History
Frederick Sovereen (or Sovereign) settled here in about 1812. According to some genealogy records, his father was called Jacob Zavering, Zafrin, or Safrein. The records suggest that the family moved to Norfolk County in Upper Canada because of the Revolutionary War in the U.S. Joseph Lawson bought land at about the same time as Frederick Sovereen (or Sovereign) but did not actually build a home in the area for some time. The village was named Fredericksburg after Sovereen until the post office opened under the name of Delhi. Sovereen was a tavern keeper for more than 30 years. He also manufactured plug tobacco, growing his own leaves, curing them, and pressing them. He donated the land for the Baptist church and served as the deacon for "many, many years".
The population in 1869 was 300, and the village had some manufacturing as well as a lumber mill thanks to the abundant water power. The post office was receiving mail daily. The railway that arrived in the 1870s was a definite benefit to locals who opened businesses such as the Delhi Canning Company, established in 1878; the company shipped canned local produce across Canada.
The village initially had a log schoolhouse, but a new school was built in 1892.
By around 1900, the village had an opera house, two tanneries, a railroad station, an Orange Hall, and a Mechanics' Institute as well as a flour mill, the Quance Mills or Sovereen-Quance Mills. At the time, the primary crops in the area were still fruit and vegetables.
Delhi Cemetery was first established sometime in the 19th century. While it was originally a cemetery exclusively for residents who were members of the Roman Catholic Church, changes in cemetery policy made it possible to have anyone buried on their property. At least 4,372 individuals or families have been buried there. Fifteen people from the Delhi area who were killed in the First World War are buried in this cemetery. The last names of the graves belong to different ethnic groups ranging from English, French, Canadian, Eastern European, and those of Belgian descent. There are even a few Chinese families buried within the cemetery, and a large number of tombstones are written in languages other than English.
In the 1960s, Delhi had its own police station, complete with its own jail. Until the 1970s, most non-essential services and businesses closed earlier on Wednesday afternoons. Other economic factors, including the abolition of Canada's blue laws in 1985, eventually forced most businesses to operate seven days a week.
In 1974, the Town of Delhi was amalgamated with the Township of Charlotteville and the Township of Windham to form the Township of Delhi. The Township's administrative centre was located in the community of Delhi. In 2001 Delhi amalgamated with Norfolk, Simcoe and the western half of Nanticoke to form an enlarged Norfolk.
Delhi experienced a state of economic stagnation with the early-2000s decline in the tobacco industry; this problem has also affected the rest of the Ontario tobacco belt, including the nearby community of Tillsonburg. People who live in the Delhi area say that farming in the area started becoming highly unprofitable.
While Quance Dam received all-time high water levels during the unusually warm winter of 2009, recent droughts and the erosion of the older portion of the dam are putting the future of this local public works facility into jeopardy. Partly inactive since the 1930s, it was sold to the Quance family in 1987. The newest part of Quance Dam was completed in 1995 once plans to convert it into a hydroelectric plant fell through. More than 1000 fish pass through Quance Dam on an annual basis; a great decrease since 1959 when more than 4000 fish would pass through. The reason for the collapse in fish population was sedimentation, the introduction of stocked fish, and human development.
