This week in 1793, John Rolph was born. He was one of the big names in early Toronto, a famous doctor and lawyer who supported the rebellion in 1837. In fact, if everything had gone to the revolutionaries’ plan, Rolph would have served in the provisional government as the first President of the Republic of Canada. (I wrote about him for Spacing many years ago, here.)
This week in 2022, we’ll talk about how it isn’t Toronto’s birthday, remember a particularly notorious wetland, and much more.
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TODAY IS NOT TORONTO’S BIRTHDAY
THE BIG STORY — Today is the day every year when one of my biggest Toronto history pet peeves gets to shine. The day many people are calling Toronto’s 188th birthday. Which is super weird. Because Toronto isn’t 188 years old. And it wasn’t founded in March.
I do a grump thread about it every year on this day, so I figured I might as well rant about it here, too.
As we talked about in the very first edition of The Toronto History Weekly, it was in the summer of 1793 that the first British soldiers sailed into Toronto Bay and began chopping down trees to make way for a muddy little town that would eventually grow into the city we know today.
So, if Toronto was founded 229 years ago this July, why are people celebrating its 188th birthday today?
Well, the answer lies with a bunch of Victorians who whitewashed the city’s history back in 1884.
By then, Toronto was already a city of about 100,000 people. There were railroads! Electric lights! Confederation! And when local politicians and business leaders decided they wanted to celebrate all this progress, they came up with an idea:
A birthday party.
That year, they threw a huge, week-long bash in celebration of Toronto’s “birthday.” There were fireworks, speeches, and a parade filled with historical floats. But in truth our city's first birthday party wasn’t really about honouring our history at all.
No, it was much more concerned with glorifying colonialism to fit a narrative of Toronto as an entirely virtuous and very British city — twisting and diminishing our history, stereotyping local First Nations and practically erasing the Mississaugas entirely.
They even invited this angry-looking fellow — Sir Daniel Wilson, the first ever history professor at the University of Toronto — to give a big speech about the history of the city…
And he took that opportunity to declare that Toronto had no real history at all.
This was nearly 100 years after the city was founded — thousands and thousands of years since the first people set foot on this land. But Wilson claimed Toronto had “scarcely a past…no record [to] look back upon." According to him, the city's story so far was nothing but “great white sheets.”
And maybe strangest of all: The date being celebrated wasn’t the date the city was founded. Instead, they decided Toronto’s “birthday” was the day it was officially incorporated as a city: March 6, 1834. When 9,000 people were already living here.
So that’s the date we’re still celebrating all these years later: The day the "Town of York" was incorporated and renamed as the "City of Toronto.” So, Toronto’s “birthday” happened when it was already 40 years old.
Of course, by shifting Toronto’s “birth” from 1793 to 1834 we’ve just symbolically exiled 40 years of the city’s history. A period that includes war, riots, duels, plagues and countless other formative events — stuff that’s still influencing our city to this day.
And as professor Victoria Freeman points out in her PhD dissertation (which is where I learned much of what I know about this), that shift is especially worrying when it comes to what it means for the way Toronto has remembered its relationship with Indigenous nations — particularly the Mississaugas.
If we talk about Toronto’s founding in 1793, we naturally have to talk about a new settlement. One built on land the First Nations had already been calling home for countless millennia. And where Mississaugas were still living when those first British soldiers showed up.
But if we talk about 1834 as the birth of Toronto, then who was here before the city? 9,000 settlers. We’re not engaging with the moment our city was actually founded — and the events that led up to it.
So, the story of settlers arriving and seizing Indigenous territory for themselves is easier to ignore — in favour of a story about a town filled with people who’d been living here for generations, taking a step into modernity as an incorporated city.
It means, for instance, that you’re probably not talking about the Toronto Carrying-Place: the First Nations trade route that first brought Europeans here and gave our city its name. Or villages like Ganatsekwyagon and Teiaiagon that were here long before the city was founded. You’re not talking about the Toronto Purchase (the treaty used to take this land from the Mississaugas) or how it was basically just a blank deed, invalid even by colonial standards. Or how a soldier soon murdered Chief Wabakinine, whose name appeared on it.
You're not talking about other important foundational stories either. You’re not talking about people like the Pompadours who were enslaved here in those years. Or how our province was created as a haven for refugees from the American Revolution and how terrified of democracy our city’s founders were as a result. Or how their vision for our city is still influencing us to this day.
And it becomes easier to claim Indigenous history as an entirely separate “prehistory” — a term our angry old friend Professor Wilson coined — to avoid talking about the ways Indigenous people contributed to and influenced our city’s founding years... And all the years since.
Thankfully, there seems to have been some shift in the way some people talk about this date — recognizing it as “the anniversary of incorporation” rather than a “birthday.” Some even acknowledge the thousands of years of Indigenous history that came before the city.
But it's still a pretty widely shared idea. So it seems, to me at least, that if we're going to recognize a day, it makes much less sense to celebrate Toronto’s birthday in March than to mark the anniversary of our founding at the end of July. (A date that would sync up nicely with Simcoe Day, as it happens.) And join other Canadian cites — like Montreal, Quebec City & Halifax — in counting from the date they were founded.
But most important of all, to use that day as an opportunity to talk about what happened at the fascinating and illuminating moment when Toronto was founded. The good and the bad.
READ VICTORIA FREEMAN’S ARTICLE “TORONTO HAS NO HISTORY!” WHICH IS BASED ON HER DISSERTATION [PDF]
TORONTO’S MOST NOTORIOUS MARSH
MIASMA NEWS — The Port Lands are in the middle of a massive transformation, which will see the mouth of the Don River renaturalized, new parks and green spaces created, and whole new neighbourhoods rise from what’s now a sprawling industrial land of concrete and asphalt.
This week, a fun detail of those new development plans was released. Apparently, the original plan for the refurbished Cherry Street would have seen a bunch of cherry trees planted along it. Which would, of course, have been wonderful and very appropriate. But it turns out the ground is no good for that. So, instead, they’re going to create an urban mash. Which is pretty neat, not just because it looks like a lovely little addition to the plans….
…but also because of the history of the Port Lands.
When Toronto was founded — and for countless centuries before that — the place where the Port Lands now stand was a one of the biggest wetlands on Lake Ontario. The settlers called it Ashbridge’s Marsh and you can find it there in some of the earliest maps of our city:
It must have been an incredibly rich habit for all sorts of wetlands creates and vast flocks of migrating birds. But our city’s early settlers were deeply suspicious of the marsh. In the days before germ theory was accepted, people believed that “miasmas” were responsible for spreading disease — that noxious fumes that wafted into people’s lungs gave them terrible illnesses like cholera.
It was an idea that stretched all the way back to Ancient Greece. And in Toronto, many believed the huge marsh on the edge of town was responsible for the epidemics that swept through the city in the 1800s. And it didn’t help that industrial development along the Don River flooded the marsh with pollution. As Waterfront Toronto puts it, “By the end of the 19th century, the lush aquatic ecosystem of the marsh had deteriorated completely.”
So the Ashbridge’s Marsh got filled in. The new Keating channel was dug to let the Don River spill out into the lake in the 1890s. And by the early 1920s, the marsh was filled in and truly began being transformed into the industrial Port Lands we know today.
WHEN IVAN REITMAN MET BILL MURRAY
THERE’S A BIT MORE TO THE STORY NEWS — As you probably recall, I wrote all about Ivan Reitman’s extraordinary life in the newsletter a couple of weeks ago, from his harrowing escape from authoritarian Communist rule as a young boy all the way to the lasting mark the filmmaker has left on our city’s skyline.
I wrote a lot about his relationship with Bill Murray in that newsletter, and how Reitman also cast him as Batman. This week, I thought I’d share one more little detail that The Toronto Star shared in a piece last Sunday.
It’s an anecdote told by Esquire movie critic Chris Nashawaty about the day the Reitman and Murray first met, when the Torontonian landed a gig directing one of National Lampoon’s live shows.
They didn’t get off a great start.
The first day Ivan showed up, he walked into the room where the whole cast were rehearsing. It was a cold day, and he took of his parka, hat, scarf and mittens and laid them down in a chair. Bill Murray took one look at him and put each article of clothing back on Ivan, walked him over to the door, opened the door and closed the door behind him.
They did not want this outsider telling them what to do. They didn’t know if he knew comedy. He looked like a square.
It took Reitman days before he could work up the courage to go back and face the cast. But, of course, once he did, he managed to win them over. And helped make Bill Murray one of the most famous and beloved comedians on the planet.
READ MY REITMAN STORY FROM A COUPLE OF WEEK’S AGO
QUICK LINKS
The best of everything else that’s new in Toronto’s past…
BLACK SUPERHERO NEWS — The Black Speculative Arts Project will be unveiling a series of public art installations across the city in the coming months, depicting Black Torontonians from the history of the city as “real-world superheroes.” Read more.
1840s CITY BUILDING NEWS — Eric Sehr dove into the history of “Toronto's forgotten first urban design project” with one of his excellent Twitter threads. The Market Block was built just north of where the St. Lawrence Market stands now. Read more.
MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARING MILLIONAIRE NEWS — One of Toronto’s great millionaire theatre moguls, Ambrose Small, disappeared without a trace more than a century ago. Peter Edwards wrote about the mystery this week for The Toronto Star. Read more.
BIG OLD SILO NEWS — I wrote about the old Canada Malting silos a few weeks ago when someone discovered they’d created an accidental camera obscura. Now, OCAD has announced that they hope to turn the historic silos on the waterfront into “The Global Centre for Climate Resilience through Art and Design”. Read more.
BITE SIZE BLACK HISTORY NEWS — Fayola Benjamin shares bite-sized videos about Black Canadian history on TikTok (@fayolajamee). And Daily Hive interviewed her about it. Read more.
TINY MUSIC VENUE NEWS — Last week I mentioned Andrew Smith’s amazing miniature models of Toronto’s lost music venues. This week, CTV interviewed him. Read more.
FRIED CHICKEN NEWS — Colonel Sanders used to live in Mississauga. He spent his retirement there, in Cooksville. And Ed Conroy of Retro Ontario wrote about it this week. Read more.
MYSTERIOUS PHOTOGRAPH NEWS — A roll of undeveloped film was found in a pile of trash downtown recently, and on it were some family photos from 1988. It has sparked a search for the people in the pics. Read more.
ICE DANCING NEWS — The Bata Shoe Museum has launched a new online exhibit called “Boots & Blades: The Story of Canadian Figure Skating.” Check it out.
HIDDEN BLACK HISTORY NEWS — Cheryl Thompson talked to TVO about how to use archives to find hidden Black histories. She’s the co-creator of an inventory of archives containing Black history in Ontario. Read more.
BONEYARD NEWS — Bob Georgiou takes a deep dive into the history of a cemetery in North York — Highland Memory Gardens — on his Scenes From Toronto blog. Read more.
TORONTO HISTORY EVENTS
TORONTO AT 188
March 6 — 7pm — Online — Town of York Historical Society
“Join us as we gather to celebrate the 188th anniversary of Toronto’s incorporation as a city.” Featuring presentations by Don Loucks — architect, urban designer, cultural heritage planner, and the co-author of Modest Hopes: Homes and Stories of Toronto’s Workers from the 1820s to the 1920 — and Morgan Campbell Ross, host of the Old Toronto series.
$32.84 for non-members, $27.54 for members, includes an 18.8% discount off the shop at TownofYork.com.
TORONTO CITY OF COMMERCE
March 29 — 6:30pm — Online — The Riverdale Historical Society
“Author Katherine Taylor will share the stories of early Toronto businesses and products – some famous, some forgotten – and the ways in which they helped shape the city we know today. Katherine Taylor will share the stories of some early Toronto businesses and products – some famous, some forgotten – and the ways in which they helped shape the city we know today.”
Free if you join the Riverdale Historical Society mailing list, I believe.
THE INDIGENOUS AND TREATY HISTORY OF TORONTO
April 7 — TBD — Online — West Toronto Junction Historical Society
“This talk will explore who the Indigenous peoples are who have lived in the Toronto area for the past several centuries, their village sites and use of the land. It will discuss the treaties between the British and the Mississaugas of the Credit for the lands in the area and will suggest opportunities for further learning. Alison Norman is Senior Historian – Indigenous History at Know History. She is a member of the Mohawk Institute Research Group, and is co-editing a book on the history of the residential school with scholars and Six Nations community members.”
Free, I believe.
STREET NAMES AND SCURRILITY
April 21 — 7:30pm — Online — Etobicoke Historical Society
“Richard Fiennes-Clinton takes a light-hearted look at King George III, and some of the connections that existed between the Royal Family the old Town of York, between the 1790s and the 1830s. George III is remembered as the King who lost the American Revolution, and who suffered from bouts of “madness”. But George III was also a family man, who tried to instill domestic virtues in each of his 15 children. But when the King died in 1820, his eldest sons embarked on a "Royal Baby Race" to provide an heir to the Kingdom. The Royal Family were the inspiration for street names in early Toronto, many of which remain today.”
Free for members; an annual membership is $25.