The 10 Toronto Museums That Are Now Free To Visit
The 10 Toronto Museums That Are Now Free To Visit
The fascinating stories behind the historic sites.
This week was a VERY big week for Toronto heritage news, including the surprise announcement that all ten city-owned museums are switching to free admission — forever. And it begins today!
Hopefully, the move will help spark a little more interest in Toronto’s history. Not all the museums are particularly well-known, but they’re all connected to fascinating stories from our city’s past.
So, for this edition of The Toronto History Weekly, I thought I’d do something a little different. I’m using this week’s entire newsletter to share some of my favourite stories and facts about each of the ten Toronto History Museums that are now free to visit.
Before we begin, just a quick reminder that this newsletter will only survive if a whole bunch of you switch to a paid subscription. You can do that right here:
FORT YORK & THE AMERICAN INVASION
One summer day in 1793, a British warship sailed toward Toronto Bay. On board was a group of soldiers who would pitch their tents at the mouth of a creek they called the Garrison. There, they got to work. They brought enormous old trees crashing to the ground as they made a clearing where they would build the first piece of our city: a military base whose cannons would keep watch over the entrance to that bay and the muddy little town that sprang up on its shores.
They called the base Fort York. And it would soon play a central role in one of the most dramatic days our city has ever witnessed.
During this week 209 years ago, the Americans invaded. It was the second year of the War of 1812 and it wasn’t going well for the United States. They desperately need a victory. So, the Americans landed outside Toronto Bay and fought their way through the forests that stood where the Exhibition Grounds are now, making their steady and bloody way toward Fort York.
When they drew near, things got even bloodier. The retreating British commander ordered the destruction of the Grand Magazine — filled with gun powder and ammunition. The result was one of the biggest explosions anyone in North America had ever seen. It sent American troops flying through the air along with a rain of deadly debris. Their commander, Zebulon Pike, was killed — along with about 250 of his men. But the Americans won the battle. The stars and stripes flew over Fort York as the Americans occupied the town, burning and looting for the next six days.
SPADINA HOUSE & BALDWIN’S GRISLY GRAVE
Toronto’s wealthiest citizens have been building mansions on the hill above Davenport Road for two hundred years, capitalizing on the spectacular views of the city below. The most famous is Casa Loma, the castle built by the crooked tycoon Henry Pellatt in the early 1900s. But another one of our city’s most remarkable homes stands right next door.
Spadina House was built by James Austin — the founder of Consumers Gas and the Dominion Bank (which would eventually merge with the Bank of Toronto to become TD). Today, the museum allows visitors to explore the house furnished and decorated as it would have been during the early 1900s. It’s been called Toronto’s answer to Downton Abbey. But the mansion was built even earlier than the period it depicts today — in the 1860s. And it wasn’t even the first Spadina House to stand on that spot.
My favourite Spadina House story comes from that earlier incarnation. It was William Warren Baldwin who built the original in the early 1800s, calling it “Spadina” after an Annishnaabemowin word, ishpadina, which means “highland” or “ridge.” Baldwin was a doctor and a politician, but also an architect and something of a city planner, who designed the house and had Spadina Avenue cut through the forest south of it so he’d be able to see the lake from his window.
His son followed in his political footsteps. Robert Baldwin grew up to become the leading champion of “Responsible Government” — arguably the guy who made Canada a real democracy. But the political battles he fought were always overshadowed by the grief he felt at the loss of his beloved wife Eliza. He kept her room at Spadina House untouched after her death, a shrine only he could enter. And when he eventually passed away and was laid to rest next to her in the family’s tomb on the property, things got weird.
His relatives found a note in one of his pockets, listing his final requests. And two of them were pretty bizarre. Robert Baldwin wanted his coffin to be chained to Eliza’s. And for his corpse to be given the same kind of caesarean section wound that had killed her. He was very clear: he wanted it done even if he’d already been laid to rest. So his relatives descended back down into the tomb at Spadina House to crack open his coffin, split open his corpse, and then chain his coffin to the bones of the woman he loved.
MACKENZIE HOUSE & THE REBEL MAYOR
William Lyon Mackenzie was probably the most polarizing figure in the entire history of our city. A newspaper publisher and politician who passionately believed in democracy, he became a persistent thorn in the side of the small clique of Tory elites who kept a stranglehold on power here in the early 1800s.
Just a few years after serving as the first mayor of Toronto, Mackenzie led an army down Yonge Street in an attempt to overthrow the colonial government. If it had worked, his rebellion would have been a revolution, leading to an independent, democratic, Canadian republic. But it was quickly crushed instead.
Mackenzie escaped with his life but was now the most wanted man in Upper Canada. The governor offered a thousand pounds for his capture. So, the rebel mayor, his wife Isabel, and their children were forced to flee across the border. And even there, Mackenzie couldn’t help but get into trouble. He spent some time in an American prison and was lucky to survive an assassination attempt.
It was after more than a decade that Robert Baldwin’s government came to power and pardoned most of the old rebels. The Mackenzies were finally able to come home from exile. When they did, their supporters bought them a house, right downtown near Yonge Street. Today, it’s the Mackenzie House museum.
And there, hanging on the wall of the Mackenzies’ dining room, you’ll find one of my very favourite Toronto artifacts: the rebel mayor’s own copy of his wanted poster.
GIBSON HOUSE & THE GOVERNOR’S REVENGE
Gibson House has its own connections to Mackenzie’s rebellion. The house stands off Yonge Street, hidden away behind some condos between Finch & Sheppard, just around the corner from Mel Lastman Square. It’s where David Gibson used to live, a surveyor who joined the rebel ranks. In retaliation, the government burned his house to the ground. The Gibson House that now stands on that spot was built after the old rebel was pardoned and could finally return to his property.
You can still find a couple of neat connections to the original home, though. Gibson’s wife managed to save the family’s grandfather clock before the house was torched; it’s part of the museum’s collection to this day. And you’ll also find a little apple orchard outside. Gibson first planted it in the years before the rebellion — and one of those original trees is still growing there today, 190 years later.
COLBORNE LODGE & JOHN HOWARD’S SECRET LIFE
John Howard was a Renaissance man of early Toronto: a surveyor, architect, painter, judge and engineer. He laid out Toronto’s first sidewalks and sewers, new streets and bridges, and designed part of Osgoode Hall. As I wrote in The Toronto Book of Love, “Two centuries later, Torontonians still live in a city John Howard helped create.”
But he didn’t do it alone. His wife Jemima not only supported his work, but took an active role in it. She made copies of his plans and drawings, kept him organized, and even helped write his diary.
The Howards had a house downtown, but spent much of their time at their country estate, High Park, which they eventually donated to the city to become the public park of today. The cottage John built for them there is now the Colborne Lodge museum.
At Colborne Lodge, you can still find the evidence of the Howards’ tragic final years. When Jemima fell ill with breast cancer, the opiates she took as a painkiller caused her to become forgetful. Sometimes, she would disappear, found wandering in the woods.
So, John went to work.
Outside Jemima’s bedroom, he built a special door without an interior doorknob, far enough down the hall she couldn’t see it from her bed and become upset that she was locked in.
Meanwhile, just outside Colborne Lodge, he began to build their tomb. It’s still there today: a big, imposing cairn of stones constructed to defend the Howards’ corpses from the body-snatchers that stalked the graveyards of Victorian Toronto. And it’s surrounded by a remarkable bit of iron fence that John shipped in from the far side of the Atlantic; it originally stood outside St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. He even paid to have it rescued from the bottom of the St. Lawrence River when the ship carrying it sank in a storm.
We filmed a whole little episode of Canadiana about it:
And as if that wasn’t enough to make Colborne Lodge one of the most fascinating historic sites in Toronto, while you’re there you’ll also learn about John Howard’s scandalous secret. The entire time he was caring for Jemima with such devotion, he also had a second family with his mistress Mary Williams.
THE MARKET GALLERY & THE FORGOTTEN CHAMBER
The St. Lawrence Market has been a staple of life in Toronto for more than 200 years. Its roots stretch all the way back to the very founding of the city in the late 1700s, to an outdoor market that used to operate on that same spot. But the current building used to play an even more central role in the city; it originally served as Toronto City Hall.
It served that purpose for half a century. Built in the middle of the 1800s, it wasn’t until a few years after Old City Hall opened in 1899 that the market took over the current building. It was renovated and expanded, most of it demolished in the process. The old Council Chamber on the second floor was the only room they saved. But even it was boarded up, its existence forgotten for 75 years. It wasn’t rediscovered until the 1970s.
Today, you can once again visit the place where Toronto’s Victorian lawmakers debated our city’s future. The old Council Chamber is now the Market Gallery, an exhibition space where art from the city’s collection is put on display. They even have the mayor’s fancy old chair.
MONTGOMERY’S INN & AN ESCAPE FROM SLAVERY
Today, Montgomery’s Inn stands just around the corner from Islington Station. But when it was built two centuries ago, it was far outside Toronto in the little village of Islington. It was built to serve travellers along the Dundas Road, one of the main thoroughfares in and out of the city. And while that road is now being renamed because of Henry Dundas’ role in delaying the abolition of slavery across the British Empire, one of the most fascinating things about the inn itself is its connection to a dramatic story of resistance.
Joshua Glover was born into slavery in the United States and was in his 40s before he was able to escape. At first, he fled to Wisconsin, but after a couple of years living there as a free man, he was betrayed, captured and thrown into prison. It took an angry mob of supporters to break him out and sneak him across the Great Lakes into Canada.
Glover made his way to Etobicoke, where he got a job working for Thomas Montgomery — the owner of Montgomery’s Inn. He’d spend more than thirty years working on Montgomery’s farm, as well as growing his own crops at his home near the spot where Dundas crosses the Humber River. That’s where you’ll find a new bust of Glover standing in a park named in his honour — the first permanent monument to a Black Torontonian ever erected in our city.
TODMORDEN MILLS & BEER & PRISONERS OF WAR
The origins of Todmorden Mills go all the way back to the founding of Toronto. The new settlement needed plenty of wood, so a couple of mills were built nearby on the Don River. A little village sprang up around them — with even more mills and a brewery for good measure.
The site is filled with fascinating little stories. How one of the founders of the original mills drowned trying to cross the dangerous river during a flood. How one of the mills supplied the rebel William Lyon Mackenzie with the paper he used to print his Colonial Advocate newspaper, filled with passionate tirades that would eventually boil over into violence. How the historic ale from the brewery has been resurrected by today’s Muddy York Brewing Company. And how that stretch of the Don Valley became home to German POWs during the Second World War who would toil at the nearby Don Valley Brick Works.
THE SCARBOROUGH MUSEUM & A SUBURBAN EVOLUTION
Four of the oldest buildings in Toronto’s eastern reaches have been brought together to create the Scarborough Museum. They stand in Thomson Memorial Park, near Lawrence & Brimley, once a farm belonging to the first Europeans to settle in Scarborough. And together, those buildings tell the story of the area’s evolution.
A log cabin from the 1830s, when Toronto was still a frontier town. A blacksmith’s shop from the 1840s where carriages were once crafted. A little village home built in the 1850s by one of the men who carved Kingston Road out of the ancient forests that once towered over the shores of Lake Ontario. An old tractor garage owned by the family Kennedy Road is named after, now transformed into an exhibition space. And an Indigenous garden that serves as a vital reminder that this place had already been home to First Nations for thousands upon thousands of years before any of those settlers arrived.
THE ZION SCHOOLHOUSE & OLD TIMEY GRAFFITI
Children have been learning at the Zion Schoolhouse for more than 150 years. Built in the 1860s, it now offers students a chance to experience what it was like to attend class back in 1910. As the museum’s website delightfully puts it, “Behind the worn green doors of this museum is a school frozen in time. The wooden desks, still carved with messages from the past and names of former students, sit empty waiting for you.”