Category: heritage

Remembering the Don

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Cover of the book Remembering the Don

I’ve mentioned Charles Sauriol and his book Remembering the Don before in this space and have used it dozens of times to educate myself about the social history of the Don Valley. I’ve made more trips than I remember to the library to borrow Remembering the Don and Pioneers of the Don, both long out of print and seemingly destined to remain that way. So imagine my surprise when I saw a small stack of new copies of Remembering in Book City on Danforth today, selling for the princely sum of $3.99 each. I snapped one up without a second thought. I figured that someone had finally reprinted it, but as far as I can tell, this is a genuine first edition, first printing from 1981 and has probably just been sitting in a box in a warehouse somewhere for almost thirty years. I swear that I’ve scoured the city and online for new copies of this book with no luck before, but now even Amazon has a single copy in stock.

This gives me an opportunity to share a passage from Remembering the Don that forever altered my impression of voyageurs when I first read it some twenty years ago. I’d always thought of voyageurs as rough, hardy adventurers who criss-crossed the wild expanses of pre-Canada in the name of commerce. These were Real Men (and they would have been Real Women too, if any of them had been women) who would have made the Old Spice guy look like Rudy in Meatballs. Then I read Sauriol quoting artist Fred Finley on the voyageurs’ route through southern Ontario:

Each Spring, in the early nineteenth century, the traders of the great North-West Company of Montreal set out for their posts, scattered far across Canada. When their laden bateaux reached York—now Toronto—the voyageurs turned up the Don River, ascending it until they reached the juncture of the Don and Yonge Street. Here the boats were lashed to wheels and pulled bodily up the old road to the Holland River, where they continued their voyage by water to the West. Thus were trading goods carried far across the continent during Canada’s early years.

Sure, it takes a Real Man to paddle and portage his way across a wild continent. But what’s this guff about strapping their canoes to carts and wheeling them up Yonge Street? It seems like cheating.

The Newmarket Canal

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Standing in front of the middle lock

There’s an interesting piece of history hiding in the outer reaches of the GDA (Greater Dodgeville Area, loosely defined as any place I can reach by bike) just north of Newmarket: the scattered remnants of the Newmarket Canal.

This never-finished canal was to be a southerly branch of the Trent-Severn canal from Lake Simcoe to Aurora via the Holland River. This was not a trivial undertaking for many reasons, not the least of which was that there just wasn’t enough water in the river to operate a canal. The initial plan for the canal called for reservoirs to be fed by water diverted from Lake Wilcox, the source of the Humber River. That plan was later shelved as being too expensive and politically unpopular, and was replaced by a scheme to pump the necessary water uphill from Lake Simcoe to the top of the Oak Ridges Moraine at Aurora.

Work on the canal was to be done in three stages: the first required that the river be dredged from Lake Simcoe to Holland Landing. The second required three locks to be built between Holland Landing and Newmarket (the second of those locks is pictured above). The final phase, from Newmarket to Aurora, would require an additional five or six locks depending on the final route, which still hadn’t been finalized when construction began.

Even as the work on the canal began in 1906 and continued for five years, there was still no clear plan for keeping enough water in the canal to keep it navigable during any period of the year outside the spring thaw. Increasing public opposition, escalating costs, and a change in government ultimately doomed the project in 1912 after years of political shenanigans, interference, and scandals that would make most modern politicians blanche. At that point, most of the work on the canal through Holland Landing and up to Newmarket had been completed. The three lock structures and the base of one swing bridge that had been built before the project was called off still stand along the east branch of the Holland River north of Newmarket.

James T. Angus’s comprehensive book, A Respectable Ditch: A History of the Trent-Severn Waterway 1833–1920, details the tortuous political and physical paths of the entire project’s 90 years of debate, design, and construction. It devotes a chapter to the Newmarket Canal debacle and is well worth reading.

This was at least the second planned canal along this route. The other would have gone straight through the Oak Ridges Moraine and connected to Lake Ontario via the Humber River.

I first visited two of the abandoned lock structures almost 20 years ago, shortly after learning about the Newmarket Canal in Ron Brown‘s excellent guidebook, 50 Unusual Things to See in Ontario. I finally visited the third lock and the swing bridge just this past September.

Looking back now, 50 Unusual Things was probably what set me off on my habit of exploring the GDA and finding unusual sights and abandoned bits of the city. Damn you, Ron Brown!

My most recent cycling visit to the canal was on Saturday, during which I was trapped under a sheltering bridge for an hour and a half by that big storm that whipped across southern Ontario. I eventually called Risa to rescue me with the car after giving up hope that the lightning, rain, and wind would let up in time for me to get back home at a reasonable hour.

The irony here is that I was stuck within spitting distance of the East Gwillimbury GO station. I could easily have gone home by train, but the next one was 36 hours away on Monday morning and I wouldn’t have been able to take my bike on it. Hello GO? Weekend service, please.

More pictures below the fold.

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Bridge from the past

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Concrete bowstring bridge outside Guelph

If you’re anything like me, sometimes you see something at the side of the road that you just have to stop and check out. This is a prime example from last year: a concrete bowstring bridge beside the current alignment of Stone Road outside Guelph. According to the crossbar, it was built in 1916.

Concrete bowstring bridge outside Guelph

The modern bridge that carries Stone Road today was built in 2005, but it’s difficult to believe that the old bridge was still carrying cars just four years ago; it looks like it’s in pretty rough shape.  The bridge was designated as a heritage structure in 2003 (PDF) and became part of a walking trail along the Eramosa River after Stone Road moved a few metres north to the new bridge.

Concrete bowstring bridge outside Guelph

Concrete bowstring bridge outside Guelph

I don’t know when we stopped building this kind of bridge, but I think the two that still exist in the Don Valley date from around the same era as this one. The sight of a concrete bowstring bridge always makes me smile; they seem to strike the perfect balance between elegance and industry.

Report Card, 1935

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Report card from Ryerson Public School

I can tell you one thing for sure: if I’d gone to Ryerson Public School in the 1930s, I would definitely have failed sitting, standing, and walking correctly and coming to school well rested. But I would have aced making an effort to control my temper. All of the other qualities of a good citizen could have gone either way. Check out the full-sized scan to see all of the things they don’t teach in school any more.

Lost Passmore Avenue

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 Passmore Avenue looking west, west of Beare RoadPassmore Avenue looking west from west of Beare Road.

If you’re familiar with Passmore Avenue in Scarborough at all, it’s probably as an unremarkable industrial street that runs in two discontinuous sections between Kennedy Road and Markham Road. But along with the rest of the concession roads in Scarborough, it long predates suburbia: it was laid out and cleared in the 1800s. On an 1878 map, Passmore (then known only as Concession Road 5) stretched 14 km clear across the township of Scarborough with only three short sections missing where the road would have crossed the Rouge River. More modern maps and aerial photos show that Passmore remained a country road crossing Scarborough well into the 1960s, when portions of it started falling to suburban development or neglect.

Although the Passmore name has virtually disappeared over the last 50 years as Scarborough grew from farming township into a suburb, most of the original route still carves its way through the former borough. West of Markham Road, the original road allowance is given over to portions of more than a dozen different suburban roads and park pathways that trace the old road, starting with Gordon Baker Road in the west and continuing to Ketchum Place near Middlefield Road. Drivers can’t follow the entire road thanks to all of the twisty-weavy suburban streets, but multi-use paths directly connect the whole route (except for one block) to allow a continuous 8 km long suburban walking or cycling tour along the old right of way from Victoria Park Avenue to beyond Markham Road. There’s no physical evidence of the original road here other than the straight route through the heart of suburbia.

East of Markham Road, Passmore was never much more than a dirt road through the countryside. Except for three very short half-blocks that still exist, most of it no longer appears on maps and has dropped off the municipal street grid. Yet the old road allowance remains largely open to intrepid hikers in this rural corner of the city. The most accessible portion of Passmore Avenue runs between Gordon Murison Lane and Beare Road, where a line of utility poles stands guard over the old dirt road as it dips into a small valley, passes farm fields on either side, and crosses a small tributary of the Rouge River before climbing back up a low hill at the other end.

A partial tour of the eastern half of Passmore and more photos are below the fold.

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Spring on the Spit: Quonset hut

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Quonset Hut on the Leslie Street Spit

This old Quonset hut is familiar to anyone who has gone for a stroll or bike ride on the Leslie Street Spit. Shawn Micallef wrote an article in the Star last fall about the history of Quonsets in general and this one in particular:

Above the front door are the faded words “Testing Building.” It once housed the Toronto Port Authority’s gauge for measuring lake levels.

It has played a role in films over the years, including Bulletproof Monk and Canadian Bacon. For the 2006 Michael Douglas film, The Sentinel, it was converted into an east coast fishing shanty, complete with lobster traps.

Shawn also reports that the Quonset will be demolished and a proper visitor centre erected in its place. Although the building is obviously past its best-before date, I’ll still miss it when it’s gone.

Tomorrow: the final edition of Spring on the Spit.

Pottery Road: The original Toronto Bypass

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Somewhat related to my previous post, Pottery Road has a little-known connection to another Toronto street: Davenport Road. The East York Library monograph Fascinating Facts About East York (and some of them really are, at least to east-end geeks like me) says that Pottery Road:

may have been a part of an old Indian trail that crossed the city along what is now Davenport Road and entered the Don Valley through the Rosedale Valley ravine. There are records of the Mississauga Indians having encamped on the Don near Pottery Road as late as 1831.

I always find it interesting that so much of our modern infrastructure follows old trails, watercourses, and terrain, even decades or centuries after after the old features have ceased to exist on any meaningful level. Technology may have brought us huge bridges across the valley and personal motorized transportation, yet there’s Pottery Road, tracing an old footpath in the Don and still used by thousands of people a day. Some things never change.

Old Pottery Road walking tour

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Pottery Road

Frequent northbound travellers on the Bayview Extension have probably noticed the “Pottery Road” street sign pointing to a glorified supermarket driveway at the top of the hill, just south of Moore Avenue. Some may even have wondered how it relates to the more familiar street of the same name almost 1.5 kilometers to the south, winding up the valley wall to Broadview Avenue. The answer to this puzzle is that the two Pottery Roads used to be one, connecting Broadview and Moore Avenues, roughly following Cudmore Creek for much of its length.

Most of the road was abandoned when the Bayview Extension was constructed in the late 1950s. The section running from Broadview to Bayview was left mostly intact (and the top of it was later realigned to allow an easier climb out of the valley), as was a very short block at the northern end of the road, now flanked by parking lots for a supermarket and a bank.

What about the kilometer of the road that used to connect the two remaining sections? Unlike most abandoned roads that exist only for short stretches of their former selves, old Pottery Road is unique: its entire original route from Broadview to Moore is still open and can be hiked from beginning to end. Read on for the complete walking tour.

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Dodge Boat Works

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Dodge Water Car

I went to the Toronto Boat Show last week, armed with a “working press” badge that allowed me into a semi-restricted area for the wakeboarding demonstration on the big indoor lake. Fun.

The Antique and Classic Boat Society, Toronto Chapter had a large display outside the show featuring, well, antique and classic boats. One in particular caught my eye, the oddly-named Dodge Watercar from the Dodge Boat Works. Founded by Horace Dodge Jr., son of one of the brothers who established the eponymous automobile company, the Dodge Boat Works shut down in 1936 after just 12 years of production, never quite able to translate the automobile company’s achievements on the road into the same kind of success on the water. You can read the full story of Horace Jr. and the Dodge Boat Works in the Summer 2002 issue of Rudder, the quarterly magazine of the Antique and Classic Boat Society (not the Toronto Chapter).