Earliest Toronto

By Robert M. MacIntosh

Almost half the population of Toronto-immigrants and newcomers from elsewhere in Canada-has no cultural memory of our city's beginnings. In a bid to fill this gap, Earliest Toronto tells the city's story up to the War of 1812 and its aftermath.

Beginning with the dramatic conflicts in the aboriginal communities around Lake Ontario before the comin

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burnstown Publishing House
• Release date: Jun 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781772570168

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Without the help and encouragement of John Stevens, my editor, this book would not have emerged. I want to thank him and the publisher, Tim Gordon, for their advice and judgment. A shorter version of Chapter 4 on Berczy appeared in the December-January issue of 2002 of The Beaver magazine.

My wife had to endure long periods of writer’s drought with patience. Kevin Doyle gave me timely encouragement. And then there are the many authors who have written wonderful books about Toronto, going back almost two centuries. I have enjoyed learning from them and trying to bring a new perspective to a slice of our early history.

INTRODUCTION

Just about half the population of Greater Toronto was born outside Canada, and many others migrated here from within Canada. Something like one and a half million people have no cultural memory of the city, no family traditions passed down for generations. Their family traditions and cultural memory are of other places.

Cultural memory is the distillation of experiences lived and passed on to a younger generation, and so preserved unconsciously in daily living.

For one-half of our population, there is no way of connecting the daily news to what happened a decade ago or a generation ago. Contemporary knowledge of political and public life, of the arts and architecture, of everything going on in the city, begins on the day when a family walks out of the Pearson terminal to a new world and a new life.

Very few great cities in the world boast such diversity as Toronto, which has succeeded better than most in building a social democracy from a platform which was mostly homogeneous in race and colour only fifty years ago. But in such a deeply multicultural society, the collective memory of what came before is in danger of being lost.

This short history of Toronto’s beginnings is meant for the hundreds of thousands of young immigrants from all over the world—and from elsewhere in Canada too—who may wonder what came before them here in their new homeland.

Earliest Toronto tells our city’s story until the War of 1812. There are scores of books about Toronto, some of which cover this early period, but most of which deal with more recent history. Focusing on this slice of history is intended to generate interest in our earliest years and to challenge conventional wisdom about the real founder of Toronto. It owes its existence to the fact that the author has been collecting books about Toronto for many years, and decided to distill some of them into this new perspective.

He has also examined the old sites, to put the earliest history into the context of today’s metropolis. Sadly, nearly all of the early buildings have been demolished. But sites don’t disappear – and just recently the site of the first Parliament buildings has been revealed and acquired by the Province. This is certainly a harbinger of renewed interest in our earliest beginnings.

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND CITATIONS

All 24 illustrations in this book have been reproduced from secondary sources. The Toronto Reference Library made digital images suitable for use by the publisher, either from books or from the extensive photo collections in the Baldwin Room. The author is grateful for the assistance of Alan Walker and Susan Schilbach at the TRL. Helpful advice was provided by Jean Dryden, former colleague at the Friends of the Archives of Ontario. Responsibility for the data rests with the author. Any errors or omissions are unintended and regretted, and will be corrected in any subsequent printing.

Abbreviations used are AGO for Art Gallery of Ontario; TRL for the Toronto Reference Library of the Public Library of Toronto; JRR for the John Ross Robertson Collection in TRL; LAC for the Library and Archives Canada (formerly PAC); MNR for the Ministry of Natural Resources, Ontario; NGC for the National Gallery of Canada; OA for the Archives of Ontario; YUA for the York University Archives. Books cited are cross-referenced in the Bibliography.

Plate 1.

Playter’s Bride over the Don

Robertson: Diary, page 336. TRL.JRR 3285, T12838; Playter’s Bridge near York, June 6 [ca. 1796], AO: F 47; p.204, TRL T11502; Castle Frank [1796]; OA F 47.

Plate 2.

Huron Long House

Heidenreich: Huronia, part of Fig.4. MNR.

Plate 3.

Dispersions of the Hurons

Cole: Atlas, Plate 35. Heidenreich. UTP.

THE GREAT DISPERSIONS, 1648-1653

Co-ordinated planning and the effective use of muskets enabled the Iroquois confederacy to disperse the Huron tribes in 1647-9, the Petun in 1649-50, the Nipissing in 1649-51, and the Neutral in 1651-2. Fearing a similar fate, most of the eastern Great Lakes native groups, together with some Huron, Petun, and Nipissing refugees, fled west and north. Other refugees, mainly Christian converts, settled near Quebec (Huron) and Trois-Rivières (Algonquin and. Nipissing). The bulk of the surviving Huron, Petun, and Neutral joined the Iroquois and were gradually absorbed.

Plate 4.

Map of Toronto Carrying Place

After Arthur Plate 1.1. UTP. From Robinson. LAC Amicus 5361285.

Plate 5.

Fort Rouillé

TRL. T32184.

Plate 6.

Map of Toronto Purchase

Gentilcore: Atlas. UTP. Part of Map 4.3 and Part Map 3.14.UTP.

Plate 7.

Mrs. Simcoe

Robertson: Diary, P. 10. TRL, JRR 4042, T16542, LAC. 10/Amicus No. 4606898.

Plate 8.

Plan of York Harbour

Robertson: Landmarks, Vol.1. YUA and LAC NMC 21768; and TRL T10080, YUA.

Plate 9

Barracks of Queen’s Rangers

After Benn: Historic Fort York, p.38, a reproduction of Lt. Stretton’s York Barracks of the Queen’s Rangers; and Benn, op.cit. p, 27, a reproduction of Elizabeth Francis Hale’s View of York, 1804, LAC (C-14905); and p. 27. LAC Coverdale Collection C’034334.

Plate 10.

Castle Frank

Robertson: Diary, page 336. TRL.JRR 3285, T12838; Playter’s Bridge near York, June 6 [ca. 1796], AO: F 47; p.204, TRL T11502; Castle Frank [1796]; OA F 47.

Plate 11.

Berczy self portrait

Allodi: Berczy. NGC, Plate V111, p.120. Original at AGO.

Plate 12.

Brant

Allodi: Berczy. NGC Plate X111, p.125. Original at NGC.

Plate 13.

Simcoe

Mosnier Portrait. TRL. T 30592.

Plate 14.

Peter Russell

Andre: Berczy p. 88. Watercolour copy by Berthon. TRL. JRR 407.

Plate 15.

Russell Abbey

TRL. T11480.

Plate 16

View of York 1804

After Benn: Historic Fort York, p.38, a reproduction of Lt. Stretton’s York Barracks of the Queen’s Rangers; and Benn, op.cit. p, 27, a reproduction of Elizabeth Francis Hale’s View of York, 1804, LAC (C-14905); and p. 27. LAC Coverdale Collection C’034334.

Plate 17.

Parliament Buildings

After Dieterman Plate 1.1. Part of LAC C-034334.

Plate 18.

Don Blockhouse

TRL. T 10336.

Plate 19.

Quetton St. George House

Robertson: Landmarks, Vol.1. YUA and LAC NMC 21768; and TRL T10080, YUA.

Plate 20.

The Grange

TRL. T11140.

Plate 21.

The Speedy

TRL. JRR 1199.

Plate 22.

The Sir Issac Brock

After Gibson p. 27. TRL. 15211.

Plate 23.

Cooper’s Wharf

Bartlett, Vol. 2. TRL JRR 1840 T32137.

Plate 24.

Map of Upper Canada

Gentilcore: Atlas. UTP. Part of Map 4.3 and Part Map 3.14.UTP.

CHAPTER ONE

TORONTO BEFORE HISTORY

In the late summer of 1794, an extraordinary scene unfolded at the mouth of the Don River.¹ A procession of bateaux—flat-bottomed boats— worked its way up the west side of the river to approximately the location of the Queen Street Bridge today. Their passengers, mainly women and children, proceeded to unload the boats and raise tents along the shore. They spoke German, a northern rural patois. Other boats held sheep and goats, broadaxes, flour-milling machinery, and long saws. During the days that followed, men arrived along the shore from the west, driving oxen and cattle. By late September, about seventy families had gathered, most of them continuing up the Don to their final destination in Markham, where they quickly erected about forty lodgings in hasty preparation for the approaching winter.

The shoreline of Lake Ontario to the east of the Don was almost deserted, all the way to the Loyalist settlements that were starting to fill in the river’s shore beyond Kingston. There were a few aboriginal families scattered inland, but no coastal communities anywhere eastward. To the west, there was a small community of Mississauga Indians a few kilometres up the Humber River at Teiaigon, which is now Baby Point. Several hundred nomadic Mississaugas occupied the large area between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron. But the substantial Indian population of previous centuries had been decimated, mainly by diseases imported by the Europeans, and also by extended tribal warfare.

As the German-speaking families in Markham huddled in the cold, dreaming of a distant spring and the opportunity to get crops in the ground, most of their menfolk were improving a rudimentary road through the woods that would become Yonge Street, from what is now Eglinton Avenue to Thornhill.

At Thornhill, their leader, William Berczy, surveyed a line eastward as far as the Don River. That road is now John Street, and the first substantial community of Toronto residents took shape there on the banks of the Don in late 1794.

More than two centuries later, the incredible feat which brought that first band of hardy immigrants to Toronto remains almost totally unknown. To explain how they came to be there— so far out of context with everything we know about our earliest beginnings—will require us to retrace our steps to see Toronto before history.

Before documented history, that is. The arrival of Europeans with a written language early in the seventeenth century marks the beginning of documented history. But one might say that the history of Toronto began perhaps ten thousand years earlier, when the first aboriginals pushed up from the Ohio Valley into the region of the Great Lakes. Archeological and oral history provides evidence that the Huron Indians built shelters near the mouth of the Humber River in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to accommodate their hunting and fishing