Why Toronto Banned The St. Patrick's Day Parade
Plus Chloe Cooley's resistance against slavery and more.
This week in 1795, Toronto’s infamous rebel mayor was born. William Lyon Mackenzie grew up in Scotland before moving to Upper Canada, looking for a fresh start after a tumultuous youth filled with drinking and gambling. But in Toronto, he wouldn’t exactly settle down to a quiet life. Instead, he would become a notoriously radical newspaper publisher and politician, a passionate champion of democratic reform who launched a failed attempt at the revolutionary overthrow of the colonial government and barely escaped with his life.
This week in 2022, we’ll talk about the sectarian violence that once spilled blood in our streets, how one woman’s resistance sparked the abolition of slavery in our province, and much more.
But to begin, a little reminder…
TORONTO’S MOST NOTORIOUS MURDERS
MY NEW ONLINE COURSE NEWS — Just in case you missed my email earlier in the week: I’m offering a new online course next month! We’ll spend five Thursday nights exploring our city’s past through the bone-chilling tales of Toronto’s most notorious murders. From serial killers and gangsters to housewives and schoolchildren, we’ll meet the infamous murderers who’ve terrorized our city for more than 200 years — and in the process, we’ll learn a lot about the history of the place we call home.
Plus, I'm offering 10% off for paid subscribers to the newsletter!
You can find all the details and registration info here:
http://adambunch.com/murderregistration.html
And if you’d like to switch to a paid subscription before signing up for the course to land that sweet discount, you can do that by clicking here:
WHY TORONTO BANNED THE ST. PATRICK’S DAY PARADE
THE BIG STORY — St. Patrick’s Day is coming up this week, which is an exciting time of year for me since I get to go around reminding everyone about one of the most bizarre facts in the history of our city:
The St. Patrick’s Day parade was banned in Toronto for more than a century! It wasn’t allowed to return until the 1980s!
Why, you ask? Well, the answer involves religious hatred and sectarian violence. So, I thought I’d share the story I always like to share this time of year: the story of the days when our city was known as “The Belfast of Canada.”
Toronto was a very Irish place in the late 1800s. By the middle of the century, more a third of our city’s residents had been born in Ireland — a higher percentage than even Boston or New York. Many of them were newcomers who’d been forced to flee the Great Famine and the hateful British policies that accompanied it. (In fact, many people prefer to call it “The Great Hunger” since “famine” makes it sound like a purely natural disaster.) In the summer of 1847 alone, nearly 40,000 Irish refugees came to Toronto — that was twice the population of the entire city at the time.
The vast majority of those new arrivals were Catholic. And they didn’t exactly find themselves welcomed with open arms.
Our city was VERY Protestant back then. Passionately, even angrily so. Not only were 75% of all Torontonians Protestant, many of them were members of the anti-Catholic Orange Order.
The Orange Order was founded in Northern Ireland in the late 1700s and it’s still a very big presence there to this day. Fiercely Protestant and vehemently anti-Catholic, it played a leading role in the violence of The Troubles; the annual Orange parades can spark riots even now. And while you don’t hear much about the group in Toronto these days, for a long time the Orange Order was the single most powerful organization in our city.
Orangemen kept a stranglehold on Toronto politics for a full century. From the middle of the 1800s all the way into the 1950s, nearly every single Mayor of Toronto was a member of an Orange Lodge. City councillors, too. Police officers. Firefighters. For a long time, practically all public employees were Orange. That meant that in the days when all those Irish refugees were pouring into the city, there wasn’t a single Catholic who held municipal office in Toronto. And for decades to come, well into the 1900s, Catholics had trouble getting hired for any public job in the city.
There was a time when prejudice against Irish-Catholics was a defining feature of life in Toronto. The Globe openly complained about their presence: “Irish beggars are to be met everywhere, they are as ignorant & vicious as they are poor. They are lazy, improvident, & unthankful; they fill our poorhouses & our prisons...” And the newspaper was hardly alone in its views.
Things got so bad that our city’s Catholic bishop began actively discouraging Irish-Catholics from moving to Toronto — warning them about the terrible discrimination they would face here.
And Orange power in Canada wasn’t limited to Toronto. It spread all over the country; you can find Orange Lodges from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island. At one point, there were more of them in Canada than in all of what's now Northern Ireland. At the time of Confederation, a third of all Protestant men in Canada were, or had been, members of the Orange Order — including Sir John A. Macdonald — and it was said that the federal Conservatives always reserved three seats in their cabinets for Orange MPs.
But no city in Canada was more Orange than Toronto. And it was most often here that those sectarian tensions boiled over into violence.
The riots in Toronto often started with a parade — just like in Belfast. Every year on July 12th, the Orange Order would hold a big march to celebrate a victory from the 1600s — when Protestant King William of Orange won a battle against Catholics in Ireland. The “Twelfth” was practically an official holiday in Toronto. At its height, thousands of Torontonians marched in the parade. Tens of thousands cheered them on. Municipal employees got the day off with pay so they could attend.
Catholics would generally stay indoors, keep their children close. But not always. The parades would occasionally erupt into violence between Orangemen and Irish Catholics, the battles of Belfast fought in the streets of Toronto.
Big Protestant vs. Catholic riots became almost an annual tradition in Toronto. Street battles broke out after political meetings and elections, when the Prince of Wales came to visit, on Guy Fawkes Day... Religious processions were attacked, St. Michael’s Cathedral besieged, the bishop pelted with stones... When a famous Irish Fenian revolutionary leader came to town, Orangemen rioted for two days. They smashed the windows of St. Lawrence Hall, destroyed a Fenian tavern and trashed stores on Queen Street. When Catholics celebrated the Papal Jubilee, stones rained down on them at Queen & Spadina. Thousands joined the fight. By the time it was all over, gunshots had been fired on Simcoe Street.
St. Patrick’s Day was especially tense in 1858. That’s the year Thomas D’Arcy McGee came to town to attend a banquet. He had once been a freedom fighter for Irish independence, a revolutionary who eventually moved to Canada and switched his allegiances. He was now a loyal British subject and would go on to become a Father of Confederation.
The violence that erupted around that year's St. Patrick's Day Parade ended with a Catholic stable-hand dead in the street. And his was certainly not the only life lost to the violence between Protestants and Catholics in Toronto. Even McGee himself would end up dead — gunned down in the streets of Ottawa. And the man who was hanged for the crime (after a travesty of a trial) was an Irish-Catholic suspected of having Fenian sympathies.
Heck, Toronto's oldest public monument is dedicated to U of T students who died fighting Irish-Catholics — taking up arms when a Fenian army invaded Canada in the 1860s.
And so, in the wake of all that bloodshed, Toronto’s political leaders finally decided to do something to quell the violence. But they didn’t crack down on the Orange Order — of course they didn’t, they were all Orangemen themselves. Instead, they cracked down on the St. Patrick’s Day parade. It was banned altogether. And would be for a very long time.
(The Orange Day Parade, on the other hand, continued on as a major public event. It’s still held today, in fact, in a much smaller form.)
It wasn’t until the 1950s that the Orange stranglehold on our city was finally broken. As Toronto began to evolve into a much more multicultural place in the wake of the Second World War, the demographics shifted dramatically. And for the very first time in the 118 years since the municipal government had been formed, the people of Toronto elected a mayor who wasn’t Protestant: Nathan Phillips was Jewish.
Even then, it would be another thirty years before Toronto decided it was safe enough for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade to return. It was in the 1980s that green-clad revellers took to the streets of our city to march in celebration for the first time in more than a century.
These days — in a non-pandemic year, anyway — it feels as if the whole city celebrates the holiday. And beyond a few drunken louts, there’s not a hint of the violence that once spilled blood in our streets.
Today, Toronto embraces its Irish heritage. And down on the waterfront, in Ireland Park, you'll find a striking monument: a reminder of the Irish refugees who came to our city all those years ago… And of the contribution they and their descendants — Protestants and Catholics alike — have been making to Toronto ever since.
WATCH OUR EPISODE OF CANADIANA ABOUT THE ASSASSINATION OF D’ARCY McGEE:
CHLOE COOLEY’S RESISTANCE AGAINST SLAVERY
ABOLITION NEWS — If you’re interested in Toronto history — and, uh, I assume you are given that you’re reading this newsletter — then Natasha Henry is someone whose work you should be following. She’s easily one of Toronto’s most vital historians: not only is she the president of the Ontario Black History Society, her PhD research is about the history of slavery in our city.
Toronto Life talked to her this week, getting a little preview of an online lecture she’ll be giving at the end of the month about one of the most pivotal figures in the history of our province.
Chloe Cooley was enslaved in the town of Queenston — on the Canadian side of the Niagara River — in the late 1700s. She, like many enslaved people, resisted her enslavement: refusing work, stealing, disappearing for periods of time, generally trying to disrupt the life of the man who enslaved her — a settler named Adam Vrooman — and ensure her enslavement was as much of an inconvenience to him as possible. And that resistance soon came to the attention of the most powerful man in the colony.
The new governor, John Graves Simcoe, was known to be an abolitionist. And there were rumours he was going to do away with slavery in Upper Canada. So, before that happened, Vrooman decided to take Cooley across the river into the United States to “sell” her. But when he and a couple of other men tied her up with rope and forced her into a boat, she resisted yet again, screaming and yelling and putting up as much of a fight as possible.
We don’t know what happened to Chloe Cooley after that. But we do know that her act of resistance was witnessed by Peter Martin that day, a Black Loyalist soldier who had fought on the British side of the American Revolution before settling in Niagara.
A week later, when governor Simcoe’s Executive Council met for the first time, Martin appeared before them to tell the horrifying tale. And Simcoe seized on it as an opportunity to push for the abolition of slavery in Upper Canada.
He would only partially succeed; Simcoe had filled his government with slaveholders who forced him into a compromise. Slavery would be gradually phased out over decades instead of being immediately abolished. But the beginning of the end of slavery in Toronto — and all of what’s now Ontario — can be traced back to Chloe Cooley’s resistance on the banks of the Niagara River.
Natasha Henry will be sharing Cooley’s story with an online lecture on March 30. You can find all the details and register here.
READ THE INTERVIEW WITH NATASHA HENRY
QUICK LINKS
The best of everything else that’s new in Toronto’s past…
ART DECO LANDMARK NEWS — Toronto’s gorgeous old Coach Terminal, built in the 1930s and still filled with potential even if it has become rundown in more recent years – seems to be under threat as the municipal government looks to “unlock” the value of eight properties across the city. (Though the plan does, at least, mention “adaptive heritage reuse”.) Read more.
GOTHIC REVIVAL LANDMARK NEWS — The old CHUM-City Building at 299 Queen looks like it might be heading for some kind of big redevelopment too. Read more.
BEAUX-ARTS LANDMARK NEWS — The University of Toronto has also announced plans to renovate its beautiful old bookstore/student centre, which began life as the Toronto Reference Library back in the very early 1900s. Read more.
BLACK HISTORY IS CANADIAN HISTORY NEWS — The CBC talked to some of the educators striving to ensure students are learning about our country’s Black history throughout the year, not just during Black History Month. Read more.
AIRPORT ART GALLERY NEWS — The Toronto History Museums have been rolling out a series of “Awakenings” projects for a while now, which “honours the voices of Black, Indigenous, S2LGBTQ+ and artists of colour to share untold and erased truths from our past that have contributed to an inequitable environment.” And they’ve just announced that some of those works will be exhibited inside Terminal 1 at Pearson for the rest of the year. Read more.
SILVER SCREEN AUTOMOBILE NEWS — Where do period piece films get all the old cars they need to set a scene? The Toronto Star talked to a picture car co-ordinator to find out. Read more.
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY NEWS — The Toronto History Museums have also added some new “HerStory” profiles to the City’s website, showcasing some of the most fascinating women from the history of our city. Read more.
PAINTED STOREFRONTS NEWS — The Toronto Star talks to artist Natalie Czerwinski, who paints Toronto landmarks, included some of our most beloved historical icons. Read more.
WANNA LOOK INSIDE AN OLD HOUSE NEWS — blogTO gave us a glimpse inside a 123 year-old mansion this week. Read more.
VERY EXPIRED TRANSFER NEWS — They also found someone with a transfer from the very first day of service on the Bloor-Danforth subway line. Read more.
TORONTO HISTORY EVENTS
OPEN FOR SETTLEMENT: SCOTTISH SETTLERS IN CANADA (ONTARIO)
March 16 — 7:30pm — Online — Ontario Genealogical Society
“Many of us have Scottish ancestors. Have you ever wondered why they emigrated to Canada? In this three-session online series Scottish genealogy expert Christine Woodcock will look at who emigrated and why, what they experienced on their arrival, and what records you can access to learn more about your Scottish ancestor.”
$20 for non-members, $15 for members
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.
“SALE OF SAID NEGRO WOMAN”: CHLOE COOLEY AND THE ENSLAVED BLACK PEOPLE IN NIAGARA
March 30 — 7pm — Online — Niagara Parks
“On March 14, 1793, Chloe Cooley, an enslaved Black woman in Niagara was bound and taken across the Niagara River by her enslaver to be sold in New York. Cooley was one of many Black women, men and children held as chattel in the Niagara region. This intriguing session alongside Natasha Henry will explore their lives and experiences and the role of slavery in Upper Canada.”
$15
DINING IN BABYLON: TORONTO’S LOST RESTAURANTS
March 30 — 7:30pm — Online — The North Toronto Historical Society
“North Toronto resident James Thompson will be sharing information from his research into great restaurants from Toronto’s past. Making a case that restaurants measure the level of sophistication of a city, James will acquaint you with some Toronto restaurants you may never have heard of. Our city has often been described as bland for eating out before the 1970s. James will reveal some elegant Toronto restaurants that were in step with the taste of the times. He will describe their uniqueness and their contribution to Toronto's cultural landscape, as well as reasons for their demise. James Thompson grew up in North Toronto and is a fifth generation member of the Austin family who built Spadina House.”
Free with registration, 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.