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In 1785, the Indians of the Missassauga Tribe, deed(ed) to the British Crown, their title to the large tract of land along the north shore of Lake Ontario, known as the Toronto Purchase. Lord Dorchester, Governor-in-Chief of Canada, by Proclamation in 1788, divided the large area of Upper Canada into districts, calling this portion of the Lake Shore, Nassau. The Constitutional Act of 1791, divided Canada into the two provinces, Upper and Lower. In 1792, Colonel John Graves Simcoe, changed the German name of Nassau, to the "Home District", and divided the province into nineteen counties, including the County of York, Home District. This large country included the present counties of Peel, York, and Ontario; Ontario County was not founded until 1852, by Act of Parliament passed in 1851, and which came into force January 1, 1852. All during the pioneer period, therefore, Pickering was York County. Fortunately, Pickering Township itself did not have to wait until 1852 to acquire its own identity; it became a Township with its present name, when the surveyors, Augustus Jones and his co-worker, Francis Stegman, during the years 1791-1795, surveyed the Front Townships and called them after towns in Yorkshire, England. Since no lots were granted in Pickering prior to 1795, we may assume Pickering was surveyed during this year together with the unsurveyed lots in Whitby Township. However, the legal transfer and subsequent naming of our Township were not in themselves very important to our lives. But the Indians transferred to us, not only a legal parcel of land, they left unconsumed, after thousands of years, the forests, soil, minerals, fish, and gravel of our Township. Of all the marvelous wealth they inherited, they used only the natural increase of wild animals, fish and fruits to carry on their simple lives. They had depleted the beaver during the great fur-trading days, but that was all. The Mississaugas, therefore, gave to us a beautiful, fertile Township, 74,660 acres in extent, rising in great natural terraces from the lake shore to the 10th comcession, or Townline in the north. This entire area was covered with magnificient forest, hardwood in the south and pine toward the sandy tract of Uxbridge Town Line. In 1853, Mr. William H. G. Kingston wrote a diary of his travels through the Province of Upper Canada, called, "Western Wanderings" or a Pleasure Tour in the Canadas", in shich he described most beautifully, the forests of the Lake Ontario area. He said in part: "I delight to dwell on the beauty of those romantic groves of maple and beech-trees, Though words are totally inadequate to give a correct idea of their lightness and elegence, of the aerial, fairy-like look of their delicate yellow and red tinted leaves. We were at first divided in our opinion as to which was the more beautiful— the mixed groves of maple, beech and other trees, or the sugar-bush by itself, or the groves composed entirely of beech. Ultimately we decided in favour of the beech-groves; their purity, lightness, gracefulness, and airy look, the delicate yellow and buff of the upper boughs—the quivering golden leaves, seen far away within the recesses of the grove, giving shade but no gloom—are not surpassed by any of bounteous nature's choicest gems. Far as the eye can reach among the stems, a golden light is suffused both over the ground and over each delicately cut and shaped branch, the shade (if it can be so called) being only of somewhat a less brilliant hue than where the sun penetrates without impediment." In 1795, Augustus Jone, surveyed the township and shortly thereafter, more than three-quarters of all the land was granted to absentee landowners, military officers, members of the Executive Council, and 1798, to friends of the Administrator, Russell. Only a few settlers were given title to their lots and these lots were far from the Kingston Road, up on the Fifth Concession.