Bathurst Street.
So who exactly is Earl Bales? His story will appear as part of that fourth generation of Bales (later in this chapter). Several of John and Elizabeth’s children would marry and leave North York to farm elsewhere. Son Joseph, however, stayed put and started the branch of the family that would ensure the Bales name would not soon be forgotten.
In 1885, Joseph Bales bought a farm on Lot 15-1E from the Harrison family of York Mills. The northern border of the farm was Sheppard Avenue. It was bounded by Bayview Avenue to the east and Yonge Street to the west. The farm had previously been owned by members of other pioneer families, including Stillwell Willson, Jacob Cummer, Elihu Pease, and Christopher Harrison II. In 1888, Joseph bought the western half of Lot 14-1E directly to the south. He now had nearly three hundred acres of farmland at the corner of Yonge and Sheppard. In 1896, the land was passed on to his sons. Joseph Christie Bales settled on Lot 15-1E and his brother, Oliver Douglas Bales, settled on the western half of Lot 14-1E. Maps from 1910 show that the farms were still owned by the two brothers.
In the 1920s, Joseph and Oliver employed a family of gypsies to work on their farms. The gypsies were skilled blacksmiths who spent much of their time shoeing the Bales’ horses. On Sundays the little family would take their covered wagon, which contained all of their worldly goods, down to the river in Hogg’s Hollow where they would do their laundry and hang it up to dry under the old bridge that once spanned the river just north of the Jolly Miller. The horses and dogs enjoyed a well-deserved dip in the cool water while the family bathed and swam before moving to the sand beach that once existed where the Miller’s parking lot is today. There they would play games and enjoy a picnic lunch while their clothes dried in the summer breeze. When the shadows began to grow long they would pack up their wagon and trundle back up the hill to the Bales’ farms.
Once common in Canada, the nomadic gypsies quietly disappeared or were assimilated into conventional society as the twentieth century progressed. One of the last remnants of their presence in North York was an abandoned gypsy wagon that survived into the 1960s, abandoned by a little creek,[1] now buried, that flowed parallel to Bannatyne Drive on the former Harrison farm in York Mills.
By the 1920s, parts of the Bales’ farms were being sold for housing as the city pushed ever further northward. Initially, the sales were to individuals for construction of individual houses, but as the years progressed, the concept of the “subdivision” reared its inevitable head. This concept of simultaneous construction of massive numbers of houses in a given area would prove the death knell for all of the farms in North York, and yet the Bales’ farms would survive a lot longer than most of their neighbours’.
Brothers Joseph Christie Bales and Oliver Douglas Bales belonged to the third generation of their family to farm in North York, but they were the first members of their family to become active in local politics. Oliver served on the first North York Council from 1922 to 1923, along with James Muirhead, William Scrace, W.J. Buchanan, and Reeve R.F. Hicks. Joseph Christie Bales would also serve on council in 1927.
Above: The success of the Bales family farms is amply demonstrated by the style, size, and detail of Oliver Douglas Bales’s farmhouse on Yonge Street, south of Sheppard; shown circa 1910.
Photographer unknown, The North York Historical Society, NYHS 1024.
Left: Later additions and renovations to the Bales farmhouse, such as the enclosed sunroom and wraparound porch, give further indication of the Bales family’s continued success. The house is shown in 1959 on the corner of Yonge Street and the fledgling Highway 401, which had been built through this area four years earlier and was still only two uncrowded lanes in each direction.
Photo by Ted Chirnside, Toronto Public Library, TC 268.
The accompanying photos show Joseph Christie’s house still standing at Yonge and Sheppard in 1955, and his brother’s house and barn stubbornly ensconced at the corner of Yonge and the 401 in 1959. The former would not last long, and the latter farm, down to one acre when the photos were taken in 1959, would be sold by the family in 1960. As riveting as these photos are, it would be the accomplishments of two of the men who were born in these houses that would outshine the pioneer family’s farming history. One of these men was the aforementioned Earl Bales, of Earl Bales Park fame.
Oliver Douglas Bales’s twin sons, Earl and Allen, were born in 1896. Earl joined the army to serve in the field artillery in 1915. After returning from the First World War he married Ruth Bick. Together, they would raise two daughters, Barbara and Mary. In 1931, Earl followed in his father’s footsteps when he was elected as a North York councillor. In 1933, he was elected deputy reeve and in 1934 became the youngest reeve in North York history at the age of thirty-eight. When he took over as reeve from George Elliot, whose farm is also featured in these pages, he landed squarely in the middle of the fiscal nightmare of the Great Depression.
In 1933, North York had defaulted on payments to its bond holders, a situation shared by virtually every other municipality in the province. In 1935, shortly after Earl had taken power, North York was put under provincial supervision by Queen’s Park. This meant that any financial transactions made by North York would have to be approved by the provincial government. Under Earl’s leadership, North York performed admirably, and, by the end of 1937, they had paid off all of their bond holders. Earl Bales would remain as reeve until 1940. In 1941, North York was released from the supervision of the provincial government, one of only a handful of municipalities in the entire province to have achieved this goal. During these years Earl was also a member of the York County Council.
After his days as an elected official were over, Earl Bales returned to private life for a while before finding a new home on the North York Planning Board. He served on the board for twenty-six years, from 1946 to 1972, and was the chairman for seventeen of those years. His tenure encompassed the greatest population boom in the history of North York. Earl was particularly well suited to this challenge, for despite his pioneer roots and farming background, he was overwhelmingly pro-development. When the fields, farms, and orchards of his youth began to be replaced by housing, he wasn’t mournful or bitter. Rather, he embraced the change, and, in fact, facilitated the rapid urbanization by sanctioning new zoning bylaws, which allowed for the construction of high-rise apartment buildings.
It seems that he viewed the loss of the farms as inevitable and wanted to retain some degree of control as to how the bulldozers rolled. In an interview with Sheila White, published in the Willowdale Mirror on January 9, 1985, Earl recalled that: “After World War II the boom started from the Humber River right over to Victoria Park Avenue. We wanted to create proper development which would be a benefit to North York, not a burden. We always looked forward to developing this area.”
Earl would live out the latter part of his life in one of these new developments, at Bayview Village on the former Kingsdale Farm property, after selling and vacating the last acre of the family farm at Yonge Street and Highway 401 in 1960. True to his farm roots, he looked after his ravine property on Forest Grove Drive as long as his health would allow, continuing to take care of the gardening and snow shovelling until he was nearly ninety. He died there suddenly on July 31, 1992. He was ninety-five. His cousin and best friend, Dalton Bales, would climb even higher on the political ladder but would meet a much more bizarre and premature end.
The message of this book is aptly summarized in this 1955 photograph by Ted Chirnside. This is the corner of Yonge and Sheppard on a sweltering summer afternoon, as seen from beneath the protective overhang of the Dempsey Brothers’ store. Looking to the southeast: from
