Brantford

Brantford is a city in Ontario, Canada, founded on the Grand River in Southwestern Ontario. It is surrounded by Brant County but is politically separate with a municipal government of its own that is fully independent of the county's municipal government.

Brantford is situated on the Haldimand Tract, and is named after Joseph Brant, a Mohawk leader, soldier, farmer and slave owner. Brant was an important Loyalist leader during the American Revolutionary War and later, after the Haudenosaunee moved to the Brantford area in Upper Canada. Many of his descendants and other First Nations people live on the nearby Six Nations of the Grand River reserve south of Brantford; it is the most populous reserve in Canada.

Brantford is known as the "Telephone City" because resident Alexander Graham Bell invented the first telephone at his father's homestead, Melville House, now the Bell Homestead National Historic Site, located in Tutela Heights south of the city.

History

The Iroquoian-speaking Attawandaron, known in English as the Neutral Nation, lived in the Grand River valley area before the 17th century; their main village and seat of the chief, Kandoucho, was identified by 19th-century historians as having been located on the Grand River where present-day Brantford developed. This community, like the rest of their settlements, was destroyed when the Haudenosaunee declared war in 1650 over the fur trade and exterminated the Neutral nation.

In 1784, Captain Joseph Brant and the Mohawk people of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy left New York State for Canada. As a reward for their loyalty to the British Crown, they were given a large land grant, referred to as the Haldimand Tract, on the Grand River.