Prince Edward County was first settled by a group of aboriginals called the Mound Builders, an obscure race that had vanished entirely before the time of white settlement, leaving behind little besides an ancestral cemetery outside of Port Milford. After their time, the Iroquois, especially the Cayuga tribe, inhabited the island and were well established in 1669, when La Salle explored the region. As white settlers began to arrive, especially United Empire Loyalists who were prepared to leave their homes in New York State to protest the Revolutionary bent of the country, the Gunshot Treaty was negotiated with the natives in 1787. By 1838, relationships were well established and amicable, and the Cayugas gave beautiful Waupoos Island to Queen Victoria as a token of their esteem. Waupoos means “rabbit-skin”, a staple of the barter system, and is one of many native place-names in the County.

As settlers flocked to Prince Edward County, it became clear that the land was strongly differentiated topographically. The southwest half, especially Athol and Hallowell townships as they became known, was fertile sandy loam for the most part, low-lying to the surrounding lake, and offered excellent advantages for growing field crops and raising cattle. The east half, later to become North and South Marysburgh, consisted of two great points of land, enclosing capacious Prince Edward Bay, with Point Pleasant forming the northern arm and Point Traverse the southern one. These points were the last tailings of the glacier that deposited the entire County on the north shore of Lake Ontario, and they consisted of the shaley limestone that remained in the glacier long after the finer sand had settled out. The land sloped down, quite steeply in places, to the Bay, and the terrain was much rockier and better drained than that in the western parts of the County.

Accordingly, as the County became settled, farmers who settled in the west became known for their dairy cattle and their produce, with the County being the pre-eminent source of canned tomatoes, corn and other fruits and vegetables right up to the 1950s. Those who settled in the east in the region, which would become the Marysburghs, notably Captain Archibald MacDonnell and his three hundred Foreign Legion soldiers.

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