Toronto was the epicentre of Canadian Orangeism: most mayors were Orange until the 1950s, and Toronto Orangemen battled against Ottawa-driven initiatives like bilingualism and Catholic immigration. The Toronto lodge has held an annual Orange parade since 1821, claiming it to be the longest running consecutive parade on the North American continent. A third of the Ontario legislature was Orange in 1920, but in Newfoundland, the proportion has been as high as 50% at times. Indeed, between 1920 and 1960, 35% of adult male Protestant Newfoundlanders were Orangemen, as compared with just 20% in Northern Ireland and 5%–10% in Ontario in the same period. In addition to Newfoundland and Ontario, the Orange Order played an important role in the frontier regions of Quebec, including the Gatineau-Pontiac, Quebec region. The region's earliest Protestant settlement occurred when fifteen families from County Tipperary settled in the valley in Carleton County after 1818. These families spread across the valley, settling towns near Shawville, Quebec. Despite these early Protestant migrants, it was only during the early 1820s that a larger wave of Irish migrants, many of them Protestants, came to the Ottawa valley region. Orangism developed throughout the region's Protestant communities, including Bristol, Lachute- Brownsburg, Shawville and Quyon. After further Protestant settlement throughout the 1830s and 40s, the Pontiac region's Orange Lodges developed into the largest rural contingent of Orangism in the Province. The Orange Lodges were seen as community cultural centres, as they hosted numerous dances, events, parades, and even the teaching of step dancing. Orange Parades still occur in the Pontiac-Gatineau- Ottawa Valley area; however, not every community hosts a parade. Now one larger parade is hosted by a different town every year. Participation in the Orange Institution was not as large in the United States as it was in Canada. In the early nineteenth century, the post-Revolutionary republican spirit of the new United States attracted exiled Protestant United Irishmen such as Wolfe Tone and others. Most Protestant Irish immigrants in the first several decades of the century were those who held to the republicanism of the 1790s, and who were unable to accept Orangeism. Loyalists and Orangemen made up a minority of Irish Protestant immigrants during this period. America offered a new beginning, and "... most descendents of the Ulster Presbyterians of the eighteenth century and even many new Protestant Irish immigrants turned their backs on all associations with Ireland and melted into the American Protestant mainstream."