Written By Alice Gibb
Long before the town of Exeter appeared on maps, another Huron County settlement sprang up where Stephen, Hay and Usborne townships meet. The hamlet was called Francistown. While the fate of Francistown is known, the disappearance of one of its prominent citizens has never been solved.
In 1832, a man named William McConnell, an early London Township pioneer, built a shanty and began acquiring land from the Canada Company. Soon McConnell’s cabin became a stopping off point for other settlers heading north from London to Goderich. The enterprising McConnell almost immediately won a contract to blaze a trail through the forests for what would become the London Road. Then he built a sawmill to serve other pioneer families building cabins and opened a grist mill a year later.
By 1856, the hamlet of Francistown included two more mills, two stores, two carpenters’ shops and a hotel. Even more promising for the local economy, the Verity Foundry, which would become a major manufacturer of agricultural implements, had also opened in the growing hamlet. The future of Francistown seemed secure.
Once enough families had settled in the area, a one-room schoolhouse was erected. The first teacher hired was an eccentric bachelor named Thomas Taylor. He lived in a room at the rear of the school and, likely because a teacher’s salary was so small, took on a second job as the clerk of Usborne Township.
Taylor’s students quickly learned that their schoolmaster valued punctuality above almost any other trait. Every morning, Mr. Taylor would be standing at the door, ready to greet his pupils as they filed into the school. That’s why students were perplexed one morning when they arrived for class, and no one was at the door. When they alerted adults in the neighborhood, they immediately entered the teacher’s quarters. Taylor’s clothes and the rest of his personal effects were all in place. An extensive search was launched and word was sent to all the other settlements in the area. Thomas Taylor had quite literally vanished off the face of the earth. His disappearance remains one of Huron County’s unsolved cold cases.
In 1873, with a combined population of just over 1,000 citizens, Francistown and Exeter amalgamated. Much of Exeter’s prosperity was due to Isaac Carling, a prosperous entrepreneur who opened a store and later built Exeter’s Carling Block. You can guess which name was selected for the amalgamated community. Exeter would go on to become an important district town – helped considerably when the London, Huron & Bruce Railway opened its line from London to Wingham. Exeter opened a brand new station on the brand new railway.
Information for this article was taken from The History of Stephen Township by historian Susan Muriel Mack.
