The year 1793 saw the establishment, on the northern shore of Lake Ontario in Upper Canada, of the garrison town of “muddy” York (now Toronto), all laid out in a neat little ten-block grid that would have made the Romans blush with pride. Some seven years later, its first jail was built on the south side of King Street, just east of Yonge Street, to accommodate a bewildering jumble of men, women, children, lunatics, debtors, and inmates awaiting trial or execution of sentence.
Henry Scadding, nineteenth-century scholar and chronicler of long-ago Toronto, describes this appallingly primitive structure in his book Toronto of Old as “a squat unpainted wooden building with hipped roof, concealed from persons passing in the street by a tall cedar stockade such as those which we see surrounding a Hudson’s Bay post or a military wood-yard. At the outer entrance hung a billet of wood suspended by a chain communicating with a bell within.” That wood-chunk-and-chain communication device was a mischief magnet for naughty boys. One “clever youth,” notes Scadding, received very rough treatment from the custodian’s son on being caught in the act of pulling on the billet and running away.
The basic materials used for construction were not the issue. With the exception of the first Houses of Parliament of Upper Canada, two “elegant” brick halls connected by a covered walkway at the corner of Berkeley and Palace (now Front) streets, the first hastily constructed buildings that sprang up in the new town during the last few years of the eighteenth century were all built using the only material that came readily to hand: wood.
However, none of them could possibly have been as wretched as that bleak structure at the corner of King Street and what is now Leader Lane. Consisting of ten cells, each measuring ten feet by fourteen feet, and two additional rooms with the luxury of “turn-up” beds for the jailer and the keeper, it was the jail of the Home District, one of the four huge tracts of land that constituted Upper Canada (now Ontario) at the time.
By 1811 its condition was “dilapidated and comfortless,” and, clearly, hazardous to all. John Beikie, the local sheriff, sombrely reported to the city magistrates “that the sills of the east cells of the Jail of the Home District are completely rotten; that the ceilings in the debtors’ rooms are insufficient; and that he cannot think himself safe, should necessity oblige him to confine any persons in said cells or debtors’ rooms.” In December of that year, Beikie submitted a letter to the magistrates containing a further litany of serious complaints: “The Prisoners in the Cells … suffer much from Cold and Damp, there being no method of communicating heat from the Chimnies [sic], nor any Bedsteads to raise the Straw from the Floors which lie nearly, if not altogether, on the ground.” He suggested setting up a small stove in the lobby between each range of cells and providing rugs or blankets for the “unhappy Persons confined.” And unhappy they certainly must have been, sleeping on a thin layer of straw and totally without heat in an oversized log cabin in the depths of a frigid Upper Canadian winter. Reportedly, they would sometimes escape through the roof to show their extreme disapproval of the abysmal conditions.
“Muddy” York’s first jail, built around 1800. The primitive log cabin surrounded by a wooden palisade was situated on the corner of what is now King Street East and Leader Lane.
It wasn’t as if folks back then weren’t aware of best practices when it came to building jails. In August 1796, Lieutenant Peter Russell, administrator of Upper Canada, stated in a letter quoted by Edith G. Firth in The Town of York 1793–1815: A Collection of Documents of Early Toronto that when laying out a jail “the Scite [sic] … should be chosen high & dry, for the sake of health & defence.” Russell also had firm ideas on the inventory requirements for an up-to-date jail. In a letter in May 1798, this one to Alexander McDonell, sheriff of the Home District, Russell advises that McDonell “will likewise be pleased to provide Handcuffs and other Irons for binding gross Offenders, and stocks for punishing those who may deserve such Chastisement.”
In addition to the regular brutal varieties of “chastisement”— flogging, branding, stocks — the threat of capital punishment always loomed large. In 1800, a certain Humphrey Sullivan, as reported in a court document in Firth’s collection, was convicted in York for knowingly passing a counterfeit note. The chief justice rose, recommended the man “to the mercy of God for pardon and salvation,” and sentenced him to death.
All types of punishment would generally be carried out in a place thronged with onlookers for maximum effect, such as a marketplace, and (or so the authorities hoped) would serve as a stern warning to other possible transgressors.
Scadding describes a public execution that was held in front of York’s original jail — it was “ridiculous, were not the occasion so seriously tragic.” Who knows what crime, grave or trivial, the condemned man had committed? One thing was for sure: he categorically refused to walk the plank placed between the cart on which he stood and the scaffold where he was to be hanged. In an attempt to help the sheriff, whose job it was to organize the hanging, and to encourage the doomed man to cooperate, the officiating clergyman gave a demonstration. He climbed onto the plank and walked toward the scaffold. “See how easy it is?” you can imagine him saying. “The condemned,” writes Scadding, “demur[red] and openly remark[ed] on the obvious difference in the two cases.” Eventually, the noose was placed around the neck of the “wretched culprit,” and the cart was wheeled away. Instead of a quicker and presumably more humane death from a broken neck, the victim died by slow strangulation.
One source lists the number of men and women living in York in 1797 as 241. Although the population fluctuated, numbers continued to rise. In 1820, there were 1,240 residents. Three years later, the town consisted of 209 houses, twenty-seven stores, and five storehouses. Accommodating the expanding criminal element that accompanied this growth meant that a new and bigger jail was urgently required.
So, in 1824, Jail Number One was replaced by Jail Number Two, situated a few paces away on the north side of King Street near Church Street. In his Landmarks of Toronto, John Ross Robertson, the founder of the Toronto Evening Telegram, describes the jail as “a good, substantial, plain-looking two-storied red brick building.” Scadding, however, was much less complimentary, saying that the jail was “of a pretentious character, but of poor architectural style.” This plain, poorly styled building had an equally ugly twin on its eastern flank: the court house. A pediment like that of a Greek temple stood at the top of both buildings, and stone pilasters ran up the front and outer edges. There were gables and chimneys, and a stone staircase at the front to finish off the picture. The parish stocks took grim pride of place at the entrance to the jail.
York’s second jail, built in 1824 on the corner of what is now King Street East and Toronto Street. Henry Scadding, nineteenth-century chronicler of long-ago Toronto, described it as “of poor architectural style.”
The buildings were designed by multitalented doctor, lawyer, architect, and politician William Warren Baldwin, and the combined cost for the two was £3,800 [$15,200]. On April 24, as was customary, there was a stone-setting ceremony, which was attended by dignitaries including His Excellency Lieutenant Governor Maitland, members of the Executive Council, an assortment of judges, lawyers, and magistrates, and an elite group of York townsfolk.
Scadding picks up the story here with a quote from the Canadian Review of July 1824: “A sovereign and half-sovereign of gold, and several coins of silver and copper, of the present reign, together with some newspapers and other memorials of the present day, were deposited in a cavity of the stone, over which a plate of copper, bearing an appropriate inscription, was placed.” Then His Excellency gave a whack with a hammer — although exactly what he whacked is not made clear — and the ceremony ended with “several hearty cheers.”
Perhaps this second jail was a step up architecturally from the original drafty log cabin, but inmates were similarly wretchedly treated. In Pioneer Crimes and Punishments in Toronto and the Home District, James Edmund Jones points out that it was only in 1836 that soup was introduced into their diet — before that, in both jails, the fare had consisted of just dry bread and water, the bread supposedly distributed three times a day, but often at the whim of the jailer.
In March 1835, a grand jury noted that “they have seen the state of the prisoners with great concern; these suffer intensely from cold, as glass in the windows is broken. There is no adequate supply of straw and blankets. Many of the prisoners are necessarily entirely innocent.” (Disgracefully, it would take until 1851 before inmates were provided with iron bedsteads instead of having to sleep directly on the ground.) And another grand jury in 1837 recorded this blistering criticism of the classification of inmates: the jurors were “obliged to mark with a most decided disapprobation the practice of promiscuously confining together the young, the novice in crime, the hardened felon and the unfortunate maniac.”
On April 12, 1838, according to a 2003 commemorative plaque, some ten thousand people gathered in front of the jail to watch the execution of Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews. (Although the number seems high, given that the population of Toronto was 12,571 at the time, it is possible that people had flooded in from other parts of Canada and even the United States to witness the controversial hanging.)
Samuel Lount was born in Pennsylvania but moved with his family to Upper Canada in 1811. He eventually settled at Holland Landing, where he earned his living primarily as a blacksmith. By 1834, he was deeply involved in public politics in the County of Simcoe. Peter Matthews was Canadian-born, an ex-military man who had a farm near Pickering. The bond between the two men was their friendship and political association with Scottish-born William Lyon Mackenzie: newspaper man, first mayor of Toronto, and later leader of the radical element of the Reform movement. These Reformers vehemently opposed the government of the colony, which was then dominated by a conservative clique of British loyalists called the Family Compact.
In the general election of 1836, the new lieutenant governor, Sir Frances Bond Head, allied himself with the Conservative Party. Mackenzie’s Reformers were utterly demolished. The Conservatives embraced loyalty to the British Crown and were opposed to reform of any nature. Their successful campaign was helped along by the violence and intimidation exercised during the election by the Orange Order, a powerful Protestant social and political organization.
With their electoral defeat, the Mackenzie Reformers despaired of changing the status quo by legitimate means, and in December 1837 they launched what has come to be known as the Upper Canada Rebellion. This failed disastrously, with the defeat of the poorly armed rebels in a series of skirmishes with loyalist troops. Mackenzie fled to the United States, although he was ultimately pardoned. He returned to Canada, and to public office, in the early 1850s. Many of his fellow rebels were not as fortunate: some were killed; others were jailed or transported to the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), Australia.
However, the authorities decided to set a stern example with two of Mackenzie’s most faithful followers, Lount and Matthews — this despite the fact that Lount had attempted to get medical assistance for a loyalist officer during the rebellion and had stopped Mackenzie from burning down the sheriff’s house, and Matthews had fought with British Loyalists against the Americans in the War of 1812. In the end, though, all of this counted for nothing. The two men were convicted of high treason, placed in shackles, and thrown into the Toronto jail to await their death by hanging.
Even though the jail yard was surrounded by a fifteen-foot-high palisade, the gallows were perfectly visible to both inmates and onlookers. The foreman of the team tasked with building the scaffold, a young Yorkshireman named Joseph Sheard, who later became mayor of Toronto, hotly refused to have anything to do with it. “I’ll not put a hand to it. Lount and Matthews have done nothing that I might not have done myself, and I’ll never help build a gallows to hang them.”
The horror and pathos of their execution is captured by Robertson in a long description provided by a man who was in jail with the two Reformers. On that fine spring morning in April 1838, with government troops (“Orange militia”) nervously standing by with loaded muskets to prevent any rescue, the two men were led out in chains. “Lount … stopped at the door. We could not see him, but there were sad hearts in that room as we heard Samuel Lount’s voice, without a quiver in it, give us his last greeting: ‘Be of good courage, boys. I am not ashamed of anything I’ve done. I trust in God, and I’m going to die like a man.’”
Lount and Matthews were hanged side by side. Their bodies were buried in the Potter’s Field, a non-sectarian cemetery on Bloor Street just west of Yonge Street, now long gone. They were reinterred some years later in the Toronto Necropolis, situated on Winchester Street on the west side of the Don Valley. Today, a large memorial to the two men, buried as traitors but now praised as heroes, stands in the Necropolis. Interestingly, you will also find there the tomb of William Lyon Mackenzie, to whom Lount and Matthews were so tragically linked, as well as that of our historian John Ross Robertson.
The third Toronto jail (or more correctly, the first one, as it was constructed after the city was incorporated in 1834 and its name changed from York to Toronto) made no bones about what it was. As Robertson wittily puts it, “the whole building plainly said: This is a prison.” It was built on a green overlooking the harbour on the south side of Front Street between Berkeley and Parliament streets. This was the same site that had previously been occupied by both the first and second Parliament buildings, which had been destroyed by fire in 1813 and 1824 respectively. Designed by John G. Howard and constructed from grey Kingston limestone, the structure cost $80,000, a very tidy sum in 1840. It consisted of a central core, topped with a turret, and two wings. Arched windows pierced the walls on each floor. In Toronto, No Mean City, architect Eric Arthur unflatteringly comments that “the windows in this grim pile remind one of a columbarium, with its niches for urns [containing cremated remains].” A twelve-foot-high stone perimeter wall completed the bleak picture. When required, a scaffold was erected on top of the wall to allow the public clear view of a hanging.
The stone jail built in 1840 overlooking the harbour on Front Street East between Berkeley and Parliament streets. A forbidding structure with two wings radiating from a central core.
The roof sported a small brass cannon for firing off salutes on the Queen’s birthday and other special occasions, and the green sloping down to the lake was a favourite play area for local boys.
In stark contrast to the image of carefree boys playing on the lawns was an 1855 report in the Globe that highlighted the ongoing problems caused by “committing infants to the common gaol, there to be educated into finished thieves.” The article posed some difficult and pertinent questions: “How shall we in future deal with the juveniles? Shall we go on for years, taking no steps to train and save them? Shall we shut our eyes to the ruin which awaits them in prison?”
The governor of the jail at the time was George Littleton Allen. Born in 1811 to a Protestant family in Sligo, Ireland, Allen immigrated to New York at the age of fifteen before heading north to settle in Toronto. In 1847, he was appointed to the position of high (or chief) constable of the Toronto Police. His subsequent stint as governor of the jail, beginning in 1852, was riddled with controversy and censure: the following year, the Globe expressed with deep regret in its report of proceedings in the Police Court that
liquor-selling ha[d] been practised in the gaol for some time past. Mr. G.L. Allen, the gaoler, was accused of selling strong drink to the prisoners without a license, and the charge being fully proved, the magistrate fined him $10…. Supplying prisoners with strong drink, to gratify their base appetite, and to deaden their moral sense, was one of the worst parts of the old gaol system, and one of the first which was removed…. The excuse of keeping liquor for cases of delirium tremens is a very flimsy covering for the general sale of the article.
Allen evidently dodged this particular bullet, as he was still in a position in November 1856 to make a generous offer to the city. He was willing to give up his own apartments at the jail, with the exception of one bedroom, in exchange for a home, “free of rent and taxes,” for his family. This, he noted, would make space available in the jail to house fifty more inmates. And, fortunately, he had already found a residence that would suit his purposes very well, at an annual cost of $400.
The governor had laid the groundwork for his proposal two months earlier in an ominous letter to Mayor John Beverley Robinson, in which he stressed “the urgent necessity that exists for providing immediate accommodation for city prisoners.” Failing that, he warned, “it will become absolutely necessary to close the present prison against their reception; for we are unable to find even standing room for them, much less sleeping accommodation. We have now one hundred and eighty prisoners within our walls, just one hundred more than the gaol was ever designed to keep.”
Allen’s numbers did not quite add up: even with his suggested changes, the jail would still have been fifty inmates over the limit. However, the unnerved council hastily gave him the go-ahead to take the house.
Backing up the governor’s bitter complaint about having to shoehorn close to two hundred prisoners into a space originally designed to hold less than half that number was this passionate plea in November 1856 from the Globe, in anticipation of upcoming municipal elections: “Who will take up the gaol question and make it a ‘plank’ at the elections? Surely no candidate could better commend himself to the moral part of the community, than by presenting a feasible scheme for relieving the city from the evils, the danger, and the expense of such an establishment as the present gaol. If the city must build a gaol for itself, let it be done at once. We shall save both money and character by expedition.”
Toronto had clearly outgrown its jail — again. According to the census of 1851–52, the population had swelled to 30,775, with an associated increase in criminal activity. The current institution was straining at the seams; there was an urgent need for something bigger and better to house the inmate population.