only flaw in this plan was the fact that Yonge Street didn’t exist yet, so Simcoe and the Queen’s Rangers made it their priority to clear this road through the dense, unforgiving wilderness. This they did, through blackflies, mosquitoes, suffocating heat, and stupefying cold. They did what they intended to do, but as soon as they crossed what became Steeles Avenue, they left the North York of today, and so they leave our story. It had taken them five years to clear Yonge Street from Lake Ontario to Steeles Avenue. Eventually, they would extend Yonge Street all the way to Lake Simcoe. Subsequent extensions would reach Rainy River, near the Manitoba border, and create what is now credited as being the longest street in the world.
With Yonge Street well underway, Simcoe was now able to have surveyors hired to start laying out the concessions, and the lots that became the farms of North York. The grid system used is a beautifully simple one. Basically, the lot numbers start from Eglinton Avenue, increasing in numerical value the further north one travels, with Lot 1 being the first lot north of Eglinton and Lot 25 being the first lot south of Steeles. The concession numbers are expressed as being either east or west of Yonge Street, so if a lot was the first one north of Eglinton on the east side of Yonge Street, it would be referred to as Lot 1, concession-1E. The first lot north of Eglinton and west of Yonge, would be Lot 1, concession-1W. All concessions are a mile-and-a-quarter apart and all lots are one-quarter-of-a-mile wide. Each lot then, measured one-quarter-of-a-mile by one-mile-and-a-quarter, for a total of two hundred acres. Now, with Yonge Street completed and the lots laid out, it was time for Simcoe to start attracting some settlers.
In 1793, he advertised free two-hundred-acre lots to anyone willing to settle in the Township of York. From Simcoe’s perspective, the British needed to build a British presence in Upper Canada. In particular, they needed proven Loyalists who would be willing to take up arms to defend their land against incursions from the south. Advertisers and recruiters spread the word throughout Great Britain as well as Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, where many United Empire Loyalists had settled after fighting on the losing side in the American Revolutionary War. While it’s nice to think of being given a lot that stretched from Yonge Street to Bayview Avenue for free, the conditions attached to the Crown grants were not to be taken lightly.
To qualify for a grant it was necessary for a prospective settler to prove that he and his family were practising Christians,[1] law-abiding in their home country, and capable of manual labour, but that was just the start. Before settlers were actually granted the deed to their land, they had two years to complete a number of tasks. First, a permanent residence had to be built on the property during the first year, usually a simple log cabin of at least 320 square feet. Next, 10 percent or twenty acres of the land had to be cleared each year, and ten acres of that fenced. Then, the full quarter-mile of forest along both ends of the property had to be cleared for a road allowance thirty-three feet wide and levelled off. This would have to be done with axes, hand-saws, and a team of oxen.
Detail from an archival map of Toronto showing Willowdale with lot numbers and owners’ names, from Tremaine’s Map of the County of York, published by George Tremaine in 1860.
Courtesy of North York Central Library.
If the settler met all these conditions, the deed to the property was transferred from Crown to settler after two years. If the settler failed to comply, the land stayed with the Crown. Preference was given to military personnel and United Empire Loyalists. Grants of up to 1,200 acres were possible, but presented a formidable task for such applicants, often land speculators with an eye to the future. The more privileged grant recipients were quite within their rights to hire other people to do the dirty work. No one was able to sell their grants, however, until the Crown had transferred the deed to the original owner.
Living conditions must have seemed extremely crude for the first immigrants, many of whom were attached to the military who were leaving older, more-established civilized societies and developed social activities. Their hearts must have sunk when they first laid eyes on that dark, endless forest, thousands of miles from home. Still, they all had their reasons for being here and now had to get to work. There was no turning back now, for if they had never actually experienced winter in Upper Canada before, they had surely heard the stories and realized that the log cabin was clearly a priority.
The first cabins were extremely primitive. Picture one large room with a dirt floor, one fireplace, one door, and one window covered with cloth, shutters, oiled paper, or glass if it was available. The washroom was outside. There was no running water and likely no time for digging a well that first year. Water would have been carried from a nearby creek or spring. Crude, hand-made furniture consisted of a bed, a table, a few chairs, and maybe a cabinet. Improvements to the cabin would have to wait since clearing the land and planting crops for food had to take priority.
The first year, settlers were limited to planting only those crops that could survive in the untilled, stump-riddled soil. Potatoes, pumpkins, onions, squash, corn, peas, and turnips were popular choices. The settlers’ diet was supplemented by hunting and fishing as back then pheasants, partridges, deer, trout, and salmon were plentiful in North York. Wild berries and other wild fruits were a welcome addition to the diet. Bears and wolves were also quite common so caution was required when out and about.
Logs left over from clearing the land were piled up and burned. The remaining wood was re-piled and burned again. The resulting ashes were taken to an ashery to be made into potash, which was used in the manufacture of soap, glass, dyes, and baking soda. Cash was still rare so the settlers would exchange their ashes for cloth, tea, whisky, flour, or root vegetables to get them through that first winter. The Crown also donated supplies to the earliest settlers but the availability of these government supplies was so notoriously unreliable that most settlers would only turn to the Crown in times of imminent starvation.
Pioneer families were much less mobile than the generations that came later. Neighbours were literally few and far between. One house or cabin would commonly house several generations of one family. Social interaction was pretty much limited to the communal “bees,” when settlers would get together to pool their resources and abilities. There were land-clearing bees, logging bees, husking bees, quilting bees, cabin-raisings, barn-raisings, and many other tasks that were accomplished more easily as more neighbours became involved. After the work was done, they would share a meal, followed by a little fiddle music, dancing, and perhaps a jug or two of whisky. When the first churches were built, they too would become centres of social activity. All such get-togethers were much appreciated by the settlers as a welcome break from their gruelling routines.
Assuming survival of that first winter, the first spring would involve learning the magic of maple-syrup production — not for the syrup itself but for the maple sugar that could be made from it. (The cane sugar used today was simply not available in Upper Canada back then.) The various First Nations tribes who had been tapping maple trees for generations willingly shared their knowledge with the settlers. To repay this kindness, settlers would often give iron kettles to the Natives, which made boiling and processing the sap much easier than had been the case with the earlier wooden vessels.
Another improvement in the second year would be a well. This would be dug near the cabin for convenience and capped off with a stone or wooden enclosure to keep children and animals from falling in. Trips to the creek or the spring were now a thing of the past, and, although pumps would not be widely available until the 1860s, it was still a great convenience to pull as much water as needed out of the nearby well with ropes and buckets.
Mills were also built in the second or third year of settlement. If sheer luck or sufficient forward-thinking provided a strong-running stream or river on the property, building a sawmill and/or a gristmill became a possibility. Sawmills were simpler and smaller since they didn’t require the large, heavy mill stones of the gristmill. Generally, mills were helpful in a number of ways, allowing millers to process their own raw
