A Giant's Tale, Part One: Was the First Heavyweight Champion of the World From Southwestern Ontario?

 by Clifton Bertram

Across the Medicine Line: Tales From the 49^th Parallel.

The articles in ‘Across the Medicine Line’ are written in hopes of learning more about how North America came to be. How our peoples lived, ate, drank, travelled, loved, fought and thought during the time between the discovery, founding and solidification of our long partnership and our current society. We believe that learning these stories can further strengthen the many ties that bind our two nations and better understand – or even heal! -- the divisions that still separate us.

  

The Legend We’re Told

Billed as the world’s first heavyweight champion, Charles Freeman was a massive bare-knuckle fighter standing over seven feet tall and nicknamed The American Giant, or sometimes, the Michigan Giant. He was a sensation in both the United States and the United Kingdom, and in 1842 while he was at the apex of his career, he fought William ‘The Tipton Slasher’ Perry more than 100 rounds, culminating in the giant’s arm raised in victory.

Interestingly, this is all true – and simultaneously not true at all. And it offers a fascinating window into the truth, or lack thereof, in entertainment, the press and even science at the height of the Industrial Revolution.

The American Giant. The cover of a boxing magazine featuring an article on Charles Freeman, the “First International World Heavyweight Champion”.

The official story about Freeman is that he was born in 1821 in New York City and grew up on a farm in Michigan before going on tour at the age of 19. On stage, he performed feats of strength and showed off his prodigious frame as an exhibit. He was billed as being 7 ft, 4 in. tall and capable of lifting a dead weight of 1500 lb.

Discovered in New York by noted English champion Ben Caunt, he was said to have travelled to England to engage in a prize fight. The bout was billed as being between the UK and American heavyweight champions. It was going to be the first world heavyweight championship.

The match had to take place twice, after darkness ended the first contest after some 70 rounds; in the rematch, Freeman stood as the champion of the world after another 38 rounds.

The newspapers of the day reported these facts breathlessly, but much of the story was fictional, a product of the ‘penny press’ – a craft industry in which cheap, mass-market newspapers were more interested in spectacle that sold papers than journalistic accuracy.

The Penny Press. Founded in 1830, The Boston Transcript was the first of these mass-market newspapers that aimed at the emerging market of urban lower classes with content about disasters, crime, scandal and spectacle.

Inspired by information found in archives where I live in Elgin County, Ontario, the following is my attempt at reconstructing the true facts behind the story of the world’s first heavyweight champion – and his rural roots in a Southwestern Ontario county straddling the line between one world and the next, wilderness and industrialization.

The Real Story

Rather than being born in New York or raised in Michigan, Charles Freeman was actually born in 1820 in a log cabin at a spot called Smoke’s Corners (sometimes called Smoke’s Hollow), near the site of what is now the water treatment plant for the City of St. Thomas, Ontario.

 St. Thomas Water Pollution Control Plant. This was the site of Smoke’s Corners, where Charles Freeman is thought to have been born.

Local histories differ on whether the shanty belonging to his father Leonard Freeman was located in the flats where the plant is today, or on top of a nearby elevation called Fingal Hill. The settlement in which Smoke’s Corners was located would later be named Hatherly in honour of its first postmaster. Subsequently, because a township called Atherly already existed, the Canadian Government requested it be changed to avoid confusion. A leading local resident, Jabel Robinson, was reading George Eliot and suggested ‘Middlemarch’. The name was formally approved in 1876.

Smoke’s Corners was at the time still part of Middlesex County, as Elgin County would not be established until 1851. Middlesex was a county of the original land grant made to Col. Thomas Talbot, an aide of Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe, in 1803.

Talbot Settlement Map. This image demonstrates the massive size of the land grant of 1803, of which Middlesex County and Yarmouth Township were a part.

At the time of Freeman’s birth in 1820, settler cabins in the Talbot Settlement were often miles from each other, separated by acres of dense bush. Aboriginal trails and deer tracks were the closest thing to roads between settlements, and many Middlesex residents still travelled by canoe on routes such as the Thames River.

Watercolour Depiction of The Thames River.  In the early settlement days, it was the main transportation artery in Middlesex County.

Thick woods blanketed the hills and valleys of the Thames, Kettle Creek and Catfish Creek, exotic species more often found in the Carolinas than in the rest of Canada: tulip trees, sassafras, chestnut and mulberry. Swallowtail and Monarch butterflies flickered above occasional grassy meadows, escorted by dragonflies the size of sparrows.

In the spring, maple trees were harvested for their sap by the local Oneida and Delaware, granted lands by the British government 50 years earlier in the wake of the U.S. war of independence.

Carolinian Forest. Southwestern Ontario contains landscapes and species that more closely resemble those much farther south (author’s photo, Springwater Conservation Area, Yarmouth Township).

Opossum and flying squirrels occupied the treetops, sharing them with warblers, orioles and woodpeckers. By night, horned owls glided silently among sycamore trees, and painted turtles slid into ponds to the accompaniment of the breeding songs of a thousand spring peepers and bullfrogs.

Sim’s History of Elgin County, Volume II contains an account by Dr. John McAlpine, grandson of a settler of the region, that sums up the pristine landscape encountered by the early residents that settled the original Talbot land grant.

“To us today it is hard to realize that less than one hundred years ago this County of Middlesex was a wilderness as unbroken as in the seventeenth century, when Champlain traversed the country.”  

Inhabiting this frontier, the young Charles Freeman was unremarkable in his youth – in fact he was undersized, and earned the nickname ‘Banty’, from the Bantam rooster. It humorously denoted a small, short and often aggressive person. In his teens, he started to grow, until by the age of seventeen he reached a height of six feet and a weight of 200 pounds.

Sim’s History tells us:

“He had very little schooling and had to go to work in his teens as a mill-hand in the sawmill at Jamestown, as well as his brother John's sawmill south of Aylmer (ie, Jamestown). He continued to grow and by twenty he was six feet, ten and half inches tall and weighed 325 pounds. He became noted for his strength and on one occasion he lifted a wagon weighing 3,266 pounds. He once threw a trussed horse ten feet.”

Gone today, in Freeman’s youth the village of Jamestown, Ontario was a new settlement founded when settlers like James Crysler, a merchant from Port Stanley, realized the potential of Catfish Creek as a source of waterpower for mills and distilleries.

19^th Century Sawmill. Power provided by Catfish Creek was a major reason for the establishment of Jamestown.

Other accounts tell us there was also a wagon-making shop in the village and a warehouse, and scows built by one Henry Carter, who had arrived from Liverpool in 1832, sailed up and down Catfish Creek transporting timber, wheat and corn. In 1850, one of the partners that owned the distillery fled with company funds, and the economic blow combined with trade routes that had shifting toward Port Bruce and Aylmer, eventually doomed the village.

Today, Jamestown is one of the ‘vanished villages’ of Elgin County. Its original structures are all gone, but the name survives in local geography, such as Jamestown Line south of the town of Aylmer, which runs from Roberts Line to Imperial Road. A roadside plaque there mentions Charles Freeman, and describes the village of his era as:

“A small Settlement near the south-east corner of the township of Yarmouth, on Catfish Creek’, about one mile from Lake Erie, containing a grist mill, a sawmill, a distillery, and about ten houses.”

It was during the settlement’s peak that the former scrawny teenager was given his first nickname: the ‘The Jamestown Giant’, by which he is still identified locally today. (He is also sometimes referred to as ‘The Middlemarch Giant’, after the township where he was born, but that is an anachronism, as that name for the settlement wasn’t officially adopted until 1875, when the post office was established.)

Sim’s History reports that “he continued to grow and by twenty he was six feet, ten and half inches tall and weighed 325 pounds. He became noted for his strength and on one occasion he lifted a wagon weighing 3,266 pounds. He once threw a trussed horse ten feet.” A clipping from a local St. Thomas newspaper says that during this time Freeman became interested in boxing, practicing in a makeshift ring that had been set up in Spohn’s Flats, located less than a kilometre just upstream on Kettle Creek from his father’s cabin.

Spohn’s Flats, Site of Today’s V.A. Barrie Park. A makeshift ring for fisticuffs was set up here, adjacent to Charles Freeman’s childhood home in Smoke’s Hollow.

Today, Spohn’s Flats is a St. Thomas municipal park, V.A. Barrie Park. Located at 68 Sunset Drive, it is a popular spot for disc golf players throughout the region, with 19 holes, concrete tee pads and DISCcatcher targets.

Spohn’s Flats Today. Instead of boxing, frisbee golf is the site’s main sporting activity today (author’s photo, 2026).

We can confirm that when Ben Caunt met Charles Freeman, Caunt was the official English heavyweight champion. In the ‘Bare Knuckle Corner’ feature section of The USA Boxing News, Mark Weisenmuller discussed Caunt’s career, confirming that before travelling to the U.S. in 1841, he was the reigning champ.

“On May 11 of same year [1841] at Long Marston, in the rematch, Caunt regained his championship when he beat [Nick] Ward after the two went 35 rounds (the match lasted 47 minutes). Ever the egotist and adventurer, in September of 1841, Caunt traveled to the U.S. in an effort to fight Tom Hyer.”

In the United Kingdom, when Caunt was the reigning champ, bare-knuckle prize fights were illegal, so for formal matches, organizers evaded the police by staging them in remote areas, outdoors in rural commons, and at secret indoor locations to evade the police.

Bare-knuckle bouts were long, violent and bloody, and serious injury and even death were not uncommon. Prize fights were governed by London Prize Ring Rules, introduced in 1838, replacing the Broughton Rules of 1743. This was also when the shape of the venue was defined as a formally defined as a square of “four-and-twenty feet square, formed of eight stakes and ropes, the latter extending in double lines, the uppermost line being four feet from the ground, the lower two feet from the ground.”

Before 1838, fights had taken place inside a circle drawn on the ground, hence the origin of the term “the ring”. Marquess of Queensberry rules, which would introduce padded gloves and 3-minute rounds, would not be introduced for nearly 20 years.

The ‘Ring’. Prior to the 1838 London Prize Fight Rules, bouts were fought in a circular shape, and were even rougher.

There were no time limits, and open-handed and fist strikes were both allowed, as was standing wrestling and throws. The only fouls were biting, eye-gouging, head-butting, kicking, hitting a downed opponent, holding the ropes, using stones or hard objects in the hands, wearing spiked shoes and taking a dive. Rounds ended only when a fighter was knocked or thrown to the ground, at which point the fighters were given 30 seconds in their corner before the bout resumed.

Mass entertainment was still in its youth and the exploding populations of urban centres were thirsty for spectacles of all kinds. Boxing matches attracted enthusiastic crowds collectively called ‘The Fancy’, which were comprised of a broad spectrum of patrons, including aristocrats, gamblers and hordes of the new urban working class whose numbers were swelling the industrializing cities.

‘The Fancy’ was divided into factions, each being a ‘fancier’ of a different contender, and the 1838 rules mandated that the fighter wear a handkerchief in the colour of their ‘Fancy’. As the sports heroes of the day, winning prize fighters were rewarded with popular acclaim, significant cash, and status to which they could never otherwise have aspired.

Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting after 1838. ‘The Fancy’ watched and bet from behind ropes stretched between eight stakes.

Caunt had first become national champion in 1838, losing the title in February of 1841 and winning it again three months later. In a 2014 article, on the 200^th anniversary of Caunt’s birth, a Nottinghamshire arts and entertainment magazine described how he celebrated the win.

“He received a rapturous welcome and his spirits were so high that when he reached his local boozer, the Coach and Six Inn, he heated a few farthings on a shovel and lobbed them onto the street, chuckling as kids scalded their fingers trying to pick up the bounty.”  

To capitalize on his success, he embarked on a tour of North America, hoping to challenge the American Tom Hyer. Hyer had claimed the U.S. title in September 1841 when he defeated George ‘Country’ McChester (named in some records ‘John McCleester) in a 101-round fight lasting nearly three hours at Caldwell's Landing on the Hudson River.

When Hyer failed to respond to Caunt’s challenge, the Englishman toured the eastern part of the country, speaking at various events and staging lucrative exhibition fights that attracted paying crowds. During this course of this expedition – we are told it was while in Philadelphia – Caunt read about the Jamestown Giant and determined to investigate.

A letter from Caunt was published in Bell’s Life in London, and Sporting Chronicles, a weekly sporting paper with which he was in regular correspondence, seeking to promote his overseas exploits to readers back home:

“When at Philadelphia I intended taking a Southern tour, but an unexpected circumstance brought me back to New York. There appeared a challenge in the papers of New York from the Michigan Giant to me; my friends at New York went to try to make a match with him ; they offered to back me for 10,000 dols [dollars] a side, and sent for me to return as soon as possible. There is no match made yet, but it is likely there will be soon. I am quite prepared to fight him; he is the only man who could draw me from my first determination.”

There is reason to believe that this account contains significant hyperbole, injected for promotional purposes, and it would seem to represent the beginnings of the fictitious American biography for Freeman. For one thing, the allegation that Freeman challenged Caunt seems unlikely. All the information we can gather on Charles Freeman suggests he was a humble youth, a characterization confirmed by numerous accounts in English publications as we will see later. 

Secondly, the sum Caunt cites in his letter is beyond belief. A $10,000 purse would have been a massive sum in 1841, equivalent to between $350,000 and $400,000 in today’s dollars. It’s not credible to believe that any backing syndicate would offer up such a sum, especially for a match in which one of the competitors was an unknown novice. As further context, we should note that in the match Caunt fought against Nick Ward – the UK heavyweight championship! – the purse was only about £100, or $500.

So, while some accounts say the two met in New York, the local account in Sim’s History of Elgin County, Volume I is more convincing. It tells us that Caunt travelled to Spohn’s Flats in Middlesex Country, Ontario. There, he engaged in an exhibition match with the 21-year-old Charles Freeman. We are not told who won the bout, but Caunt was evidently impressed enough with the young giant that he invited him to join him on his tour.

Sim’s tells us that before he left Southwestern Ontario, Charles Freeman visited his cousin Joel Lewis in Pumptown (later Lewisville), south of today’s Orwell, Ontario, in between St. Thomas and Aylmer. Joel was the son of Barnabas Lewis, one of the earliest pioneers of the region, and his brother was Asahel Lewis, founder of a St. Thomas newspaper and a noted early Canadian liberal. Known for his generosity and gregarious nature, Joel Lewis accommodated innumerable visitors in the spare bedrooms on the second floor of the large brick house he built in 1835.

He also liked to collect curios, often trading with his many visitors to acquire them. This was how Joel ended up with a pair of Freeman’s size 14 boots as part of his extensive collection. When Joel Lewis died in 1886, the boots disappeared, probably stolen.

Stay tuned for Part Two, in which we’ll explore Charles Freeman’s ascent to the world stage.

 

Across the Medicine Line: Tales From the 49^th Parallel.

The articles in ‘Across the Medicine Line’ are written in hopes of learning more about how North America came to be. How our peoples lived, ate, drank, travelled, loved, fought and thought during the time between the discovery, founding and solidification of our long partnership and our current society. We believe that learning these stories can further strengthen the many ties that bind our two nations and better understand – or even heal! -- the divisions that still separate us.