The end of 1856 ushered in some good news: the city finally had plans to build a new jail. And the burning question, “Where shall we put it?” seemed to have been satisfactorily resolved in the opinion of the men who governed Toronto.
This is where the Don River flows into the picture. Toronto was rapidly expanding on the western side of the river; the jail would be built on its eastern bank, outside the city limits.
Long before the river’s name became a three-letter word, the local Indigenous Peoples had their own names for it: NechengQuaKekonk, as recorded by Crown surveyor Alexander Aiken in September 1788, and Wonscotonach, as mentioned by late-eighteenth-century surveyor Augustus Jones. Jones translated it as “‘back burnt grounds,” perhaps as an allusion to the vulnerability of the area to sweeping forest fires. Historian Jennifer L. Bonnell prefers Anishinaabe scholar and linguist Basil Johnston’s alternative translation of “burning bright point or peninsula,” possibly a reference to what was once a peninsula near the mouth of the river, now the Toronto Islands.
We catch a glimpse of the pristine, meandering waters of the Don through the eyes of British artist and diarist Elizabeth Posthuma Simcoe. In July 1793, Elizabeth took up residence in the tiny, newly named town of York with her husband and family in two canvas houses, better known as tents. (According to one legend, now convincingly debunked, the tents had originally belonged to British explorer and navigator Captain James Cook.) Where these famous canvas houses were pitched is difficult to pinpoint: tradition has it that they were moved several times to different sites on the western side of town.
Elizabeth’s husband was John Graves Simcoe, who, in 1791, had been appointed lieutenant governor of the newly created British colony of Upper Canada. Upon his arrival from Britain in 1792, Simcoe had intended to establish the new provincial capital in Newark (now Niagara-on-the-Lake), but, given the simmering disagreements between the English and their American neighbours to the south, he needed to find a more secure site. His next choice, an inland spot on the River La Tranche (Thames), was frustrated by a different kind of enemy: Lord Dorchester, the captain general and governor-in-chief of both Upper Canada and Lower Canada (now Quebec). Dorchester, Simcoe’s commanding officer (and nemesis), coldly vetoed his suggestion.
Simcoe, ever resourceful, set off from Newark with a party of officers in May 1793 to scope out another possible location for the new provincial capital. As his wife recorded in a letter dated May 13: “Coll [sic] Simcoe returned from Toronto, & speaks in praise of the harbour, & a fine spot near it covered with large Oak which he intends to fix upon as a scite [sic] for a Town. I am going to send you some beautiful Butterflies.”
After settling into the family’s new canvas pad, Elizabeth Simcoe went exploring. She introduced her diary in August 1793 to “a Creek which is to be called the River Don. It falls in to the Bay near the Peninsula. After we entered we rowed some distance among Low lands covered with Rushes, abounding with wild ducks & swamp black birds with red wings. About a mile beyond the Bay the banks became high & wooded, as the River contracts its width.”
The river, it seemed, was about to lose its time-honoured Indigenous names and be sucked into the colonial lexicon. As decreed by a nostalgic Lieutenant Colonel John Graves Simcoe, it would thenceforth be called the Don River, after a river in far-off South Yorkshire, England.
Simcoe had done something very similar three months earlier with the name of the provincial capital. On May 31, Simcoe wrote the following to the acting colonial administrator and lieutenant governor of Lower Canada, Major General Alured Clarke: “It is with great pleasure that I offer to you some observations upon the Military strength and Naval convenience of Toronto (now York), which I propose immediately to occupy.” In the space of just a few days and with a few simple strokes of his pen, the lieutenant governor had officially changed the name of the capital from Toronto to York.
Although strategic, renaming the town after the Duke of York, an unsuccessful military commander, in an attempt to curry favour with the king of England, the duke’s father, was not exactly a successful branding exercise. This was because the settlement — a ten-block hamlet, really, at that stage — became known as “Little York,” or even more pejoratively, “Muddy York” to distinguish it from other far more glamorous Yorks scattered around the globe: think New York City, for example.
Even at the time, Simcoe’s practice of choosing English names above traditional ones led to protest. As mentioned by Edwin C. Guillet in Pioneer Settlements in Upper Canada, Irish explorer and artist Isaac Weld, who travelled through the province in 1796, soberly commented: “It is to be lamented that the Indian names, so grand and sonorous, should ever have been changed for others. Newark, Kingston, York are poor substitutes for the original names of the respective places Niagara, Cataraqui, Toronto.” Weld simply refused to use the new names.
Amid widespread support, the name York was changed back to Toronto when the city was incorporated in 1834, but other early British names, like that of the Don River, have stuck.
However, in addition to Simcoe’s reported distaste for Indigenous names and, probably, his jingoistic desire to put the stamp of Britain on everything he encountered, something much more basic lay at the heart of his decisions: the colonial idea of terra nullius, or the belief that the land belonged to no one. This is perfectly illustrated in the words of Joseph Bouchette, who made the first formal survey of Toronto’s harbour in 1793, as quoted by Henry Scadding:
I still distinctly recollect the untamed aspect which the country exhibited when first I entered the beautiful basin, which thus became the scene of my early hydrographical operations. Dense and trackless forests lined the margin of the lake and reflected their inverted images in its glassy surface. The wandering savage had constructed his ephemeral habitation beneath their luxuriant foliage — the group then consisting of two families of Mississagas, — and the bay and neighbouring marshes were the hitherto uninvaded haunts of immense coveys of wild fowl.
The country, then, was “untamed” and the habitation of the “wandering savage” was “ephemeral,” with their presence on the land limited to “two families of Mississagas.” As Jennifer Bonnell puts it: “Suggestions of an essentially unoccupied, ‘hitherto uninvaded’ landscape lent support to European territorial claims…. The area’s first inhabitants ‘left no trace’ of their passing: by failing, in the terms of Lockean logic, to use the land to its full capacity, they had no legitimate claim to the lands they occupied. Without the investment of human labour to transform the land, its potential remained untapped, wasted.”
And thus up for grabs.
However, although the Indigenous Peoples were not intensive farmers or city builders, archaeological excavations have pointed to the presence of First Nations peoples in the area since the Late Woodland period (1000–1700 CE) and perhaps even earlier. This is acknowledged on a plaque attached to the wall of the Withrow Avenue Junior Public School on Bain Avenue, close to Riverdale Park on the east side of the Don River. It reads, in part: “As long as 4,000 years ago, this sandy knoll was the location of campsites for generations of native people. It provided an excellent lookout over the Don River Valley for observing game. Here small family groups probably lived in skin tents during hunting seasons. Lost for many years, the site was uncovered by workers digging a roadbed in 1886.”
Sadly, as Bonnell points out, with the local Indigenous people, the Mississauga, relinquishing hundreds of thousands of acres to the settlers in a series of land purchases in the late 1700s and early 1800s, this became a story of dispossession. Europeans who arrived on the scene early were richly rewarded with the opportunity to snap up prime lots, both within and outside the new township.
One of the lucky beneficiaries was John Scadding, a native of Devonshire, England, who had lived just down the road from the Wolford estate of John Graves Simcoe. Scadding became Simcoe’s farm manager, and the ties between the two men were close and cordial. When Simcoe received his appointment as lieutenant governor and decamped to Niagara in 1792, John Scadding followed him. After the provincial government moved to Toronto/York, Simcoe was happy to ensure that his friend and confidant would be generously recompensed. In 1796, Scadding received a Crown Grant of Lot 15 in the township of York — 253 acres stretching from the Don River in the west to Mill Street (now Broadview Avenue) in the east, and from the present-day Danforth Avenue in the north to the lakeshore in the south.
Lot No. 15, according to John Ross Robertson in his Landmarks of Toronto, was a jewel. Some highlights: ancient elms, basswood, butternut, and crabapple trees; lake views in the distance and river scenes in the foreground; the river leaping with salmon and brimming with perch and pike; and the banks alive with game birds such as grouse, quail, and snipe, and “numerous fur-producing animals” such as fox and muskrat, to say nothing of the occasional deer, bear, or wolf. In short, “for the enthusiast in almost every branch of natural history, it was a paradise.” It was not so great for farming, but the “first patentee of lot fifteen,” John Scadding, did his best.
Scadding initially built a small log cabin and barn on the site in fulfillment of what were called settlement duties. As explained by Elizabeth Simcoe, “the Law obliges persons having Lots of land to build a House upon them within the year.” Scadding later constructed a more permanent farmhouse, with a barn for horses and cattle. An early bridge over the Don was named Scadding’s Bridge in his honour. The life of this gentleman, described as a veritable pioneer of civilization, was brought to a sudden end in March 1824, when he was struck and mortally injured by a falling tree.
Scadding’s family had been living in York since 1821, and their history is tightly woven into the original fabric of the city of Toronto. Remember much-quoted historian and writer Henry Scadding? Well, he was John’s youngest son; he not only documented early Toronto but played an active role in its unfolding saga. In 1830 he became the first student enrolled in the newly minted Upper Canada College in York, and later, courtesy of Elizabeth Simcoe, he studied at St. John’s College, Cambridge. He returned to Canada in 1837, and the following year he was ordained as a priest.
A deed of sale dated December 30, 1856, records that almost half of the Scadding farm was sold to the “Mayor, Aldermen and Commonalty of the city of Toronto … for the purposes of an Industrial Farm and Gaol,” as T.A. Reed notes in The Scaddings, A Pioneer Family in York. The plot consisted of 119 acres of land, bounded by the Don River, Broadview Avenue (then Mill Street), Gerrard Street (according to a map dated 1857, called Danforth Road on the east side of the river), and a line south of today’s Danforth Avenue. One of the signatories to that deed was the Reverend Henry Scadding.
It might be thought that British penal reformer John Howard would have approved of the site chosen for the new jail, for, as he wrote in his hugely influential 1777 work, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, “A county gaol, and indeed every prison, should be built on a spot that is airy, and if possible near a river, or brook. I have commonly found prisons situated near a river, the cleanest and most healthy.” He also advised that “an eminence should be chosen: for as the walls round a prison must be so high as greatly to obstruct a free circulation of air, this inconvenience should be lessened by a rising ground.” And, thirdly, he stressed that a prison should not be located within the confines of a town or city. On paper, the proposed site seemed just perfect.
Detail from a City of Toronto map dated 1873, showing the New Gaol and the House of Refuge on the Industrial Farm lands to the east of the Don River.
However, if Howard had actually surveyed the scene from the banks of the Don River in 1856, he would have been horrified. For by then the river forming the western boundary of the site was no longer the natural paradise so glowingly described by Elizabeth Simcoe and John Ross Robertson.