Samuel Strickland

Born in England, Samuel Strickland emigrated with his family to Upper Canada in 1825 and settled near what later became Lakefield, Ontario. Like several members of the literary Strickland family, he wrote from experience, drawing on the realities of clearing land, farming, and building a life in a new country.

He is best known for books including Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West; or, The Experience of an Early Settler and The Backwoods of Canada, the latter prepared with his sister Catharine Parr Traill. His writing is valued for its practical detail and for the picture it gives of emigrant life, from the promise of opportunity to the strain and isolation of frontier settlement.

Strickland spent much of his life as a farmer and local figure in the Peterborough area, and he died in 1867. Today he is remembered as one of the early chroniclers of settler life in what is now Ontario, writing in a plain, direct way that still makes the period feel close and human.