Toronto's Lost Villages | Sample Chapter

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Along the Lakeshore

Toronto’s First Vanished Villages T E I A I A G O N A N D G A N AT C H A K I A G O N

As the glaciers that covered the Toronto region melted northward, humans followed. The first were nomadic hunters searching the then tundra for roving herds of elk, caribou, and other subarctic wildlife.

The growth of forests saw succeeding cultures replace the earlier occupants. The oldest prehistoric artifact found in the Toronto area is a chert spear point discovered by a school student and dated to eight thousand years ago; other artifacts of similar age have been few.

By the 16th century, the sedentary Hurons and Petuns occupied the fertile lands south of Georgian Bay, away from their traditional enemies, the Iroquois Confederacy, who occupied the Finger Lakes region of New York state. South of Georgian Bay, the Hurons and Petuns established large village compounds of longhouses, surrounded by sturdy wooden palisades. They came to the Lake Ontario shores to hunt in the Rouge and Humber marshes and fish around the Toronto Islands, but established no villages on those shores.

Through the 17th century as the Europeans arrived, mainly in search of the beaver, the lifestyles of the Indigenous Peoples shifted.

Now they concentrated on hunting the valuable beaver pelts to trade for tools, guns, and liquor. Alliances were formed, the Iroquois aligning with the Dutch and English traders, the Hurons with the French.

The main trading route between Lake Simcoe and Lake Ontario was known as the “Toronto Carrying Place,” following the Humber River

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A 17th-century French map shows the locations of the Seneca villages along Lake Ontario’s north shore.

and over a height of land before descending to Lake Simcoe. (At the time, the early French knew our “Lake Simcoe” as Lac Toronto.)

As the fur supply became depleted south of Lake Ontario, on what is now the American side, north of Lake Ontario the Iroquois launched a string of deadly raids that either killed off or chased away the Huron and Petun populations. The missions established by the French missionaries to “Christianize” the “savages” lay in smouldering ruins. Fort Ste. Marie near Midland is a reconstruction of such a mission complex, which had lain on this site.

Following their violent dispersal of the Petun and Huron in 1650, the Iroquois built a string of seven villages along the north shore of Lake Ontario. Two of these were within today’s Toronto region. Each was to protect one of the two southern termini of the Toronto Portage, one branch of which followed the Rouge River, the other the Humber.

The village overlooking the Rouge was Ganatchekiagon, built by the Seneca (of the Iroquois Confederacy) on a high promontory upstream 2

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from the river’s mouth. This strategic position allowed the Seneca to control the trade routes east and west along the north shore, as well as the main route along the Rouge. Archaeologists now know the location as the Bead Hill site. The site overlooking the Humber was Teiaiagon, and is known now as the Baby Point site. Both were palisaded compounds of longhouses, in which an estimated six to eight hundred people would live. The river-mouth marshes provided ample fish and fowl.

Then came the pushback. Anxious to regain control of the fur trade, in the 1690s the northern Anishinaabe tribes, including today’s Ojibwa and Mississaugas, raided the Seneca villages, pushing the Iroquois back across the lake in what are known as the Beaver Wars. By 1700 the Seneca villages lay vacant — becoming Toronto’s first vanished villages.

In 1991 the Bead Hill site was designated a National Historic Site.

Excavations have unearthed a bone haircomb decorated with figures drinking from a goblet, which indicates European contact. Other finds include stone tools, effigy pipes, burial artifacts, ceramics, and the remains of many meals — as well as countless beads typical of a Seneca village of significant size.

The site lies within and adjacent to the newly created Rouge National Urban Park, the world’s first national urban park, and remains the Toronto area’s only undeveloped First Nations archaeological site.

Although many artifacts have surfaced, Parks Canada has yet to publicly mark the location. There is as yet no plaque nor interpretation centre, although both are in the works. The park entrance lies along Kingston Road in the Rouge Valley.

By contrast, the Baby Point site (named for Jacques Baby, Inspector General for Upper Canada) has been known for many decades, and now lies buried beneath housing. Below the site, on the floor of the Humber Valley, two prominent historic plaques within a Story Circle recount the story of Baby Point and of the lifestyles of the early Indigenous Peoples.

The Europeans Arrive, in Numbers The year was 1793, and the shore of Lake Ontario was heavy with forests. The few clearings were hazy with smoke from the campfires of 3

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A well-worn path leads from the Rouge River up a steep slope to the location of the Bead Hill Seneca village. An early Indigenous peoples’ trail?

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A story circle beside the Humber River tells of the Baby Point Seneca village that was located on the bluff above.

Indigenous hunters, while ducks flapped across the little lagoons that hid in the frequent river mouths. Well-worn foot trails and portages wound through the dark woods linking the all-important rivers and lakes. To the inhabitants of the day, the rivers were their highways.

Those routes were as important to the lakeshore’s first nonIndigenous settlers as they were to the Indigenous populations. Eastern Ontario and the Niagara Peninsula already had a few crude villages ringing some little harbours, but with the arrival of John Graves Simcoe in 1793, that pattern began to spread, and that spreading, two hundred years later, would be the seemingly endless sprawl of the Greater Toronto Area.

Old York This, the oldest of European Toronto’s “lost villages,” has undergone many transformations. From the earliest “Toronto,” a cluster of wooden huts in a dark forest clearing in the 1790s, “York,” as it was renamed

by Simcoe (who disliked using Indigenous names), had evolved by the 5

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1830s into a handsome, if muddy, provincial town of banks, churches, and stores. In the 1850s the railways began to transform what was by that time again called Toronto into a smoky and industrial city.

And yet another transformation since has removed most of the old industries, replacing them with condos, townhouses, and soaring glass skyscrapers.

The enormity of the changes belies the scant time in which they have occurred: 1793, after all, is only a little more than two centuries ago. Yet it was in July of that year that John Graves Simcoe, commander of the Queen’s Rangers, landed in the schooner Mississauga on the low shore of “Toronto,” to a silent woodland. His job was to find a site for and to lay out a new capital for Britain’s new province of Upper Canada. The existing capital, Newark (now Niagara-on-the-Lake), was too exposed to the Americans, with whom Britain had just fought the War of Independence. With him were chief surveyor Augustus Jones and his deputy, Alexander Aitken.

Rather than choose the grounds around the old French Fort near the foot of today’s Dufferin Street, as proposed in a plan prepared by a Captain Gotherman five years earlier, they chose instead the head of the swampy harbour where a creek they named the Don River flowed into the bay. Here they laid out ten square blocks, five along the shore, and two deep.

In August, Simcoe discarded the name “Toronto” and named the new town “York,” after Frederick, Duke of York, the second son of King George III. The township that surrounded it was called Dublin.

The following year, Simcoe began the construction of parliament buildings at today’s Front and Berkeley Streets, which were then known as Parliament and Palace.

By 1810, York had grown to about six hundred inhabitants, most of them related to the governing of the province. These included the legislators, their bureaucrats, the military, and the merchants that served them, along with their families. There were also a half dozen stores and a like number of hotels, but only a solitary church. The only industries were those needed to serve the needs of the inhabitants: a brewery, a distillery, a potashery, a bakery, and a slaughterhouse.

Thomas Skinner’s grist mill stood on the Don River, a good distance 6

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An early painting depicts the harbour shore, around the time that Simcoe chose what he called York to be the new capital.

northeast, while the King’s Mill stood on the Humber to the west.

Along the streets huddled about a hundred houses. The forest around them remained largely still and dark, for pioneers had only begun to hack down the huge trees. The harbour was marshy and ringed with vegetation, while a forested sandspit stabbed out into the lake. The isolation of the tiny capital was daunting and palpable.

As the fledgling capital slowly grew, crude roads were cut through the forests. Those who braved the new potholed trails that passed for roads could follow the Kingston Road east, Dundas Street or the Lakeshore Road west, or Yonge Street north. To reach Kingston Road from Simcoe’s new parliament buildings, travellers would cross a longlost rivulet known as Taddle Creek, then follow King Street to reach Kingston Road at a point where King now joins Queen.

Although it was the baseline for the concession being surveyed farther north, Queen Street, or Lot, as it was then known, was not a through road, being cut off by the creek. To reach the village of Dundas, a jumping-off point far at the west end of Lake Ontario, travellers had 7

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first to follow Richmond Street from the corner of New Street (now Jarvis) west to the area of today’s Queen and Ossington, to find themselves at the start of what was grandly called the Dundas Highway.

By 1837, York was beginning to change. New street plans were in place west to Simcoe Street, and Yonge Street had been extended southward to the lake. King Street, not Queen or Front, was fast becoming the fashionable new main street, with the town centre moving west to focus on what would become Jarvis.

Here stood the new town hall, jail, customs house, and, nearby, the beautiful St. James Anglican Church. Industries had begun to appear as well, with Enoch Turner’s brewery and James Gooderham’s distillery, and a flourishing farmers’ market behind the town hall. A new Bank of Upper Canada and a handsome post office had opened up side by side on the northeast corner of Duke (now the part of Adelaide Street East that is between Jarvis and Parliament) and George. In those days the corner of Yonge and Queen, now considered the commercial centre of the city, had only a tannery and a foundry, and was considered “out of town.”

Most of the huts of log and lumber were being replaced, some by grand mansions. Among these were the Campbell house on the northwest corner of Duke and Caroline (today’s Adelaide and Sherbourne), a neoclassical brick building built in 1825; the Ridout House at Duke and Princess; the three-storey Arnold house near George and Duchess (now Richmond); the sprawling Widmer house at Ontario and Palace (Front); and the Berkeley “Castle,” a thirteen-room English manor, with yard and garden, sitting grandly on an acre of land at the southwest corner of King and Berkeley. The parliament buildings had gone from their early position on Front. The first buildings were burned by American soldiers in 1813, then their replacements burned out a mere decade later, because of a defect in the flues. After that the legislature moved to a new building on a two-hectare plot bounded by today’s Front, Wellington, John, and Peter Streets.

In 1834, York became a city named Toronto.

But the biggest transformations occurred from the 1850s to the 1880s. The railway era arrived, and with it the most dramatic changes Toronto would experience along its lakeshore. Although early city 8

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councils were opposed to putting the railways along a shoreline that was supposed to remain open and public, railway lobbying won the day. Rail yards, wharves, and factories occupied the shoreline on numerous landfills. The new users pushed out the houses and the fine stores, and Old York became Toronto’s industrial centre.

Still later, when the car craze arrived after the Second World War, Lakeshore Boulevard was widened to six lanes, and the unfortunate elevated Gardiner Expressway completed the barricading of the lake from the city.

Through the 1960s, another transformation would occur. With the blooming of the suburbs, the old rail-oriented lakeshore industries in their turn became obsolete. Nearly all have closed now, replaced by a forest of condominiums, or renovated into theatres or offices.

Few buildings remain from the days of “Old,” pre-1834, York. The grand homes of the Widmers, the Ridouts, and the Arnolds are long gone. Only the Campbell house survives, now in a new location, as a museum and lawyers’ club at the northwest corner of University and Queen.

Two of the best examples of heritage preservation in Old York are the Bank of Upper Canada and the nearby building that was the new city’s first post office. Built in 1827, the three-storey former bank building at the northeast corner of Duke (now Adelaide) and George was only the second used by the first chartered bank in Upper Canada. Its two upper floors housed Thomas Ridout, the first general manager. To the east, stood Toronto’s first post office. Built on land purchased from the bank for £500, and originally the house of James Scott Howard, it was designed to complement the grandeur of the bank. Howard operated the post office in it from 1834 until 1838, employing six people and staying open from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday to Saturday, and 9 to 10 a.m. on Sunday. Howard was dismissed as postmaster in 1838 after the aborted rebellion of the previous year. The bank failed in 1866.

The bank building became Lasalle Catholic School, and in 1871 an addition for the school was built between the two older buildings.

The school eventually expanded to take over all three. But the educational uses ceased after 1917, and the buildings gradually deteriorated, parts being variously used as a biscuit factory, egg storage facility, 9

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and armed forces recruitment centre. By 1978, they sat abandoned.

After a fire, they were slated for demolition. However, a visionary and heritage-lover named Sheldon Godfrey rescued and restored them, an accomplishment that earned him architectural achievement awards as well as awards from the Ontario Historical Society and the Ministry of Citizenship and Culture. The old bank and school now house offices, and the post office, now a National Historic Site, is a fully functioning post office museum operated by the Town of York Historical Society.

A trio of King Street’s early stores, built during the 1830s, still stand at the northeast corner of King and Jarvis, while at the southeast corner of King and George (187 King) stands what was the Little York Hotel, an 1880s replacement for one of Old York’s most popular hostelries. A short distance away, across Church Street at 57 Adelaide Street East, is the third York County Court House, built in 1850 and remaining in use until the then “new” city hall and courthouse opened in 1900. The 1850 courthouse has seen many historic events, including Toronto’s last public execution and the formation of the Group of Seven. In 1909, the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto (now situated on Elm Street) took it over as a meeting place. Today it houses a restaurant complex. Some of the cells remain from its time as part of the legal system, in the basement.

Toronto’s first city hall is likewise preserved, within the walls of the St. Lawrence Market.

Although the area is much changed, a number of buildings remain that date from the 1840–60 period, when Old York was becoming just a memory for early Torontonians. These include the magnificent Gooderham and Worts distillery complex of buildings, now a remarkably popular heritage venue for locals and tourists alike (and for Hollywood filmmakers), known collectively as the Distillery District. It is one of North America’s best-preserved early industrial complexes, a successful example of how heritage can work. The oldest portion dates from 1859.

At King and Trinity, past Parliament Street, a couple of blocks east of Old York, the Little Trinity Church (1843) and the Enoch Turner Schoolhouse (1848), Ontario’s first “public” school, are both preserved. Close by, at the southeast corner of King and Parliament, stands what is left of an early Kingston Road hotel, the Derby, built in 10

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1846. At the corner of King and Berkeley (298–300 King), a pair of houses built by Charles Small, son of Major John Small, who owned the Berkeley Castle, date from 1845. The building at 302 King was once the Garibaldi House, an early wayside tavern built in 1859.

And of the old parliament buildings, only the name remains, commemorated in a small, uninteresting park at the foot of Berkeley Street, called simply Parliament Square.

THE TORONTO ISLANDS

These days the popular Toronto Islands are a busy summertime retreat for Torontonians, and have been so for many decades. Even Indigenous people came here to hunt and to fish, although no evidence of villages has been found.

Among the first Europeans to enjoy the air and breeze on the islands was Lady Elizabeth Simcoe, the adventurous wife of John Graves Simcoe, by then Upper Canada’s first lieutenant governor. She wrote often in her diary of riding on the sandspit and enjoying the natural vegetation.

Geologically, the “Island” was a spit of sand deposited by the lake currents swirling westward from the Scarborough Bluffs, past the swampy mouth of the Don River.

Strategically, the spit of land created a large natural harbour, which had drawn Simcoe to the site as a location to replace Newark (Niagaraon-the-Lake). On Gibraltar Point, the outermost point of the peninsula, Simcoe in 1808 added a tall, stone lighthouse. Since enlarged, it still stands today.

In 1833, Michael O’Connor built the Island’s first hotel and began daily ferry service to the mainland. In 1843, Louis Privat added the Peninsula Hotel. A small colony of fishermen established a base on Ward’s Island. Then, in April of 1858, waves from a fierce storm washed away the narrow bridge of sand, severing the rest of the spit from the mainland. This was seen as an opportunity: dredge the new channel and create a shipping lane. That gap has remained the harbour’s main freighter point of entry to this day.

Hanlan’s Point, the westerly end of the spit, began to attract hotels and cottages as well, including a new, eight-thousand-seat 11

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baseball stadium. Completed in 1909, it was from this stadium that the legendary baseball great, Babe Ruth, is said to have launched his first professional home run. But it was Centre Island that grew into the recreational focus, with shops, hotels, and children’s rides crowding the main thoroughfare, Manitou Road, which led from the new ferry docks to the beach by the lake.

In the 1950s, however, the City, which owned the islands, removed the old structures to make way for grass.

Meanwhile, on Ward’s Island, the eastern-most portion, a different story was unfolding. Ward’s was originally a City campground, but campers finally received permission to erect small cottages on their own tent-sites, while larger summer homes sprung up to line the shore of the lake. The City, however, didn’t want people, it wanted more grass, and in the 1950s ordered the residents to leave. Although much of the community was demolished, some residents refused to leave without a fight. Eventually they won the day and Ward’s Island remains the site of many small, eclectic homes. At one time a cottage community also thrived on Hanlan’s Point. Demand for an airport,

The Anglican church is one of the Toronto Islands’ most historic buildings.

It still hosts weddings.

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however, forced the removal of thirty-one cottages in 1938 to a new location on Algonquin Island, which was until then known as Sunfish Island. The original air terminal building now sits beside the runway of today’s Billy Bishop Airport.

Other vestiges from the days of the larger island village include the Rectory Café, housed in the manse of a former church minister; the lovely white wooden church, St. Andrew-by-the-Lake, which hosts many a wedding; and a pair of early bridges. Evidence of the bitter eviction feud lingers in the foundations and sidewalks that yet line the former lakeside road, now a walkway. A small amusement area known as Centreville and a restaurant have restored some of the summer fun to the islands.

NEW TOWN

By 1796, Simcoe had returned to England (where he died ten years later), and his successor, Peter Russell, was anxious to place his own distinct imprint upon the layout of the new capital. As Simcoe had done east of Yonge Street, Russell laid out an extension west of it stretching south of Lot Street (now Queen) between Yonge and Peter. The lots here were considerably larger than those in Old York. Special lots were set aside for the more important buildings, such as the parliament buildings and Government House.

The new centre of town was the area around today’s King and Simcoe. Upper Canada College stood north of King from 1829 to 1900; Government House, the lieutenant governor’s residence, between King and Wellington; and from 1829 to 1900 the parliament buildings themselves between Wellington and Front.

West of this extension, Toronto’s first effort at urban design was an area called New Town. The original plan for New Town, designed in 1833 by Deputy Surveyor H.J. Castle, focused on a circle at what is today the intersection of Bathurst and King. But the plan was revised, and the focus instead shifted to a Washington-style plan with two town squares, Clarence Square and Victoria Square, linked by a grand treed boulevard called Wellington Place (now Wellington Street West).

Bounded by Peter Street on the east (now Blue Jays Way), New Town stretched west to Garrison Creek, a now-vanished rivulet indicated 13

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today only by the curving pattern of Niagara Street. The largest lots lined the north side of Front Street, across which was a strip of land “for a public pleasure ground,” which if used for anything else would revert to the Crown. The railway companies, however, successfully lobbied for railway yards, and the lands did not revert to the Crown.

Although several of Toronto’s more prominent families took up the spacious lots along Front Street West, including the Anglican bishop, the receiver general, and the chief justice, New Town remained for the most part only sparsely developed.

As in Old York, the arrival of the railways changed the face of New Town utterly. The noise and the smoke of the steam engines and the factories they attracted soon chased away the fledgling aristocracy. The Grand Trunk and the Toronto and Hamilton (Great Western) Railways both coveted the shoreline for its access to shipping. By 1858 new landfill was extended into the waters of the lake, and wharves lined the shore from the fort to the market. Old York and New Town had been severed from their waterfront roots, a planning miscalculation that merely worsened over the years, compounded by more wharves, more rail lines, and ultimately, the ill-conceived elevated Gardiner Expressway and a condo canyon.

The grand town lots soon filled with factories and warehouses, and a century later, more changes arrived. However, there is evidence still of this early effort at grand urban design.

One piece is found in the configuration of the streets. Both Clarence Square and Victoria Square survive; the former now the site of a row of 1880s-era townhouses, while Victoria Square is now Victoria Memorial Square, with a number of old grave markers still in it. Between the two, Wellington Street has retained the unusual width planned for its now-lost grand role as the new town’s main boulevard.

Strangely out of place in a factory district, Wellington has retained its boulevard appearance in other ways, too, with trees lining the roadway, and the factories and warehouses set well back from the street. The vista remains elegant as well, the squares being easily seen from each other at their respective ends of the boulevard.

The land that became Victoria Memorial Square had been set aside in 1794 by Simcoe as a burial ground for Fort York. Tragically, its first 14

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The failed new development of New Town contains Toronto’s oldest burial ground.

burial was that of Simcoe’s own daughter, Katherine, at the age of only fifteen months. The grounds subsequently became the resting place for four hundred soldiers and their families. Interments ended in 1863.

In 1899, the Canadian Club of Toronto erected a monument in the square to the War of 1812. Time and vandalism took their toll, however, and rehabilitation became necessary. In 2007, it began. In 2010, seventeen surviving headstones were relocated to make a common wall at the east side of the square. A number of interpretive plaques now recount the early role of the location.

Clarence Square remained undeveloped until the late 19th century when a row of elegant townhouses was built along the north side.

Clarence Square remains a shady parkette.

Finding original buildings, however, is a little harder. Although most disappeared with the wave of industrialization, a few linger.

Workers’ houses line Draper Street between Wellington and Front, most sporting plaques proclaiming them to be heritage homes. This attractively preserved row, which dates from the 1890s, was described by legendary urban activist Jane Jacobs as “an urban jewel rescued from a wasteland of neglect and forgetfulness.” The Wellington Place 15

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Neighbourhood Association has maintained that mission. Historic homes at the northeast corner of Wellington and Portland and at 422 Wellington represent the last vestiges of Wellington Place’s attempts to be an urban boulevard, the latter being incorporated into (not surprisingly) a condo tower, and the former now a popular tavern.

Interestingly, as negative as the word factory or warehouse may sound, many of the structures now lining Wellington Place originally had such uses, and exhibit a quiet beauty of their own, having been built in a turn-of-the-20th-century era when architectural aesthetics were embellished on industrial structures and residences alike.

Farther from the grand boulevard, squeezed between two modern offices, number 24 Mercer Street, east of Clarence Square, is the 1859 house of then well-known lawyer John Reed, designed by his neighbour, notable architect John Tully.

However, the most prominent symbol of the attempt at a grand new town is found in what remains one of Toronto’s finest buildings, Osgoode Hall. When built in 1832, it stood majestically at the head of a country lane that is now called York Street. Designed by John Ewart, the original hall — named after first justice of the peace, William Osgoode — consisted only of what is today’s east wing. The centre block and west wing were added in 1844, and the famous cattle gates in 1866. The magnificent structure is a welcome relief amid the architectural tedium that now dominates University Avenue.

New Town now forms part of the King-Spadina Heritage District.

The Villages on the Lake Lakeshore Road, one of West Toronto area’s busiest roads, is also one of its oldest. Originally an Indigenous people's footpath, it predates even Yonge Street. Governor Simcoe’s surveyor, Augustus Jones, was working on it in 1791, two years before Simcoe’s arrival and five years before Yonge Street’s conception.

But even as late as 1812, there were no bridges over the main rivers, and travellers on Lakeshore had to resort to using the several toll ferries. At various points along the road, taverns sprang up to provide rest and refreshment. At other locations, wharves were opened to offer 16

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farmers and landowners a way to ship out grain, lumber, and other produce. Wherever there was a cove large enough to harbour a schooner or two, warehouses would appear, sometimes fleshing out into a larger community.

In 1853, the Toronto and Hamilton Railway, part of the Great Western Railway network, laid its tracks parallel to the lake and boosted the economies of the communities fortunate enough to rate a station.

Then, in 1910, the Lakeshore Road was paved and became known as the Hamilton Highway. In 1939, Queen Elizabeth, visiting Canada along with her husband King George VI, opened North America’s first limited-access highway, the Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW), beating out the Pennsylvania Turnpike by a year.

At each phase in the evolution of the lakeshore’s transportation saga, villages appeared, and others were swallowed up and vanished.

WINDERMERE

Windermere, the village, is long lost in the story of Toronto’s growth.

On Humber Bay between Grenadier Pond and the mouth of the Humber River, it contained a church, a general store, a bolt works, a handful of workers’ houses, and a small board-and-batten railway station. The church, St. Olave’s-by-the-Lake, was built in 1886 on land donated by the Ontario Bolt Company. Started after the arrival of the railways, the Bolt Company was located at the foot of today’s Windermere Avenue. By 1885 the company employed two hundred workers and was the largest factory west of Toronto. Nearby was the Ontario Rolling Mill Company, while another village industry was the Grenadier Ice Company, which began operation in 1880, adding icehouses and employing eighteen workers.

But the little lakeside village would soon fall to the suburban boom sweeping outward from Toronto. The Bolt Company owned eighty hectares of land, stretching back up the hill toward Bloor Street.

With the extension of streetcar service along Bloor, and speculation that the College Street service would be extended through High Park (which did not happen), the company subdivided the land between what is today Morningside Avenue (but then called College Street) and Bloor, and in 1890 Windermere became the attractive hillside 17

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suburb of Swansea. The Bolt Company was bought out by Stelco in 1910 and operated until 1989. Since the paving and widening of Lakeshore Road, and with the building of the Queen Elizabeth Way, all traces of old Windermere have vanished. The only evidence that there even was a place by that name is Swansea’s main thoroughfare, Windermere Avenue, which leads to the site of the one-time lakeside village, and in the name of St. Olave’s Road. Ellis Avenue marks the location of the Rolling Mill Company.

H U M B E R B AY

A short distance west of Windermere, the protection offered by the mouth of the Humber and the presence of a toll ferry over the river provided the impetus for the development of the little port of Humber Bay. As with toll booths on Ontario’s early roads, the need for travellers to stop — in this case, to wait for the ferry — led to the building of taverns at the location.

In 1803, ferryman Donald Cameron was shuttling travellers across the Humber at six cents per person, or sixteen cents per carriage and two horses. He was succeeded in 1815 by another Scotsman, named MacLean, who converted his dwelling into a pub, then the only stopping place between York and the Credit River, and so started Humber Bay on its way to becoming one of the more popular watering spots west of Toronto.

After MacLean perished in a snowstorm in 1834, his widow, “Mother” MacLean, operated the tavern until her death at ninety-four.

MacLean’s buildings were subsequently demolished to make room for the tracks of the Great Western Railway.

Humber Bay became a busy little port. In 1840 William Gamble erected a grist mill upstream on the Humber and barged his grain and barley down to his extensive wharves at its mouth. Steamships also docked here, disgorging both passengers and mail. Then the European markets to which Gamble shipped his produce collapsed and the banks foreclosed on his operation.

However, the demise of Gamble’s wharves did not mean the end of the port. Because of the many bad stretches along Dundas Street, the Lakeshore Road gradually became the busier of the two.

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After the ferry gave way to a crude log bridge in 1824, Humber Bay accumulated a notorious collection of taverns and inns. Devins Restaurant, with its second-floor dance hall, became a popular destination for York’s sporting crowd. John McDowell added a tavern in 1852, and three more appeared in the 1860s and ’70s.

The Royal Oak was noted for an oak tree growing through its veranda, its well-equipped reading room, and its popular banquet hall.

Charles Nurse operated a hotel along with his boat works. Beside it he added a fishpond and bicycle path. But likely the best known of the lot was John Duck’s tavern. Located to the west of Nurse’s hotel, Duck’s Wimbleton House provided an extensive “pleasure ground” with specimens of bears, ducks, and racoons on exhibit. Travellers could arrive by train or on steamers like the Canadian, which operated from the wharf at the foot of Spadina Avenue, or could tie up their own boats at his private wharf. His open-air ox roasts, complete with music, were wildly popular and often ended in drunken brawls.

As streetcar service developed along Lakeshore Road, and as new communities such as the railway town of New Toronto brought more development to the lakeshore, Humber Bay was soon just another suburb of sprawling Toronto, although it remained a part of the township, later the city, of Etobicoke.

The area’s role as a “sporting locale” expanded in the 1920s with the start of the Sunnyside Palace Pier project, a $125 million scheme which would have seen the building of a 550-metre pier, an auditorium, and a dance hall. Although severely reduced in scale by the Depression, the Palace Pier opened in 1941 and hosted such international dance bands as Les Brown, the Dorsey Brothers, and Duke Ellington. In 1963 the dance hall was destroyed by fire; the site is occupied today by the Palace Pier and Palace Place condominium towers. Between the tall buildings and the lake, a single stone block with historic images is the sole visible legacy of the establishment.

Increasing auto tourism after the opening of the Hamilton Highway brought a strip of roadside motels east of the Humber. These were a main form of accommodation until more modern hotels arrived on the scene. As the motel era faded, the properties lost their lustre and turned into shady destinations of dubious repute. Gradually they were 19

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replaced by condominium towers, the last of the motels being felled in 2018.

LONG BRANCH

At the end of the nineteenth century, even as Toronto was booming outward along its new streetcar lines, only a few kilometres from the end of the urban fringe lay “cottage country.” In those pre-automobile days, when streetcars and railways were the only means of mass transportation on land, there was little development beyond where the streetcar tracks ended. And it was “out there” that Torontonians had their summer playground.

Prior to 1883, the Long Branch area was still farmland. But in that year James Eastwood, realizing that the pollution of the city was driving Toronto’s more affluent residents in search of more distant summer haunts, sold his land to Thomas Wilkie, who subdivided it into 219 cottage lots that he called Sea Breeze Park. He left the four hectares along the lake as an open space for the purchasers to stroll. The plan consisted

What were once summer cottages line the lakeshore in the former resort community of Long Branch.

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of a half-dozen streets south of Lakeshore Road, with the main route into the area called Sea Breeze Avenue. In 1886, the ďŹ rst cottage was bought by Richard and Amy Ough. The next year the Oughs could watch the building of the magniďŹ cent Hotel Long Branch, with its Japanese balconies and pagoda tower. The Hotel Long Branch boasted

The original literature promoting the resort community of Long Branch.

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electricity, speaking tubes in every room, and telephone connection to Toronto. The rooms went for $15 per week. On the lawn by the lake were a pavilion and a Coney Island–style carousel.

While many vacationers arrived by train at the Long Branch station on the Grand Trunk, others boarded steamers like the Greyhound or the White Star at the Yonge Street wharf in Toronto and sailed along the lake.

The arrival of streetcar service changed all that. Chartered November 14, 1890, the Toronto and Mimico Electric Railway and Light Company began running streetcars from Sunnyside, along the lakeshore of Humber Bay to Humber River. In 1893 it was extended to Mimico, to Long Branch in 1894, and to Port Credit in 1905. In 1906 it was acquired by Toronto and York Radial Railway, before becoming part of the new Toronto Transportation Commission holdings in 1927. With regular streetcars clanging along Lakeshore Road to Long Branch, many of the summer cottages soon became permanent homes.

Many others were demolished over the years to make room for more modern houses. Nevertheless, a few of the original cottages still stand, such as 282 and 256 Lake Promenade, overlooking the park, and numbers 4 and 16 Long Branch Avenue, the current name for Sea Breeze Avenue, all dating from the 1890s. Even the Ough cottage still overlooks the lake from 262 Lake Promenade. The narrow width of Chapel Road, with a one-time cottage remaining at number 2, is a visible reminder of the community’s former role as cottage country. Unfortunately, the grandest building of the community, the elegant old hotel, burned in 1958. It was replaced by an apartment building.

L O R N E PA R K

Like Long Branch, Lorne Park began as a summer retreat for wealthy Torontonians. But unlike Long Branch, it didn’t start off as a cottage community. Instead, its first incarnation was that of an exclusive resort, or, as it was called in those times, a “pleasure ground.” Here, eight kilometres west of Long Branch, on thirty hectares of forested lakeshore, the Toronto Park Association opened its exclusive retreat, which included a “restaurant bar parlour” with separate parlour for ladies, 22

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bowling lanes, billiard tables, and a shooting gallery, along with picnic grounds, baseball diamonds, and merry-go-rounds. As with Long Branch, many vacationers arrived on the Toronto steamers.

Somewhat surprisingly, in less than a decade the enterprise was bankrupt. It was sold in 1886 to John Stackwell, who promptly subdivided the forested grounds into twenty-metre-wide building lots at $100 each. The hotel still stood, however, then renamed the Hotel Louise and leased to Thomas Anderton, who operated in it the Bodega Restaurant. By 1891 twenty-seven summer homes had been built, many facing a small, square, central park, and claiming names like the “Buenavista” or the “Linstock Villa.”

Lorne Park, however, was plagued with misfortune. The wharf collapsed suddenly in 1903, tossing passengers waiting for a steamship into the chilly lake. Fortunately, no one drowned, perhaps partly because by then most travellers were arriving by train at the attractive little Grand Trunk Station, which stood less than two kilometres away on Lorne Park Road. The hotel still wasn’t making a go of it and in 1910 became a private club for the residents. It finally burned to the ground in 1920, but by then, in 1919, beset by financial woes, the owners of the Lorne Park Estates development had sold the stock to the occupants themselves. In 1923 another plan of subdivision was registered to open more lots.

After the Second World War, the new lots quickly filled. The opening of the QEW had brought the once remote lake shore into Toronto’ s urban fold, and Lorne Park became a permanent residential neighbourhood. The houses that now line the narrow roads display a mix of moderate and luxury homes, while closer to the lake, a few of the elegant old summer homes still stand. Two examples can be found at 892 Roper and 913 Sangster, and others face onto the little park by the lake, as they did when they were first built. The W.J. Davis house — of the Davis family of the Davis and Henderson stationery company — overlooking the lakeside “commons” was built in 1889 and is now a municipally designated heritage structure Despite the suburbanization of the area, the older portions of Lorne Park still resemble a cottage community from the past. Closer to the lake, early roads, still private, are narrow, some permitting only 23

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a single lane of traffic, and large, shady trees cling to the roadsides, giving the appearance of a forest track. Despite its elegant heritage, Lorne Park oddly prides itself as being a “private” community, generally off limits to non-residents. It stands along Tennyson Avenue, south of the intersection of Lorne Park Road and Lakeshore Road.

ROSEBANK

Like Long Branch and Lorne Park, and unlike most of the other “lost” lakeshore villages, Rosebank, to the east of Toronto, did not begin as a pioneer tavern. Rather, this community, situated on the high east bank of the Rouge River at its entrance into Lake Ontario, was a summer resort. In the 1860s, the Rouge was effectively as distant from Toronto as Muskoka is today, and less developed.

Rosebank was established as a resort in the 1860s by John Pollock, and later purchased by William Cavan. By 1880 the families of Dr. Byron Field and Alex Brown had joined in. In 1885 Brown built a cookhouse and sleeping house and two more cottages were built by the Jewitts and the Woodleys around 1889.

The Rosebank House appeared, and was so popular a resort hotel that it was enlarged in 1897 and again in 1907, this time with the addition of a general store, a pavilion, and electricity. By then the community numbered seventeen cottages. Just a kilometre farther east, near the mouth of Petticoat Creek, around 1913 William Moore, MP, built his summer house — an estate known as Moorelands. It burned during the 1930s, and the grounds eventually became part of today’s Petticoat Creek Conservation Area.

During its heyday, so popular did the area become that the Grand Trunk built a special station and added Rosebank picnic specials to their regular trains. The Rosebank Hotel would send a stage to meet the train at the Rosebank station and shuttle the happy holidayers the short distance to the resort.

Around the Second World War, many of the cottages were being converted to year-round homes, a trend that increased with the opening of Highway 401 in 1958. Today, Rosebank Road has become another modern suburban thoroughfare. The station stood where Rodd Avenue still crosses the tracks.

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The Rosebank Hotel and Resort once attracted city dwellers to the banks of the Rouge River. They would arrive by train at Rosebank Station.

Summer does, however, still bring crowds to the banks of the Rouge. On the west bank a conservation area has been created along the beach on Lake Ontario, and the marsh is protected. The area lies within the Rouge National Urban Park. Bathers, fishers, and wildlife watchers carry on the summer tradition started by the Rosebank cottagers, even though the area is now entirely within Toronto’s suburban cloak. It even has a new railway station nearby: the Rouge Hill GO Station.

FA I R P O R T

The story of this bay community is tied up with that of the village of Dunbarton on Kingston Road (see chapter 5). In fact, its story takes over where that of Dunbarton leaves off. After J.T. Dunbar, who founded the village that took his name, realized that the wharves he had constructed at the north end of Frenchman’s Bay were too vulnerable to silting, he constructed new wharves closer to the lake. Here, on the east side of the bay, a townsite was laid out and named Fairport. It 25

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contained a store, a post office, two hotels, and several workers’ houses, with most of the development around the intersection of Front Road and Commerce Street. By the water were the wharves, grain elevators, and the ice houses of the Simcoe Ice and Fuel Company. A number of independent fishermen also operated out of Fairport.

When the Grand Trunk Railway built its line just north of Frenchman’s Bay in 1856, shipping from Fairport dropped drastically. Still, after heavy lobbying, the government pumped more than $80,000 into replacing the wharf, adding a barley elevator, and dredging the channel through the sandspit to the lake. But a U.S. tariff against barley spelled ruin for the port, and the facilities finally closed.

The elevator stood until it was torn down in 1915, although commercial fishing did carry on into the 1920s.

In the years leading up to the First World War, however, urbanites “discovered” Frenchman’s Bay and began to build small cottages on the sandspit and in the townsite.

During the 1920s, “commerce” returned to the waters of Frenchman’s Bay when a rum runner named “Black Jack” began smuggling liquor across the lake to thirsty Americans via the quiet waters of

An old ship’s propeller, in a park in the oldest portion of Fairport, on Frenchman’s Bay. 26

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the bay. The police, however, caught wind of the operation, and, in true “Untouchables” fashion, gunned him down in a late-night ambush.

During the 1950s, with the arrival of a new limited-access highway, the 401, commuters converted many of the cottages into permanent homes. Through the 1960s and ’70s, urban development engulfed the land around the old cottage community, and Fairport is now just another Toronto suburb.

But although surrounded by townhouse condominiums, a few vestiges of its early era can yet be found.

At the northwest corner of Wharf Street and Liverpool Road stands one of the old hotels, while at the southeast corner is a onetime store. On the swampy north end of the bay, the pilings of the original wharves, looking like mere tree stumps, still protrude from the water. Nearby, on the north side of Bayly Street, a stone arch underpass cuts under the CN railway tracks where the original road led from the docks to the village of Dunbarton. The street was closed decades ago when CN added more tracks, but the historic stone arch remains. One of Fairport’s oldest houses, that built by the O’Briens in the 1850s, now stands at the corner of Bayview and Front, having been moved from its original site on the sandspit. The little store that once served as a summer post office during the 1920s survives yet at 674 Front Street, near Commerce. Another early house survives, set back from the road on the north side of Wharf Street at 1279, although difficult to see behind the bushes.

But the shoreline of historic Fairport is no longer recognizable.

Extensive changes have included new parking, trails along the sandspit, and townhouse condominiums, while the entire site is dominated by the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station and its looming wind turbine.

As for the origin of the name Frenchman’s Bay? That likely derives from either a Sulpician priest, François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, who wintered there in 1669 with a band of Seneca, nearly starving to death, or a Marquis de Denonville, who stayed there in 1687.

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