Abel Stevens

Photo by Alan L Brown - July 8, 2007

Plaque Location

The County of Leeds and Grenville
The Township of Elizabethtown-Kitley
At the cemetery at Bellamy's Lake on the south side of County Road 8 just west of its intersection with Lake Eloida Road, about 3 km west of the town of Toledo

Plaque Text

Born at Quaker Hill, New York, about 1750, Stevens served as a British agent during the Revolutionary War despite being enrolled in the rebel militia. After the war he lived in Vermont where, as an ardent Baptist, he became a deacon in 1786. Attracted by Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe's offer of land in Upper Canada, he moved to the province and settled in this area in 1796. A vigorous colonizer, Stevens within two years of his arrival had encouraged some 100 families, many of them Baptists, to locate in Kitley and Bastard Townships. He built mills and laid the foundation for the establishment of ironworks at present-day Lyndhurst. Stevens remained a leader in the Baptist Church in which he had been ordained a minister in 1804.