At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, members of the upper middle class in England and Ireland emigrated to Canada. For some, land grants were given for wartime achievements, or in lieu of half-pay pensions. Others craved the adventure, but many more were victims of a post-war depression economy.

The first recorded settler to move to this area was Adam Scott, a millwright of Edinburgh, Scotland. Scott built a lumber mill near what is today the corner of Water and King St. and later added a distillery. Many islands in the Otonabee river were actually created from sawdust deposits from the mill. As a result, this area was known for a time as Scott’s Mills or Scott’s Plains. Here on display are a variety of tools that would have been used in Adam Scott’s era.