r Gee, who also operated a ferry when the primitive bridge was
swept away —for which reason the community was known for a couple of
decades as Gee’s Ferry. In 1854 an enclosed wooden bridge was built to
span the Thames, as a result of which the community activities seem to
have shifted largely to the north bank, and the place became known by its
present name of Kent Bridge.
Joshua Cornwall, a Connecticut
loyalist, was, about 1796, the first settler in the present Camden, then a
wilderness. Both he, in 1816, and his son, Nathan, in 1834 and 1836,
represented Kent in the Canadian parliament. Cornwall’s nearest neighbors
were the Moravian missionaries and their Indian flocks at Fairfield (the
original Moravian— town) a few miles east of the present Thamesville.
Another Connecticut Loyalist, Lemuel
Sherman, located a little farther upstream from Cornwall, some time before
1804 ; for in that year his son, David, was born on the Sherman homestead.
Sherman built a large frame house with a palisade fence of oak stakes, and
a large barn. The Shermans went through the stirring times of Procter’s
retreat, and after the battle of Moraviantown, the Sherman barn was
converted into a temporary hospital for the British and American wounded.
The historic structure survived for more than a century.
The Americans after the battle
destroyed the Moravian village; but after the war, the Indians were
re-established in a new village south of the river, in Orford township.
Settlement along the river front
grew. In 1852, when the building of the Great Western Railway was mooted,
David Sherman, a son of the pioneer, surveyed a portion of the homestead
into a village plot. A great admirer of the Indian chief, he named his
village Tecumseh; but later, when the post-office was transferred from
Nathan Cornwall’s, the name was changed to Thamesville.