Bruce County has approved an amendment to the county’s official plan for a new hamlet in the Municipality of Brockton.
The amendment affects the parcel of land, located at 13420 Bruce Road 10, to re-designate the lands from Agricultural to Hamlet-exception.
The change is to allow for the land to be developed into three semi-detached homes, for a total of six new residences.
“These lands form part of the broader new hamlet area identified in the Bruce County draft official plan, and although the draft plan is not yet in effect, this application supports orderly, phased growth consistent with the long-term vision for the area, ” said Planner Benito Russo.
The amendment would establish a new 0.29-hectare hamlet area. The zoning amendment would allow the development as proposed.
Dana Kieffer from COBIDE Engineering shared on behalf of the applicant, “This is an area of Brockton that has functioned as a settlement area for quite a long time, just on the outskirts of Hanover and heading out on that main county road. We just feel the re-designation is going to really fit what’s there, as opposed to what’s mapped as Agriculture.”
County Councillor Brockton Mayor Chris Peabody explained that the new hamlet would be named Sutherland.
“We did have to give the settlement a name, so I picked Sutherland in honour of Robert Sutherland, the first Black lawyer to practice in Ontario. He practiced here in Walkerton, Ontario for twenty years on the site of the library. And he was also our Reeve.”
According to the Bruce County Museum, Robert Sutherland was born in Jamaica to a Scottish father and a freed African-Jamaican mother.
He moved to what is now Ontario in 1849 to attend Queen’s University, where he graduated in 1852.
Sutherland became a lawyer in 1855, and moved Walkerton in 1859.
He was elected as Reeve for the Town of Walkerton in 1872, but did not run again the following year.
Robert Sutherland contracted pneumonia during a trip to Toronto in 1878, and succumbed to the illness on June 2nd of that year. He was laid to rest in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto.