John would become district chief when the North York force was absorbed by the Metropolitan Toronto Police in 1957. He is buried in the Zion Church cemetery that he helped to restore.
John Harrison wasn’t the only addition to the force, which had grown to thirteen officers by 1944. The township population had grown to 25,000 by this point, but it would be the post-war years that would see a real explosion in both population and crime. By 1953 the population of North York had exploded to over 110,000. Crime grew as well, for now the area was well-serviced by hundreds of new roads and nearly everyone had access to a car. Bank robbers, in particular, took aim at the new, isolated suburban banks, which offered a more enticing choice of getaway routes than their downtown contemporaries. It was Roy’s men who, in 1952, captured two members of the notorious Boyd gang[1] who had escaped from the Don Jail and were hiding out in an abandoned barn on the old Hildon Farm near Finch and Leslie.
The unfettered population growth and the corresponding expansion of the police force meant that the force seemed to be constantly looking for new police stations. In 1955, the twenty-nine member division that served Don Mills had to be housed in one of the barns at the former Don-Alda Farm, near the corner of Don Mills Road and York Mills Road. By 1957, the North York force had grown to two hundred officers. Through it all, Roy’s influence continued to grow. He became somewhat of an elder statesman whose opinion was sought and valued by members of the community. His endorsement often meant the difference between victory and defeat for local politicians, in a time when it was considered perfectly normal for municipal employees to involve themselves in this way
Several months before the North York Police Force was absorbed into the new Metropolitan Toronto Police Force in 1957, Roy Risebrough retired. It seemed a perfect convergence of events for the former one-man show. He had reached retirement age that year and had certainly earned his leisure, but he was also able to neatly sidestep being rolled into the huge new bureaucracy, a near miss that probably pleased this rugged individual. He retired to the family farmhouse on Cummer, staying involved through local service groups, police associations, and the Newtonbrook United Church.
In a time before graffiti, there was a certain elegance in abandonment, and a chance to explore and appreciate what once was, before it was defaced. The empty, haunted eyes of this massive Risebrough farmhouse, photographed on the south side of Cummer Avenue, just east of Bayview in 1961, beckon a visitor to enter an interior that would have offered the senses a visceral education to shame the most elaborate video game or surround-sound movie. It was demolished in the mid-1960s and high-rise apartment buildings took over the site.
Photo by Lorna Gardner, North York Historical Society, NYHS 42.
Roy’s ancestors did historians no favours by making sure that they were all named “Robert.” His father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and brother all carried this handle with only the odd middle initial to differentiate them from one another. Robert I started it all when he left the county of Norfolk in England and sailed to Canada with his wife and six children in 1837. After a nightmarish thirteen weeks at sea they finally arrived in Upper Canada, sick, tired, and hungry. One source indicates that they first farmed the northeast corner of Lot 22-1E, the section near Bayview and Cummer, but this is difficult to prove.
The land, which had previously been home to Alexander and John Montgomery, was owned by the Cummers when the Risebroughs arrived, so if they did start there it would have been as tenants. What is certain is the fact that Robert I bought the east quarter of Lot 21-3E on the northwest corner of Finch and Woodbine in 1852. It was not until 1862 that his name appeared on the deed to the northeast corner of the lot on Cummer. The same year he also bought the western half of Lot 22-2E on the southeast corner of Bayview and Cummer. When Robert I died in 1871, he left the farms to his son Robert II, who had been born in England in 1827 and survived that hellish Atlantic crossing at the age of ten. In 1891, Robert II bought the southwest corner of Lot 23-1W and expanded an existing farmhouse there on the northeast corner of Bathurst Street and Drewry Avenue.
In 1890, William Risebrough, one of Robert Risebrough II’s sons, bought sixty acres of the seventy-five-acre Lot 22-4E, north of Finch on the east side of Woodbine. The remaining fifteen acres was part of the Myers family holdings. By 1891, the Risebroughs had a farm in every one of the four concessions east of Yonge Street, as well as one farm west of Yonge. They were also farming in Scarborough, to the east of Victoria Park Avenue.
As already seen with Roy, the family continued to farm until after the Second World War, when pressures from the growing city began to gobble up all of the remaining farmland in North York. But, the family’s contribution to farming still wasn’t over. Their more easterly farms, near Finch and Woodbine, continued as productive farmland until the 1960s. Post-war development generally flowed east and west from Yonge Street, and farms on the far eastern and western borders of North York were the last to be paved over.
In 1946, a small subdivision was created on the former Risebrough farm on the southwest corner of Bayview and Cummer, but this subdivision was different. Created and operated under the federal government’s Veterans Land Act (VLA), the oversized one-half-acre lots were designed to allow returning veterans and their families enough space to grow their own food. The lots featured frontages that ranged from 110 feet to 140 feet. One of 124 such communities in Canada, “Risebrough,” as the new community was called, was an immediate hit with the fifty families lucky enough to live there. The going was rough at first but as the new settlers persevered they soon created a way of life that made all of their efforts worthwhile.
Like most subdivisions, this one started out as a sea of mud, but as the new residents landscaped and developed their properties, a very different scene began to emerge. By 1949, all fifty families had moved into their new homes and were beginning to see the first produce from their gardens. In a way, the new community was like a collection of mini farms, where neighbours still had a commonality of purpose. Large projects, such as the construction of garages or additions to the houses were accomplished by all of the residents coming together to pitch in, much as the farmers before them had depended on barn-raising bees and the like to realize their dreams. The growing of fruits and vegetables was undertaken in a serious way, to the point that most families were able to harvest enough produce in the fall to get them through the entire winter.
John MacKenzie, who had spent most of the Second World War on corvettes in the North Atlantic, is a case in point. “We grow almost every type of vegetable,” he said, when quoted in The Willowdale Enterprise of October 20, 1949. “We put them in a cold storage bin in the basement and they last us all through the winter. Last spring we had enough potatoes left to cut up and plant for this year’s crop.”[2] The family only needed to buy butter, meat, and a few packaged items to get them through the winter. The MacKenzies won an award for having the best landscaped and developed VLA lot in Ontario. Although most of the veterans were employed in Toronto after the war, they couldn’t wait to get home at night to their plots and garden tractors. Orchards planted by the families soon yielded peaches, pears, plums, cherries, and apples. Fall was the time for harvesting and ploughing.
Looking northwest across Bayview Avenue, just north of Finch. The William Ford farm can be seen in the foreground, and several of the houses in the little suburb of Risebrough in the background. The Fords began farming this eighty-acre parcel in 1886. Today, this would essentially be a photo of the Bayview Arena, but here, in 1955, a well-kept working farm and the garden plots of Risebrough continue to stand their ground.
Photo by Ted Chirnside, Toronto Public Library, TC 117.
The package of house and lot cost an average of $7,200, although the veterans were only required to pay $5,200 back to the government. Amortized over twenty-five years, the mortgage payments were approximately $19.00
