The first settlers to the area now called Breslau arrived in 1806, mostly German Mennonite families from Pennsylvania. Settlers included John Brech, Daniel Erb and John Cressman. In the 1820s, members of the Cressman Mennonite Church began congregating in the homes of the early settlers. in 1834, the first meeting house in Waterloo County (built by Benjamin Eby in 1813) was donated to the Breslau congregation and moved to the settlement.[2] In 1850, Joseph Erb built a dam, a sawmill and a grist mill. The village was named after Breslau, the capital city of the Province of Silesia in the former German Empire (now Wrocław, Poland).
A post office was established in 1857 and began receiving mail on a daily basis. By 1864, the settlement had several tradesmen including two blacksmiths, a cooper, wagon maker, a cabinet maker and two mills.[3]
Demographics
In the 2021 Census of Population conducted by Statistics Canada, Breslau had a population of 5,053 living in 1,582 of its 1,635 total private dwellings, a change of 33.7% from its 2016 population of 3,778. With a land area of 5.44 km2 (2.10 sq mi), it had a population density of 928.9/km2 (2,405.7/sq mi) in 2021.[4]
