Brockville (Canada 2006 Census population 21,957) is a city in the Canadian  province of Ontario, located in the Thousand Islands region on the St. Lawrence River in Leeds & Grenville County and was formally known as Buell’s Bay.

Known as the “City of the 1000 Islands”, Brockville is located in Southern Ontario on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, directly opposite Morristown, New York, about half-way between Cornwall in the east and Kingston in the west, and a little over an hour’s drive south of Ottawa. It is Ontario’s oldest communitie and one of the oldest cities founded by ethnic Europeans in Ontario, it is named after the British general Sir Isaac Brock.

Indigenous peoples lived along both sides of the St. Lawrence River for thousands of years. The first people known to have encountered the Europeans in the area were the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, a group distinct from and preceding Iroquois nations of the Haudenosaunee. While the explorer Cartier recorded about 200 words in their Laurentian  language, the people disappeared from the area by the late 16th century. The Iroquois by then used the St. Lawrence Valley as hunting ground.

This area of Ontario was first settled by English speakers in 1785, when thousands of American refugees arrived from the American Revolutionary War. The colonists were later called United Empire Loyalists for their political position supporting continued relationship with King George III. The struggle between Britain and the 13 American colonies took place in the years 1776 to 1783 and seriously divided loyalties among people in some colonies, such as New York and Vermont. In many areas, traders and merchants in the coastal cities or the northern border had stronger business ties and alliances with the British than did frontiersmen of the interior. During the 6-year war, which ended with the capitulation of the British forces in 1782, many of those colonists who remained loyal to the crown were frequently subject to harsh reprisals and unfair dispossession of property by their countrymen. Many “Loyalists” chose to flee north to the then-British colony of Quebec. Great Britain opened this western region of Canada by allocating land to the mostly English-speaking Loyalists and helping them with some supplies as they founded new settlements.