Willowdale: Yesterday's Farms, Today's Legacy

By Scott Kennedy

Stories of the evolution of Willowdale from its earliest acquisition of land to today’s urban environment.

In 1855, Willowdale’s post office opened in Jacob Cummer’s store on Yonge Street. Today, streets in Toronto’s community of Willowdale are peppered with the names of the early farm families of North York, such as the Shepards, Finches, and Kennedys.

Author Scott Kennedy’s intriguing stories embrace the evolution of Willowdale from the earliest acquisition of land to today’s urban environment. You will read about combat training for the ill-fated Rebellion of 1837 that took place in the community fields; about Mazo de la Roche’s estate, Windrush Hills, which stood at Bayview and Steeles, and is a Zorastrian temple today; about the Kingsdale Jersey Farm, which was located on Bayview until 1972; and about Green Meadows, the estate of "Bud" McDougald, which was the last operating farm in North York.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Nov 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781459717527

Book preview

Willowdale.

{Chapter One}

The Shepards:

Joseph and Catherine

Of all the pioneer names in this book, none resonate more with present-day Torontonians than this one does. The east-west artery named after this earliest of pioneer families is one of the busiest and most talked about in the city. Sheppard Avenue (as was common then, both spellings, Shepard and Sheppard, are found in the records) runs all the way from the Humber River in the west to the Rouge River in the east. Like its neighbour to the south, Lawrence Avenue, also named for a pioneer family, Sheppard Avenue spans virtually the entire city. A major transportation corridor, as well as a magnet for development, it is seldom out of the news — a fitting legacy for patriarch Joseph Shepard, who traversed this land on a regular basis in a time before white settlement.

Joseph’s early days are cloaked in mystery, owing to the destruction of many records around the time of the Revolutionary War in the United States, but it seems he was born in New Hampshire to Irish immigrant parents, on August 10, 1765. Mozart was nine years old and had already spent over three years performing in the palaces and concert halls of Europe. Joseph Shepard — while precocious in his own way — would prove a much later bloomer. In 1774, when Beethoven was turning four, the Shepards moved to Upper Canada, apparently settling in the Bay of Quinte area. They were Loyalists and likely felt uncomfortable living south of the border, as the potential of armed conflict with Britain became ever more likely.

Sporadic mentions of Joseph appear during the late 1700s, but it’s hard to know who to believe. The Globe newspaper of April 26, 1899, reported that he came to North York in 1785 to travel with Native traders, as he had done in the Quinte area. This seems quite likely, as Joseph would be twenty years old by then, and practised in the physical challenges that travelling with Natives on their trading routes demanded. The next we hear of Joseph is that he apparently applied for and received a land grant in Kingston in 1790 that he did not accept. His permanent relationship with North York would begin three years later.

By 1793, Joseph Shepard was helping the very first white settlers in the area to erect their initial primitive log cabins. In 1798, after helping the others with their shanties, Joseph built his own cabin on the northwest corner of present-day Yonge and Sheppard. In 1802, he bought the lot where his cabin stood from a William Dickson, who had acquired this Lot 16-1W (on the north side of Sheppard, running west from Yonge Street to Bathurst) in 1798, a year after it had been granted to James Johnson. It was still mostly forest when Joseph purchased it.

On April 11, 1803, Joseph married Catherine Fisher, a member of the Pennsylvania German family, led by patriarch Jacob Fisher, who had come to Upper Canada in 1796 and settled near what today is Dufferin and Steeles after receiving a land grant from the Crown. The Fishers were accompanied on their move by Jacob Kummer (later to become Cummer), who had married Catherine’s sister, Elizabeth, when the families lived in Pennsylvania. The Fisher family farmed, constructed mills, opened a blacksmith shop, and soon a little village named Fisherville was born at the crossroads. The Fisherville Presbyterian Church, constructed in 1856, was moved to Black Creek Pioneer Village in 1960, where it can still receive visitors.

At present-day Yonge and Sheppard, Joseph and Catherine were wasting little time starting their family. Their first child, Thomas, was born in 1804, followed by three other sons and four daughters. In 1805, Joseph applied for and was granted the deed to Lot 17-1W, directly north of the family’s first farm, giving them all a little something to look forward to and some room to grow.

The Shepards’ days were now defined by hard labour and incremental progress — clearing land, burning the stumps, selling the potash, planting whatever they could, raising some livestock, raising a family, and making their cabin more comfortable. The latter two responsibilities would have fallen almost exclusively to Catherine. Joseph, still as involved and gregarious as ever, somehow found time to serve York Township in a number of appointed and elected positions. Beginning in 1804, he was township assessor for three terms and pound-keeper for two, which, in those days, included more lost and errant horses, swine, and cattle than cats and dogs. He was also elected overseer of highways and fence-viewer.

Both these latter positions had the potential to put Joseph in frequent conflict with his neighbours. As an overseer of highways, he had to make sure that the settlers were clearing the road allowances around their farms as per the conditions of their Crown land grant applications and take action if they were negligent. As a fence-viewer, he was obliged to settle disputes among neighbouring farmers with respect to livestock caught wandering onto other peoples’ farms. At the time, hogs and cattle were marked for identification, but allowed to graze at large in the country. When they were caught trespassing on fenced land, they were impounded by the landowner and the fence viewer was called in to make sure that the fences on the property met the township specifications that had been designed to keep the wandering livestock out. As can be imagined, this would have sparked many a heated argument that Joseph would have had to settle in such a way that all parties, Joseph included, would be able to continue living as neighbours on good terms.

In 1807, Joseph took his political involvement to the next level when he allied himself with the fledgling reform movement in Upper Canada, which was beginning to speak out against injustices the farmers believed themselves to be suffering at the hands of the ruling Family Compact. The farmers felt that the Family Compact, who controlled the government through their closed network of entitled families, were guilty of corruption, land speculation, religious favouritism, and administrative extravagance. That year, Joseph chaired meetings to support Robert Thorpe, a judge of the Court of the King’s Bench in Upper Canada, in his campaign to make the Family Compact more accountable. Though the reform movement wasn’t really organized until the 1820s, Joseph stood for election to Upper Canada’s lower house, running on a reform platform. A split in the reform vote led to his defeat by the government candidate, Thomas Ridout, who had already served as sergeant-at-arms to the House of the Assembly and clerk of the peace for the Home District.

To some, Joseph Shepard was an unlikely reformer since he was a supporter of the Church of England (Anglican), an allegiance usually accompanied by Loyalist tendencies, and, in fact, he did fight with the British troops in the War of 1812 as a forty-seven-year-old private in the 3rd York Militia. He was seriously wounded at the Battle of York in April 1813 when the powder magazine at Fork York was intentionally blown up to prevent it from falling into the hands of the American invaders. Catherine found him the next morning, unconscious and lying in his own dried blood. His injuries, including broken ribs and a mangled left thigh, were serious enough to warrant a lifetime pension. In addition, he was given one hundred acres in Tecumseth Township in Simcoe County in appreciation for his