Ted Rumble’s quest in restoring Niagara-on-the-Lake’s oldest rock collection continues after some recent success.

Last week, ordnance boundary stone number one was found, marking number 19 out of 38 stones Rumble has been searching for – exactly half.

Richard Larocque, a land surveyor at Larocque Group, told The Lake Report a team of two surveyors discovered the stone in an undisclosed wooded area.

Larocque described the search for stone one as a “labour of love.”

These 38 stones were all erected at the same time around 200 years ago on the perimeter of four properties in the town owned by the British military.

Finding the stone was no game of chance, Larocque said. The firm had records of the stone being found around 50 years ago during another group’s survey.

After calculating the physical location of the stone, surveyors went out to find it – with the hope that it hadn’t been destroyed, Larocque said.

“Lo and behold, they found it,” he said.

Larocque contacted Ted Rumble, a member of the NOTL Museum’s board and took him for a walk to see it.

The ordnance stones tell us a lot about the boundaries of military property in town at the time.

“They mark the limit of ownership that is between the Crown and general ownership, which had been bequeathed to the early settlers in the area,” said Larocque.

Two hundred years later, these stones are still important to understanding the past, Larocque said, specifically the property lines they were meant to establish at that time in history.

“They are still held today to be sacrosanct: they should not be tampered with (and) they should not be moved,” he said.

The discovery of ordnance stone one leaves 19 stones remaining to be found in NOTL.