Bruce County, Ontario
Chepstow is a small village of fewer than a hundred households in the Municipality of Brockton, Bruce County, Ontario. It sits along the Teeswater River in the rural country between Walkerton and Kincardine, in what was the Township of Greenock before amalgamation put Brockton on the map in 1999. It is the sort of place that is easy to miss if you are driving fast on the concession roads.
The village was founded on May 17, 1852, when a settler named John Phelan brought his family down the Yokassippi River, later renamed the Teeswater, and put up a sawmill. The name Chepstow comes from the market town of the same name in Monmouthshire, Wales. It is a long way from the Wye Valley, but the borrowed name stuck. The post office opened in 1885 and is still running out of the village, which for a settlement of this size is not nothing.
Chepstow was settled largely by Irish and German Catholic families, and the community that grew here has been shaped by that heritage from the beginning. Mary Immaculate Roman Catholic Church was built in 1857 and still anchors the village. Mary Immaculate School operates alongside it, drawing more than a hundred students from Chepstow and the surrounding farm concessions. That the parish and the school have survived where so many small rural parishes have closed is worth noting.
The village has two nineteenth-century hotels still standing. The Chepstow Inn was built in 1869 as a coach stop and is the oldest continuously operating hotel in Bruce County. The King Edward Hotel followed in 1871. Both are still in business. Two working hotels in a hamlet of fewer than a hundred households is unusual, and it says something about the village's stubbornness that neither has been converted or torn down. The Inn is the better known of the two.
Beyond the church, the school, the two hotels and the post office, Chepstow is quiet farm country. The Greenock Swamp, one of the largest wetlands in southern Ontario, sits to the south and west. Walkerton is about fifteen minutes east for groceries and services; Kincardine and Lake Huron are about half an hour to the west. Chepstow is accessible without being on the way to anywhere, which is largely the point.