Before written history, the Neutral Indians lived here. It was a perfect home with forests teeming with game, the lake providing fresh fish and transportation, and the fertile plain ideal for agriculture. The Neutrals were wiped out by their enemies by 1650. In 1787, a group of United Empire Loyalists arrived from New Jersey. They named their little settlement The Forty after the creek which was believed to be forty miles from the mouth of the Niagara River. John Graves Simcoe, an officer of the British army who served in the American War of Independence, became the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada (Ontario) from 1792-1796. The naming of the newly surveyed townships was part of his duty, and on a number of them he gave places names from Lincolnshire, England. One of these was Grimsby. In the early days the many creeks on top of the Niagara Escarpment which flowed into Lake Ontario - each with a waterfall - were named according to their approximate distance from the Niagara River. There is the Twelve Mile creek, the Sixteen, the Twenty, the Forty, etc. It was along these creeks and stretching back from then on either side that the first settlers took up their land and built their log cabins, their saw mills and grist mills. This is how the Settlement at The Forty - later called Grimsby (from the name of the township) - began. Less than twenty years after the arrival of the first settlers, the United States declared war on Britain and began by attacking Canada from three points - one of them was Niagara. In 1813, the Engagement at the Forty occurred on June 8, 1813. American forces, retreating after the Battle of Stoney creek, were bombarded by a British flotilla under Sir James Lucas Yeo. Indians and groups of the 4th and 5th Regiments Lincoln Militia joined in the attack and created such confusion in the enemy ranks that they abandoned this position and retreated to Fort George.