Napanee

Napanee grew at a waterfall on the river of the same name, where navigation from the Bay of Quinte met a source of water power. The falls and surrounding lands had long formed part of an Indigenous lakeshore country; an Oneida village, Ganneious, stood in the wider bay region during the seventeenth century.

After the American Revolution, Loyalists settled around the bay. Mohawk families allied with Britain established a community at the mouth of the Napanee River in 1784. At the falls upstream, the government commissioned the Loyalist millwright Robert Clark to build mills in 1785. A sawmill and a gristmill served the new settlements, giving farmers a place to have their grain ground, and the place became known for a time as Clarksville.