- DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: H. V. Nelles, “NELLES (Nellis), ROBERT,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 7, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/nelles_robert_7E.html
- DCB profile notes:
- Businessman, office holder, jp, politician, and militia officer; b. 6 Oct. 1761 in Tryon County, N.Y., eldest son of Hendrick William Nelles (Nellis); m. first 1788 Elizabeth Moore (d. 1813), and they had five sons and three daughters; m. secondly 1814 Maria Jane Waddell, the widow of Samuel Bingle, and they had two sons and four daughters; d. 27 July 1842 in Grimsby, Upper Canada.
- Friendship with the Indians had helped rebuild the family fortunes in New York, as it would later in Upper Canada. Abandoned by their British sponsors and denied title to their lands, the Palatinate immigrants had moved inland in the 1720s to settle among the Indians of the Mohawk valley. Although it seems that Nelles was not involved in such deals, he certainly did acquire a great deal of land. When old associations called him back to the Indian Department in 1777 (or revolutionary tensions drove him back), he left behind property that he later valued at £3,760, not counting stock and equipment.
- After 1777 the Indian Department strategy was simply to destroy the settlements in the interior of New York that supplied the Continental Army. Captain Nelles (he anglicized his name to Henry at this time) accompanied Indians on many savage raids back into his own Mohawk valley, sacking homesteads, burning crops, and killing and scalping settlers.
- Understandably, neither father nor son returned after the war to the district that they had razed. Instead, they followed their Indian clients to the Grand River valley, where they settled and did a little fur trading. In February 1787 Joseph Brant [Thayendanegea*] arranged for some 4,254 acres on the Grand River to be deeded to Henry Nelles and his sons Robert and Warner “to be possessed by them and their posterity.” By the time of Henry Nelles’s death in 1791, five of his sons were settled in Upper Canada. The Nelleses received other land grants for military service, loyalism, and compensation for lost property, and by 1800 they collectively owned 7,300 acres, most of it in the Niagara District, making them the sixth largest landholders on the peninsula.
- Robert decided to develop more than 600 acres on Forty Mile Creek. There, on the site of present-day Grimsby, he built mills and a store, and commenced a grand stone mansion, The Manor, which still survives. In the 1790s he supplied hardware, household goods, textiles, and provisions to the small settlement. After 1800 he forwarded whiskey, grain, and flour from his mill to W. and J. Crooks at Niagara (Niagara-on-the-Lake). Joseph Brant sought his help both in supplying the Six Nations settlements and in the education of his own sons. Robert was also briefly pressed into service again as an Indian agent in 1797, delivering trade goods to the Mississauga Ojibwas under the terms of their recently concluded treaty. Thus Robert Nelles launched his own family from the elevated position accorded by landed wealth, a commercial income, and his continuing half pay.
- United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=6190
- Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/67313472/robert-nelles
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