HAIGHT, Daniel: 1764 - 1830
Tile ordered and paid for by C. Haight,* Toronto, Ontario, July 1888
Daniel Haight, born in Dutchess County, New York, on January 14, 1764, was the eighth and youngest child of Joseph and Margaret Haight. The Haights (spelled variously as Hoit, Hoyt) were descended from Simon Hoyt who came to Massachusetts from Upway, Dorchester, England.
Daniel’s grandson, Canniff Haight, who sponsored this tile to his grandfather*(1) wrote that, at the time of the American Revolution, Daniel was an able farmer residing in Dutchess County. As a Quaker and member of the Society of Friends, following their tenets opposed to war and bloodshed, he did not bear arms during the Revolutionary War. In common with many of his sect, he favoured law, order and good government and his sympathies were with the Loyalists. Shortly after the expulsion of his friends and neighbours who had resettled in Adolphustown, he and his second wife, Mary Dorland, whom he married in April 1789, and one child from his first wife, abandoned their home and joined them. His neighbours in Upper Canada included his father-in-law John Dorland, and John’s brothers, Philip and Thomas Dorland. Able to bring a few belongings with them, the Haight family’s circumstances were not quite as desperate as those of the refugees who had landed destitute a few years earlier. Nevertheless, they endured severe deprivations. For a few years Daniel had a store in Adolphustown. In 1792, he bought a 200-acre farm on lot 14, concession 2, about three miles northeast of Adolphustown the village of Adolphustown, where he built a comfortable colonial house.
Daniel is listed in the 1800 Adolphustown census as head of a household of ten persons. Philip, the eldest of Daniel’s eleven children had been born in New York. His mother, Mary Moore, had died eleven days after he was born. Daniel and his second wife, Mary Dorland, had ten children: Mary, John D, Rhoda Bathsheba, Joseph B, S. Ricketson, Reuben Amos, Consider Merritt, Bathsheba Tabetha, Rowland Ricketson and Samuel Dorland. Ricketson’s son, Canniff, later wrote both a history of his family, which included memories of his grandfather Daniel, and a book about the early settlers of the area.(2)
In 1800, Daniel was appointed clerk of Adolphustown. He was a well-read man whose estate included a large number of books at a time when books were scarce in Adolphustown. He was “a man whose sound sense, meekness and probity, had procured for him the respect of all his neighbours and acquaintances. He was a member of the Society of Friends.”(3)
Daniel died in Adolphustown on August 19, 1830 at the age of sixty-six.
1. Canniff Haight, History of the Haight Family, 1899 (University of Alberta Libraries microfilm) via www.archive.org/.
2. William Caniff, Settlement of Upper Canada (Toronto: Dudley & Burns, 1869).
3. The Canadian Genealogist, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1979.