History of the Beaches

 

 So this is happening.

And if you think the neighbourhood is "the Beach" and not "the Beaches," take it up with Richard. He's the author; I'm doing the Q part of the Q&A. Or read his explanation why in the book itself.  The Beaches, Creation of a Toronto Neighbourhood from University of Toronto Press

Local Service

I've been a member of my local historical society for longer than I can remember, though not the full forty years of its existence. 

I've never worked extensively in Toronto history, but through the West Toronto Junction Historical Society I have learned a lot of local history, got to know my neighbourhood, made friends, and made some contributions to help maintain an organization that is entirely volunteer. WTJHS has advocated for historical and architectural recognition, educated and entertained the public, introduced remarkable speakers and conferences, trained people in house and family research, maintained a publicly-accessible archives, published several well-received historical works, run webinars.

It's also a part of the community, even a pillar of the community. Every time I do something with or for the society, I have a nice sense of being part of the fabric of civil society.  It's one of the reasons I don't have to bowl alone.

This is to say, you ought to consider being part of your own historical or heritage society wherever you are. It's also to mention that the WTJHS is looking for some volunteers right now, to join its executive.  In particular, it's looking for a president.

If you happen to live in or be connected to the west side of Toronto, would you like to be president or something?  Info on the WTJHS here.  

Bradburn's Local history

Every Sunday lately the Toronto Star has enlivened its "Together" section with a quiz on Toronto history.  Props to Jamie Bradburn, who produces the column.  He draws on a seemingly limitless knowledge of local history matters. (I've lived in T.O. quite a while, but I flame out on his quiz every week.)

Which East York road is named after the founder of Laura Secord chocolates?

Thanks to its historical association with the production of roses, which community is known as “Flower City”?

\_O_/

Bradburn used to write most of the "Historicist" articles for the Torontoist blog, and I was regularly amazed about the amount of deeply researched history that went into every week's .

History of local history

Went round last week to hear a talk at the local historical society by my friend Ron Brown, who knows everything about the lost, remarkable, quirky, and unknown towns/roads/landmarks/natural wonders across Ontario, and indeed much of Canada.  There was the usual friendly, interested crowd.  Ron got them laughing by mentioning the Ford recall notice he'd recently seen -- and how disappointed he been to realize it only meant the automobile. (Evidently one can get away with some political sting.)

I have a constant admiration for historical societies. They seem to me like civic society.  Just because groups of citizens have decided to band together, they work to appreciate a community's built and natural environment, to preserve and defend when necessary, and constantly to share knowledge, just for the pleasure of it.

As it happened, the society whose event we were attending was also launching a new book about local history, Glimpses into Etobicoke's Past. The Etobicoke Historical Society has been active since 1958, and this anthology gathers essays it has been publishing since then. Most historical societies have a certain lineage shrine aspect to them and this book certainly bears marks of its origins:  lots of attention to early settlers, local families of note, and notable landmarks, not so much on indigenous or minority presence.

But we are lucky books like this one exist. Anyone who mouths the old cliche about Canadians taking no interest in their history should count how many collections of irreplaceable local history exist through the efforts of local historians. 

Historical Societes and Civic Society

Lambton House, not in January

Went down to Lambton House on the edge of the Humber River in west Toronto last night to hear the annual Howland Lecture of Heritage York. "York" is a former small city now amalgamated into the City of Toronto. Its local historical society, having played a key role in preserving Lambton House, a 1847 inn and only survivor of a mid-19th century milling complex where Dundas Road crosses the river, continues to be active in the community. The Howland lecture commemorates William P. Howland, miller, businessman, and politician, once the builder and owner of the inn.

The Lambton Lecture is usually on a historical topic, but last night's topic was "It’s Up to Us: Taking Action to Protect the Humber" and featured a Toronto city councillor, Gord Perks, and Heather Marshall of the environmental lobby TEA, Toronto Environmental Alliance. Their presentation was somewhat about issues in the Humber watershed, but mostly about how to advance progressive environmental policies in the face of a complacent city government and a hostile provincial government.

Cold raw night, uncommercial location, post-holiday lull with the Leafs on TSN and the usual cornucopia on Netflix. Still the place was packed, SRO. In fact, York Heritage has an active membership and most of its events are well attended. Last night's topic drew out a supplementary crowd of people with political and environmental bent, and suddenly they had a hit on their hands.

Who else does this kind of thing? It struck me once again how much local historical societies all over the country are prime elements in a thing often said to be collapsing, civic society. They have space, often in the buildings they have preserved. They have activist members with community and political links. They have a membership roster and promotional networks. Their historical programming is itself a contribution to community knowledge and cohesion. When they turn to civic and political issues, their instincts are for good planning, preservation of both natural and built environment, and civic accountability.

I'm not even a member of Heritage York -- I do pay dues to historical societies on either side of its turf -- and still I was kinda proud of what it achieved last night.

Local history in Toronto

Went down last night to the launch of Fort York Stories, an anthology of articles from Fife & Drum, the half-newsletter, half-history journal that has been coming from the Friends of Fort York for 25 years. It 's edited by Adrian Gamble, a history Ph.D candidates at York University, and includes articles by, among others, me.

The event made me glad again for the local historical societies I have joined over the years, for while I have never really worked in local history, what I pick up from the people who do very powerfully grounds me in the communities in which I live.

Ground me in politics too:  Friends of Fort York have had a vital part in the revitalization of the Fort York neighbourhood, once a bleak post-industrial mess, now a densely populated highrise community beside the lake, for whom the Fort's green spaces and public facilities are back yard and living room for all the 750 sq foot dwellers.

History of cemeteries in a secular age

Congregations dwindle, and churches close all over.  In the cities they sometimes turn into condos. In rural areas they may re-emerge as private homes or retail outlets or community halls.

But the cemeteries beside them endure. Who takes care of them when the congregations are gone?

In Cornwall, Ontario, recently, the problem was handed over to a backhoe and a dumptruck, and tombstones dating back to the 1830s ended up as rubble.

Turns out there actually is an agency for these matters, the Bereavement Authority of Ontario, and it is not pleased with the Presbyterian church that ordered the demolition.

That’s the law. When you’re buried, you’re buried in perpetuity…forever. The cemetery has to be responsible for the care and maintenance of a grave site.

As it happens, a large crowd of my ancestral in-laws are buried in a rural Catholic cemetery in western,Ontario. The church, like many others in that diocese, is long closed, but upkeep for the many little graveyards like it is apparently a serious ongoing burden for the diocese. Perpetuity does not come cheap.

Meanwhile, Cornwall historian and friend of this blog Stuart Manson has to take it personally:

He says his fourth great-grandfather, James Gillie, was and is probably still buried there.
“Our family has no knowledge about his body being disinterred and moved like some apparently were. So, from our perspective, he still lies still there in that cemetery although he’s probably rolling in his grave right now,” Manson said.

Photo credit: The Cornwall Newswatch -- which seems to do a pretty good job covering local news, in an era when local news outlets are about as endangered as local cemeteries.

6 on the Humber: creative public history

Ars Musica's Michael Tobey, tenor (centre left, with cap) singing "Joshua" forWalk the 6 West participants

Saturday we went down to the Humber River in west Toronto to follow "Walk the 6 West: History on the Humber," a terrifically creative piece of public history produced by a consortium of local history societies: the Etobicoke Historical Society, the York Pioneer, Heritage York, West Toronto Junction HS, Swansea HS, etc.  In recent years these groups have grasped that working together they can leverage grant funding and deliver substantial audiences for all kinds of public events.

Saturday's was an ambitious walk on a beautiful afternoon: severla hundred people walking 3 kilometres along the Humber riverside trails (and often 3 kilometres back). The walkers encountered:

• William Pearce Howland giving a bit of his political campaign speech, delivered locally in 1864
• Artist Tom Thomson, dead 100 years this month, describing his early days in Toronto, when he took the train out from Toronto to sketch along the Humber shore. 
• Anna Leung, a Chinese-Canadian who broke the colour bar in Toronto theatres and Mrs Brown, local African-Canadian shopkeeper, among a variety of characters from the local past.  
• Ars Musica, the Toronto opera group, presenting a vignette from its opera-in-development about an African-American who took the underground railroad to Canada West and farmed locally. 
• Cheri Maracle from the Six Nations of Oshweken with a bit of her one-woman show about Pauline Johnston,,
• A moment from Mixed Company Theatre and playwright Rex Deverell's work-in-progress about local girl turned western and northern photographer Geraldine Moodie.

These might all have been little talks from a standard walking tour, I suppose, but the historical society organizers had partnered with theatre companies and musical groups to turn each into a brief musical or theatrical presentation.

It was a unique and dynamic event. The historical societies had used their membership mailing lists and a few public notices to generate an audience of some 500 people, carefully organized into four escorted groups at various times, half from the south end of the route, some from the north. Performers were paid, but their groups also got exposure -- and evidence for their own grant-getting efforts of public outreach and public support.

The whole event was a pleasure for the body and mind, and reminded me again of the vigour and creativity that comes from local historical societies all over the country, in all kinds of clever and imaginative ways -- and the appreciative audiences that come forth when they get the opportunity.

Local History at the Old Sydney Society

Parnaby

When my good friend and colleague, the late and lamented Robert Morgan of Windsor, Ont, moved to Sydney, Nova Scotia in the 1960s to teach at the little college that then represented higher education on Cape Breton Island, he found there was no local history society. He and others founded the Old Sydney Society. I wrote some years ago about their achievements, and it all seemed like a shining example of the work history societies do for communities all over Canada

Morgan first went to Cape Breton Island in 1962 to teach history at the local college, now Cape Breton University. There was a strong local culture, but no local history courses, no local history societies, not a single local museum or heritage property on the island.
...

The society rallied support from local notables and successful expatriates, and the supportive local MLA became a cabinet minister, and the movement snowballed. “I think we have forty historical societies on the island now, and 25 museums," Morgan says.

My still flourishing friend and colleague Ken Donovan reports that on January 28 the Old Sydney Society will mark its fiftieth year of monthly public talks on Cape Breton history when historian Andy Parnaby of Cape Breton University (the little college has grown) speaks on "The Antigonish Movement and the Sydney Steel Crisis of 1967."

On the Toronto Carrying Place

The leaves say Time for Change

On a beautiful Thanksgiving weekend in southern Ontario, we went walking north of Toronto. The sun was bright, the temperatures shirt-sleeve, and the fall colours hitting their peak.

This tree above stands just over one of the branches of the Humber, hence not far from the Toronto Carrying Place, the ancient trail from Lake Ontario to the Holland Marches and thence on to Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay. After attending the Carrying Place seminar a couple of weeks ago, I've been reading about it in a couple of books:

The recent one is Glenn Turner's Toronto Carrying Place, built around an account of his own walk from south to north.  As he underlines while doggedly trying to follow the trail, most of it is absolutely gone under urban and suburban development and the habit of putting new roads on top of old routes.

"The Carrying Place was part of the centuries-old network of trade routes that led from the St. Lawrence Valley into the Upper Great Lakes and the Canadian Northwest. It was an alternative to the more traditional route up the Ottawa River and was particularly useful to the peoples living north and south of Lake Ontario. Though technically a portage, the Toronto Carrying Place was too long to easily carry a canoe. Travellers were more likely to abandon their canoes at one end, and make or obtain new canoes at the other end."

The slightly old account is my friend the late Heather Robertson's Walking into Wilderness, which starts at the same place but continues north of the Carrying Place itself to include the Georgian Bay end of the route. It offers less of the walking/canoeing experience and more of the broad historical context of south-central Ontario history and prehistory, the fur trade, etc.

Glenn Turner frequently notes how little the Carrying Place registers in the modern landscape north of Toronto -- an observation doubtless applicable many other places across Canada. We are lucky to have so much substantial, published local history to help out.

History of Pelee Island (with update)

Mostly swamp once, and the battlefield was off to the left, somehow

The blogger has been travelling more and posting less lately, and anyway these are the dog days when nobody's history blog seems very active (or generating many hits, either, 'tseems)

But a small gleaning from the travel:

I learned (who knew?) that there was actually a battle on and for Pelee Island in Lake Erie once. It was not in the War of 1812 but during the 1838 skirmishes that followed the rebellions of 1837. Where your sympathies lie may depend on your view of those conflicts, but the British and Canadian forces drove their rivals off the island and back to the US of A.  It was winter. All troops on both sides got to the island on foot across the ice. Most of the battle was fought on the ice rather than on the land.  Casualties included "fell through, drowned."

Also much of Pelee Island was originally marsh and swamp.  Its modern shape and size are the result of extensive diking and draining in the late 19th century, and the pumps are still running to keep (most of) it that way.

Which suggests: there is pretty much nowhere that people won't fight over if they get the chance.  And there has always been remarkable enthusiasm for creating new land, even when there is lots of the old stuff available not far away and seemingly more conveniently situated.

As you may guess, Pelee Island Heritage Centre is a pretty terrific local history museum where we spent quite a while the other day.We were the only people there but it's a quiet island. Crowds were larger at the winery tour, but not by so much.

Update, August 16:  Chris Raible comments:

Chris, you are, alas, not alone in not realizing how many Rebellion battles were fought along the Upper Canada/United States border in 1838, that is after defeats of December 1837. Navy Island set the pattern for several incursions that followed that winter/spring- invade an Upper Canadian island in order to establish a base on British territory that could be fairly easily defended and also fairly easily supplied from the US.

In addition to Navy Island in the Niagara River there were invasions of Bois Blank and Fighting Island in the Detroit River, Hickory Island in the St. Lawrence, and, as you noted, Pelee Island. They were not fighting to create "new land" but to establish launching points for larger battles on the mainland. All failed and the next wave of invasions (summer and fall of 1838) were full land invasions - Short Hill (Niagara Peninsula), the Windmill (near Brockville), and Windsor - all intended to stir up the local population and re-ignite the fires of Rebellion.

All these border incursions - dubbed "Patriot Wars" by their participants and sympathizers - were disastrous, largely because they were not supported, but were firmly discouraged, by the American government that had no interest in another war with Great Britain. They did, however, demonstrate that, in the border states of Michigan, Ohio, New York and Vermont, there was strong American support for the Canadian cause. You undoubtedly know that many rebellion participants were sentenced to be transported to Van Diemen's Land. You may not know that of  those who actually made the full trip - that is, who did not escape or be legally released en route - none were December 1837 rebels but rather men captured in failed 1838 raids - and most of these were not Upper Canadians, but Americans. Thanks, Chris, for reminding us all that there is much more to the whole Rebellion story than the debacle at Montgomery's Tavern.

History is where you find it

Just to say that Danielle Terbenche's piece in Active History recently was a very nice piece of historical work on a small subject: a few neglected graves leading to an observation about 1920s social history. She begins:

In 2012, I began attending Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Thornhill, Ontario. After learning I was a historian, some church members invited me to join the cemetery board. 

Churches -- even though many of them in my neighbourhood are being turned into condos --  remain the custodians of a vast amount of historical material. Good to know some historians remain in touch with that source.