Alexander Graham Bell is credited for inventing the telephone as we know it today. He lived near Brantford, where he lived, worked, and invented the telephone. Former prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King had his telephone subscription backdated to make him the first telephone subscriber in the world on paper.
The Bell Homestead National Historic Site includes the country’s first telephone business office. Reverend Thomas Philip Henderson lived in downtown Brantford and encouraged the Bells to move to Brantford. His house became a telephone office when he retired from ministry in 1877, it was moved to the current site for conservation.
Brantford is near Brant’s Ford. It came to prominence in the 1920s when Europeans started living along the road between Hamilton and London. Europeans forced the Six Nations out of the area in 1830 and cultivated the land for agriculture, it benefitted from a railroad going down to Buffalo in 1854.
Victoria Park is the centre of Brantford. There is a tree planted in memory of Diana, Princess of Wales. There is a monument to Tyedinaga erected in 1886 for his allied service to Britain. There is a granite drinking fountain gifted by J. Kerr Osborne to the city in 1892. The park itself was land set aside when the place was developed in 1830 before being formally designated as a park in 1861.
The former public library facing the park is now Wilfred Laurier University’s Brantford campus. Another building facing the park is the Brant County Court House completed in 1853. It has courtrooms, county offices, and holding cells. The building was enlarged throughout the nineteenth century.
Although the town was planned in 1830, immigration helped grow it to its current size. Italians began immigrating to Canada in 1860 and the first Italian landed in Brantford in 1891. Since then, thousands of Italian families migrated to the city, many from Campania, Basilicata, Abruzzi, Molise, and Sicily in southern Italy.
