county names in place along the eastern seacoast of England, running from the Scottish boundary down to the English Channel.) The proclamation defined the northern boundary of Norfolk County as being the Thames River, but the area which became Blandford and Blenheim was originally designated as being part of the western end of York County for election purposes. Gov. Simcoe with several other government officers, guided by a party of Six Nations warriors, conducted a wilderness tour on foot down and back up the length of the Thames River in February 1793 and decided to assign additional place names to mirror those they knew along the Thames River in England. Middlesex County was the name to be used for the area around a town site reserved at the "lower forks" in the river, to be called London; Dorchester was the name for a town site at the "middle forks"; and the area around the "upper forks" was to be Oxford - the same sequence of names as found along the Thames in England. Just as in Oxfordshire in England, Blandford and Blenheim were names at the northerly end of the county, around Woodstock, adjacent to the towns of Oxford and Burford. When legislation was passed in 1798 in Upper Canada to implement these new divisions by Gov. Simcoe, Norwich and Dereham were separated from Norfolk County and added to the new Oxford County, which included also Burford, Blenheim, Blandford and Oxford townships. Blenheim Township was opened up to settlement in 1793 when Gov. Simcoe agreed it should be granted to Thomas Watson from New Jersey who promised to bring in settlers and build mills. This was the start of what became the life's work of his nephew Thomas Hornor, who with Watson's son Thomas Jr. and various others were active developing a settlement around Princeton by 1795. Within the course of the next decade, Hornor was appointed a justice of the peace, then as the land registrar for the county, then as the resident commanding officer for the county militia. He carried on as a leading citizen of the county until his death from cholera in 1834. Blandford Township was held in reserve by the government until a village began to develop along its southern end in the early 1830s, which took the name Woodstock. The official town plot was surveyed in 1834 by the prolific Crown surveyor Charles Rankin.