Much of the eastern shoreline from Harvey Bay south to the border was caught up in a frenzy of cottage development starting in about 1902, driven largely by two entrepreneurial farmers, Daniel Cambell and Joseph C. Bullis. However the land south of and including Blueberry point was never subdivided into vacation properties. Of the original grantees of the land – the so-called Associates of Isaac Ogden (see map labelled 1794 – in fact this is the date of when the Township of Stanstead was internally surveyed and divided into lots; the map itself dates from about 1801 ) very few actually attempted to settle here. Certainly Benoni Grant the original grantee of the lots never did! The first ones to clear the land that is now the Dunn Biodiversity Reserve were squatters. Jonathan Magoon on Lot 1 Range 4 in 1796 and Phillip Verback some ten years later on Lot 2 Range 4 (interpretive map on right-hand side). Starting in the 1870s the lots then owned by farmers Blackadar, Salls and Reed were being looked at for their granite potential, not their vacation potential!
In 1897 the nomenclature for lots was changed (blue map). The relevant Lot numbers for the territory of the Dunn Biodiversity Reserve were 156, 157 and 158 (going from the border north).
