In the 1790s, Elizabeth Simcoe could enjoy relatively easy access to the beautiful Don River. Out on the water, Elizabeth described “the spot where [the Indians] were catching maskalonge, a superior kind of pike, and pickerell.” But even in those early days there were ominous warning signs: “At the mouth of the Don I fished from my carriole, but the fish are not to be caught, as they were last winter, several dozen in an hour. It is said that the noise occasioned by our driving constantly over this ice frightens away the fish.”
The Simcoes’ country home, Castle Frank, and the site chosen in 1856 for the new jail were on opposite banks of the Lower Don. Formed by the confluence of the east and west branches of the river, this stretch meandered along for some seven kilometres before spilling into Lake Ontario through a widespread marshy delta.
Historians and environmentalists have documented in grim detail the rapid descent of the Lower Don from pristine waterway to toxic sewer.
The original British colonialists, with the fire of Empire in their bellies, were primarily focused on security and economic development, and Toronto fitted these purposes splendidly. As recorded by Edith Firth, Lieutenant Governor Simcoe had reported in May 1793 to his counterpart in Lower Canada, Major General Clarke, that “at the Bottom of the Harbour there is a Situation admirably adapted for a Naval Arsenal and Dock Yard, and there flows into the Harbour a River [the Don] the Banks of which are covered with excellent Timber.” The site had strategic importance, too. Historian J.M.S. Careless explains that Toronto’s location was particularly significant, as it stood at the junction of the land and water routes through the Great Lakes region. Particularly notable were “its accessible lake harbour, low, easily traversed shoreline, and gate position on a passage through the midst of southern Ontario.”
Once it had been decided that, in addition to a naval arsenal, this admirable spot at the bottom of the harbour would become the new capital of Upper Canada, Simcoe and other early settlers snapped up prime one-hundred- and two-hundred-acre lots on both sides of the river.
It did not take long for the newcomers to start chopping away at all that “excellent Timber” on the banks of the river, and within two years a sawmill was up and running on the lower reaches of the Don. Then came a gristmill for grinding grain. The area just east of the river, originally called the Don Mills and today known as Todmorden Mills, developed into a small industrial complex that included a brewery, a distillery, and, by 1827, another gristmill and a paper mill.
By 1825, as Jennifer Bonnell notes in Imagined Futures and Unintended Consequences, there were twenty-three saw- and gristmills along the Don River and its tributaries. Potteries and brickworks profiting from the deep clay deposits in the Lower Don Valley, an ancient lakebed, also made an early appearance. The fast-flowing river played three important roles in servicing these industries: it powered millstones, turbines, and other machinery; its water served both as a coolant and an ingredient; and it became an all-too-convenient location to dump garbage and toxic wastes. Predictably, one of the important effects of the deforestation, noise, and poisonous by-products generated by these industrial activities was the extermination of the local fish populations. By the 1860s there were more than fifty mills of various types dotted throughout the river system, and, ominously, the salmon had stopped spawning.
In addition to the growing pollution in the more northerly reaches of the Lower Don, there were from the outset ongoing problems associated with the extensive marshes where the river flowed into the lake.
Many critics well into the 1800s believed that setting up a town at the mouth of the Don River was a really rotten idea. Just why was succinctly and satirically expressed in 1825 by inventor and journalist Edward Allen Talbot:
The situation of the town is very unhealthy; for it stands on a piece of low marshy land, which is better calculated for a frog-pond, or beaver-meadow, than for the residence of human beings. The inhabitants are, on this account, much subject, particularly in Spring and Autumn, to agues [shivering fits] and intermittent fevers; and probably five-sevenths of the people are annually afflicted with these complaints. He who first fixed upon this spot as the site of the capital of Upper Canada, whatever predilection he may have had for the roaring of frogs, or for the effluvia arising from stagnated waters and putrid vegetables, can certainly have had no very great regard for preserving the lives of his Majesty’s subjects.
Was that reference to the frog- and effluvia fancier aimed directly at Lieutenant Governor Simcoe? To be fair, although Simcoe had strongly recommended York as an excellent spot for a naval arsenal, the decision to make it the capital of Upper Canada was not his. It had become the compromise choice following a spat with his hostile boss, Commander-in-chief Lord Dorchester, who strongly favoured Kingston, as opposed to Simcoe’s preference for something farther west, along what is now the Thames River. And while the claim that five-sevenths of the population came down with agues and fevers each year is hardly scientific and perhaps not entirely accurate, Talbot did have a point: the place was unhealthy. The stagnant waters of the marshlands were fertile breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Whereas it is well understood today that those chills and fevers were symptoms of malaria, which is transmitted through mosquito bites, Talbot’s words reflect the popular belief at the time that diseases were caused by a miasma, a foul-smelling vapour emanating from rotting organic matter that hung in the air, especially at night, poisoning anyone unfortunate enough to inhale it. Fears of unseen perils lurking in the east drove the city’s expansion westward. As the lieutenant governor of the day explained in 1833 in a letter included in Firth’s The Town of York collection, “the rapid increase in the population requires that the Town should be extended towards the Westward, the most salubrious and convenient site.” As the gentry fled west, the less desirable areas to the east soon began to be populated with workers and working- class families, attracted by lower property prices, taxes, and rents.
The reputation of the marshes as an extensive area where disease and death were rampant and the associated westward movement of the city accelerated the development of what Bonnell calls “noxious” industries both around the river mouth and extending to the north beyond Gerrard Street. She describes these industries as producing what locals considered an offensive and possibly harmful stench from biological wastes and chemical processes, as well as extreme noise, filth, and general unsightliness.
Three exceptionally noxious factories, up and running by the late 1840s, were the harbingers of worse to come.
The first was William Smith’s tannery on the east bank of the river, constructed in 1820 on fifty acres of property that had previously belonged to John Scadding. This enterprise provided all-important leather goods for the locals. In doing so, however, it generated odious smells and dumped toxic tanning wastes into the river.
The second major polluter in the area was the Gooderham and Worts gristmill and distillery on the lake front just west of the river mouth. By 1840, more than twenty-eight thousand gallons of whisky were being produced annually to slake the public’s thirst for hard liquor. G&W may have been captains of industry, but they, and particularly William Gooderham after the suicide in 1834 of his original partner, James Worts, were not exactly model citizens. In the late 1830s, Gooderham came up with the bright idea of starting a hoggery to utilize the by-products of the distilling process. The company also opened a large dairy near the mill, with sheds on the east side of the river that eventually accommodated some four thousand cows. Ever the entrepreneurs, G&W participated in the development of the Toronto and Nipissing Railway, which not only distributed booze and other products to markets outside Toronto but also transported cattle from the agricultural hinterland in the north to their sheds on the fringes of the city. In addition to the overwhelming stench that pervaded the area, copious volumes of pig and cattle manure were simply drained into the shallow marshes at Ashbridges Bay, provoking howls of protest from the city government, other businesses in the area, and the growing number of working-class folk setting up house in the neighbourhood.
Detail from a City of Toronto map dated 1893, showing the Gooderham and Worts cattle sheds just east of the bend in the Don River. Manure from some four thousand cows was disposed of by simply tipping it into the shallow marshes to the south.
The P.R. Lamb Glue and Blacking Manufactory, established in 1848 on the west side of the river north of Gerrard, completed the unholy trinity. Lamb’s boasted of paying the “highest Price in Cash … for Tanners’ Size Pieces, Damaged Hides, Cattle Tails, Horns, &c,” which would then be boiled, and boiled again, in an exceptionally malodorous process to create their trademark thick, gooey adhesive. But what were they to do with all the wastes? Luckily, little Lamb’s Creek, which fed into Castle Frank Brook and thence into the Don River, was situated just beside the factory. Such a convenient spot to dump all that toxic and evil-smelling sludge.
By 1856, when the city became the proud owner of a hundred-plus acres of former Scadding property, the area outside the city limits to the east of the Don still consisted mainly of dwindling forests and farmlands. The scene was now set for the establishment of an industrial farm, a new jail, and, as an afterthought, a House of Refuge.
An advertisement in Hutchinson’s Toronto directory, 1862–1863, for the P.R. Lamb Glue and Blacking Manufactory. Toxic wastes from the factory contributed to the pollution of the Don River in the mid- to late 1800s.
A precedent for the location of these new institutions on the fringes of the city had been established in 1855 when the Toronto General Hospital moved from the downtown area to a four-acre site just east of Parliament Street. In 1853, as noted by Bonnell, a local medical journal decried the relocation: the site was too far from the city centre; it was alarmingly close to the pestilential river with its dreaded miasma; and the poor medical students would have to trudge close to four miles to get to the hospital from the medical school at Trinity College. An editorial in the Leader declared that this was absolute nonsense. The old hospital was located as far west of the downtown area as the new one would be to the east; people in the west part of the city got ague, too; and there were simply no facilities for students closer to Trinity College. And, importantly, the site, with “all the advantages which are to be derived from an airy and unconfined position … has met the general approbation of the public.” Case closed. The hospital took in its first patients in 1856.
The House of Refuge, to be situated just north of the jail, was not part of the original plan. In the late 1850s, the Toronto Magdalene Asylum, a women’s charitable organization whose main mandate was to protect “fallen women,” obtained a lease of five acres on the industrial farm site. In 1860, the refuge opened its doors, thus providing shelter, according to city council minutes, for “the poor and indigent,” as well as “idiots,” and reform for “the idle, the lewd, the dissolute and the vagrant members of the community.”
The site, located beyond the city limits, had two important points in its favour: it was cheap, and, as noted in an inquiry in 1858, its purchase would provide both employment “for the criminal and disorderly portion of our population” and reduce “the city expenditure in connection with the department of Police and Prisons.” The assumption was that the land would lend itself to extensive agricultural use. But, as is so often the case, you get what you pay for. As the inquiry sadly discovered: “Of the entire area of about 100 acres, which it is proposed to retain for the purposes of the farm, not more than thirty acres can be brought under cultivation without the expenditure of a very large amount of labour.”
However, there may have been additional but far less obvious reasons for choosing this particular semi-rural location.
Despite the increasingly polluted waterway that formed its western boundary, the site was regarded as being located in the countryside. And the countryside occupied a special position within the nineteenth-century psyche. It was viewed as a place of natural beauty, majesty, order, and tranquility, as opposed to the city, which was perceived as overcrowded and rife with disease. Prison reformers like the Englishman John Howard reflected this romantic viewpoint: prisons near a river would be the cleanest and healthiest.
In Reclaiming the Don, Jennifer Bonnell posits that there were complex and paradoxical factors underlying the choice of site. The three new institutions would be established in what was considered to be a “restorative landscape,” outside, but fairly close to, the city and its corrupting influences. On the one hand, undesirable individuals, such as criminals, vagrants, the poor, the elderly, the “fallen,” and the mentally ill would derive the double benefit of being distanced from the harmful effects of the city and placed in the reformative and healing countryside. On the other hand, isolating these damaged individuals would protect “the supposedly uncorrupted residents of the centre” from their debased influence. And so, in a strange parallel with the heavily polluted Don River, the semi-rural space would become a dumping ground for the unpleasant or ugly elements of society.
For better, or perhaps for worse, the die had been cast: the urgently required Toronto jail would be located on a fairly remote parcel of land on the far side of the Don River. The time had now come to choose someone to design and oversee the construction of the new institution.