Simon Cress and his family came to St Jacobs in 1806. His daughter married Elisha Hewitt, who once sold his socks to buy an axe. Later in the 1820s, John E Bauman (also known as Bowman) settled here and built a house overlooking the wooden bridge over the Conestogo River. John had been one of the original members of the German Company who had signed on for the purchase of part of Block 3 of the Six Nations Reserve. He signed for Lot 8, which now contains the western section of the village of St Jacobs.

Jacob Snider from the village of Waterloo had thought that the site would be a good place for a mill using the waterpower of the river. He discussed it with Bauman and bought one acre of Lot 36 (just north of the bridge in St Jacobs) and 122 acres of Lot 8 (just south of the bridge and on the west side of the road). Then he bought four acres of Lot 7 from Simon Cress (south of the bridge and on the east side of the road). He then built a sawmill and a woollen mill that used the dam he built across the river. Soon he had a flour mill and a blacksmith’s shop. The flour mill was on the site now occupied by the old mill opposite Benjamin's Hotel. Later many German and Pennsylvania Dutch people settled in the area and they gave the village the name Jacobstettel (Jacob’s village) for Jacob Snider. The village received the name St Jacobs in 1852.

Places to see in St Jacobs are:

• Old Mill

  Old Mill in St Jacobs

  Snider’s flour mill occupied the site of the mill at 10 King Street, just across the road from Benjamin’s Hotel. The Snider mill changed hands several times in the 1850s and burned down in 1863. The sawmill was further up Front Street.

• Benjamin's Hotel

  Benjamin's Hotel

  Benjamin’s Hotel at 17 King Street started out as the Farmer’s Inn when Joseph Eby opened it in 1853. Eby was also the first postmaster when the post office was opened in 1852. An advertisement of 1864 describes the Farmer’s Inn as providing “Good Stabling, Choice Wines, Liquors, and Cigars.” After Eby’s death in 1871, the new owner renamed the inn the Dominion Hotel. There was a second hotel in St Jacobs. The Albion Hotel did business at the corner of King and Church Streets. It is still there.

• Home Hardware Headquarters

  St Jacobs is birthplace of the Canadian hardware group Home Hardware, which is still headquartered here.

• Dr. Manley Robinson's House

  Robinson-Sittler House

  Doctor Thomas Manley Robinson, the village doctor, used to own the house at the north end of the village, on the left as you go up the hill after crossing the bridge. This house is also famous as the boyhood home of Darryl Sittler, captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 1970s. Sittler is famous for scoring ten points in a single game in February 1976. He started his career playing for the Elmira Sugar Kings in 1966.