Chapter 6

ENOCH TURNER BREWING AND DISTILLING, 1831–1855

Like Joseph Bloore, Enoch Turner came to Canada from Staffordshire. Turner was born in 1792 and was a later arrival in Upper Canada than his contemporary. Their careers followed essentially the same path, although they were an ocean apart. Enoch Turner had been a victualler, or pub landlord, in Lane Delph, Fenton, at the Duke of Wellington in 1818 at about the time that Bloore was founding the Farmer’s Arms in York.

Turner was a much later arrival to York, immigrating at the end of the 1820s. His brewery was erected at the southeast corner of Front and Parliament in 1831. At the time, he would have been one of about seven brewers in York. Unfortunately, the majority of his brewery was destroyed by fire in early February 1832. Uninsured, Turner was reduced to poverty by the loss, although contemporary records suggest that he was undaunted by the tragedy. Later that month, he was touring other breweries in York to look at techniques and equipment that would improve his operation.

Funding for the replacement building came from the local community, and it may have been this compassionate act that influenced Turner’s attitude for the remainder of his life. While many of the other brewers in Toronto were interested in using the proceeds of their business to create wealth for future generations of their family, Enoch Turner was childless. His legacy in Toronto would be his philanthropic endeavour, his reputation for fair dealing and his tendency to mild eccentricity. This was a man who fed his horses on beer.

In 1848, Turner was responsible for leading the community in the construction of a schoolhouse, which still stands on Trinity Street just south of King. While he donated the funds, the land for the building was donated by Little Trinity Church, of which he was a trustee. The need was created by a series of Common School acts that suggested that local municipalities become responsible for funding public schools. With the City of Toronto slow to raise taxes, available options were restricted to expensive private schools like Upper Canada College and minimal Sunday schooling. Turner would provide education for 240 students. He would also donate heavily in 1849 to an organization that would found the University of Toronto.

The brewery itself was built in stages on the banks of Taddle Creek. It is suggested that some of his employees may have been refugees from the Underground Railroad, in which he was a participant. In 1837, Turner hired a local wood chopper, Samuel Platt, as a clerk. Platt was from Armagh in Northern Ireland and had been providing for himself in York since the age of seventeen. Platt was a man of some substance, having led two companies of militia against the rebels. By 1841, he had developed a distillery in partnership with Turner on the same property.

The main L-shaped building of the brewery was standing by the mid-1840s, but significant expansions were made and can be seen on a plan of the property sketched by John George Howard. Some of the grounds owned by Turner had been used to construct housing, as was typical. By 1854, when Platt and Turner decided to retire, the Globe advertised the brewery thusly: “Brick Brewery and Distillery, 116 feet by 42 feet, two storeys high, independent of three capital stone cellars, paved with flags, also a spacious cellar 43 feet by 21 feet, with malt house and granary above, two Malt Kilns with about 3000 feet superficial of malt floors of the best kind, steeps, mash tubs, coolers, malt mill and every convenience for brewing and distilling on a very extensive scale, large granaries, engine house, steam engine and boilers, ice house, stables, sheds.”

It is made clear that Platt and Turner were attempting to sell the brewery as a going concern, with improvements being made to allow for brewing to be carried on in the summer. This would have been one of the first such improvements to be made in Toronto. The brewery did not sell as a package, but the equipment was auctioned off separately.

From the auction’s contents list, we know that Turner’s brewing copper comfortably held 650 gallons. A reasonable estimate for production would have been two thousand barrels of beer annually. It is more difficult to say how much whiskey they would have produced. The difficulty in selling the property would have been that the competition for the brewery, less than a block away, would have been Copland’s East Toronto brewery. The competition for the distillery would have been Gooderham and Worts, which was in process of becoming the largest distillery in North America. Even had Turner and Platt specialized in a single beverage, the premises were not really large enough to compete.

Platt was retiring from brewing and distilling in order to go into politics and to diversify his business concerns. By 1855, Platt was only forty-three years old and had any number of options available to him. Enoch Turner would have been sixty-three and, while well regarded, would not necessarily have been suited to political life, being something of a genteel eccentric. He decided simply to retire to his new home, Allandale, on Sherbourne Street and pursue his main hobby: gardening. The brewery property had had a number of fruit trees and a vineyard in which Turner grew Black Muscat grapes. He would continue to win awards from the Toronto Horticultural Society for years to come. He was recognized especially for his plums and filbert nuts.

The brewery was replaced in the 1850s by the Consumers Gas Works, of which Platt was a board member. The land is now occupied by the administrative center of the Toronto Public Library, which would surely have met with Enoch Turner’s approval.