Buckley, Menzie and McMurray Families - Niagara Falls, Ontario ...

The Woods were natives of Birmingham, married in London, immigrated to New York in 1827
and then moved to Toronto in 1831. Elizabeth Ann was born the next year on Colborne Street
near the present King Edward Hotel.
Philip and Sarah Morton Buckley c. 1845
Elizabeth’s father Charles was a well known taxidermist and written up at length in the
Philadelphia Newspapers at the time of his death from work related poisoning. Perhaps
concerned by the growing Political unrest in Upper Canada which led to the ‘Upper Canada
Rebellion’ of 1837 he took his family to Philadelphia in 1835. Oddly enough and probably
because of political unrest again, the American Civil War and ‘The Trent Affair’, Elizabeth Ann
returned to Canada with her husband in 1861 with their only surviving child George Eli on what
would have been a four week journey. They purchased a farm in Stamford Township across from
St. John’s Church on what is now the North West corner of St. Paul’s Avenue and O’Neil Street
and Morton Major opened a general store which catered to the Village of Stamford.
Morton’s brother, Mark Arthur Buckley, moved to Windsor, Nova Scotia where he published
the first Newspaper. He then moved to Halifax where he ran a stationery and bookstore for
several years before he decided to move to Santa Cruz, California for health reasons. Morton
Major kept a wonderful diary of his rail trip to visit him there which I have read but was lent to a
family member and on his death was sadly lost. On his return he wrote a number of critiques of
the USA comparing it somewhat unfavorably to ‘British’ Canada in the local papers. Another
brother Samuel Morton moved to Richmond, Indiana.
In 1865 seeing opportunities in the new Town of Clifton, brought about by the arrival of the
Great Western Railway in 1853, he sold his property to the Rose family and moved there. The
Rose’s operated greenhouses there for three generations and then sold the property to the
Morgan’s. He built the Albion Hotel strategically between the Great Western’s new Clifton
Railway Station and the Michigan Central Station at the corner of Queen Street, calling it ‘the
hotel in Clifton most convenient for the traveler’. Soon after he purchased a triangular lot at the
corner of River Road and Cataract Avenue and built a house on it which he named ‘Park Villa’.
The photo depicts a hitching post and a step for a coach captured at the edge of the road. He and
his wife are seated on either side of the door with their son Wright and unidentified daughters in
the wings. The child on the step may well be Charles’ daughter Ethel Rose who was raised by
her Buckley grandparents when her mother Rose Louise died at her birth. She was later to marry
Charles Vandersluys, follow him to the Great War and die in the great influenza outbreak of
1918. Charles then married Eva Dobbie on his return. Charles Buckley remarried Will
Hamilton’s sister, Mary, and the son from that marriage, Jerome Hamilton Buckley, went on
to be one of the great scholars at Harvard and Chairman of the English Department.
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