tailors, a millwright, as well as a cooper and sawyers.

"It was almost all German speaking with almost equal numbers of Lutherans and Roman Catholics," Karen Ball-Pyatt, manager of the Grace Schmidt Room of Local History at the Kitchener Public Library told CBC News.

She was referencing the book Waterloo Township Through Two Centuries by Elizabeth Bloomfield.

According to a report by the region on local educational buildings, a one-room school house was built along Bleams Road in 1864. The building still stands today.

The schoolhouse is made of grey rubble stone and information from Bloomfield's book shows 24 students attended the school in 1873 and 33 students in 1874, which was the same year the school saw an expansion to accommodate the growing number of children.

According to the region, many well-known families attended the school, including the Steckles, Webers and Henhoeffers. The school closed in 1966 and was sold to private owners. The schoolhouse was deemed a heritage building in 1987.

Bloomfield's book also described the school's caretaker duties. In 1907, a caretaker would make $55 a year by cleaning the school house daily, cutting the grass three times during the summer, cleaning the outhouses twice a year and lighting fires between November and March.

According to historical research commissioned by RBJ Schlegel Holdings, the company that developed the new Williamsburg suburb, the land that it now sits on was owned and farmed by Max and Florence Becker. 

The research, which was conducted by Ulrich Frisse, president of Historical Branding Solutions, found that Max's parents arrived in Williamsburg from Germany in 1844.

"Max Becker had owned a series of farms in the City of Kitchener," said Vaughan Bender, the chief operating officer of Schlegel. "And as the city would expand, Max would sell and move his farming operation out to the perimeter of the city."