in 1800.
Thomas would remain there until 1811, at which point an Alexander Gray’s name would appear on the deed. This is a different Alexander Gray than the one who emigrated from Paisley, Scotland, in 1820 to run a number of mills near present-day Don Mills and York Mills Roads. The farm would then tumble through the hands of four different owners in four years before Alexander Montgomery and his son John bought the property in 1815. This Alexander had previously owned farms on Lot 10-2E and Lot 12-3E, near the current Leslie and York Mills. This, his third farm, would remain in the family for over thirty years, through some of the most riveting events in the history of Upper Canada.
John and his father built the first of several inns, which John would own in his lifetime, on this farm in 1820. The Bird in Hand Inn, mentioned in the previous chapter, was a two-storey frame structure built around a centre hall plan. It was an immediate success with the travellers of the day, who depended on hospitable inns every few miles to mitigate the misery of the muddy, rutted roads. Things went well for several years, before a disagreement between father and son would lead to one of the more bizarre incidents in the history of North York.
It seems that John and Alexander had been having ever more frequent arguments over the operation of the inn. In January 1827, following legal proceedings, a court order led to the inn being cut in half — literally. The structure was sawn in half, from the peak of the roof down to the ground. John continued to operate the inn in the southern portion of the building while Alexander retired to the northern part, which was now his private home. Apparently this arrangement worked well, as The Bird in Hand continued under John’s ownership until the 1830s, at which time he leased the inn to John Finch and moved south to Yonge and Eglinton, where he would build the most notorious tavern in Canadian history.
Montgomery’s Tavern was a two-storey frame structure on the west side of Yonge Street, just up the hill from Eglinton Avenue on one of the highest points of land in the entire area. The tavern wouldn’t last long, for in 1837 the most famous battle of the Upper Canada Rebellion was fought here, and before the day was out Montgomery’s Tavern would be burned to the ground.
On December 3, 1837, several hundred rebel reformers gathered at Montgomery’s Tavern, most having travelled from many miles away in the cold and snow. They were mostly disenchanted farmers, fed up with the way their concerns were routinely ignored by the ruling Family Compact. Although December 7 had been chosen as the day to engage the government troops, this particular group had grown impatient. By December 5, they had run out of food and decided to march down Yonge Street themselves, without waiting for either their fellow rebels or the assigned day. On this night they were cold, tired, and armed mostly with simple farm implements. They marched down Yonge Street to Maitland Avenue, where they were met by Sheriff William Jarvis and a smaller, though much better armed government force that included twenty-seven sharpshooters.
The skirmish was brief. The rebels, severely outgunned, retreated. Both sides re-grouped, and two days later the government troops marched up Yonge Street with two cannons and numerous sharpshooters, engaging the rebels at Montgomery’s Tavern. Once again, the skirmish was brief, and after a cannon ball was shot through the tavern, the rebels retreated and the loyalist commander, Lieutenant-Governor Sir Francis Bond Head, ordered the tavern burned to the ground. The tavern, intriguingly, had been rented to a John Linfoot just the week before.
When his tavern was burned to the ground, John Montgomery’s family was relatively safe in Newtonbrook, about seven miles away. Nonetheless, John was arrested for his part in the uprising, as were many others. But the Rebellion worked in strange ways. Although a total failure as an actual rebellion, it would quickly lead to the government reforms that the farmers had been seeking all along. Lieutenant-Governor Sir Francis Bond Head, the de facto head of the Family Compact, was recalled to England and never held public office again. Four years after the Rebellion, the government’s Durham Report would initiate many of the reforms that the farmers had fought for, and would also lay the groundwork for our current system of provincial government.
Although two of the rebels were executed for their role in the Rebellion, John Montgomery and many others were eventually pardoned by the Crown. The news reached John in the United States, where he had fled after being sentenced to banishment in Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania). John, like Thomas and Michael Shepard, had escaped from prison in Kingston while awaiting banishment, and made his way across the lake to the United States. After he was pardoned, he returned to Yonge and Eglinton, where he built a new hotel just south of the old one. He would go on to open two more hotels in downtown Toronto, while turning the Yonge and Eglinton property over to his son, William. Today’s extension of Broadway Avenue west of Yonge Street is called Montgomery Avenue.
This moment, captured on a summer evening in the mid-1950s, by photographer Ted Chirnside, will surely bring a smile to the many North York residents who passed through this iconic front door in search of adult beverages: ladies and escorts to the main room and dance floor on the right, men only to the beverage room behind the sombre brick wall on the left. Though long considered one of the rougher taverns in the area, it wasn’t such a bad place once they got to know you. The former Elliot family barn, shown to the left, disappeared nearly thirty years before last call at the Algonquin in 1986.
Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library, TC 68.
Meanwhile, back up in Newtonbrook, John Finch closed The Bird in Hand in 1847 and built a new hotel on the same farm, on the northeast corner of today’s Yonge and Finch. Finch’s Hotel operated until 1873, when it was sold to Charles McBride. He dismantled it and used the timbers to build a new hotel, the Bedford Park Hotel, on his farm, which lay south of Fairlawn Avenue on the west side of Yonge Street.
Maps of Newtonbrook show John Finch and his descendants retaining ownership of the south half of the Newtonbrook farm into the 1900s. Their one-hundred-acre parcel stretched along the north side of Finch Avenue from Yonge Street to Bayview, and, yes, they were the Finches who gave their name to the concession that formed the southern boundary of their farm. The north half of the farm would again tumble through a series of owners after the Montgomerys left, with everyone from the Bank of Canada to the Cummer family being listed as owners of one parcel or another.
The situation solidified somewhat around 1861 with John and Mary Francis owning the north half of Lot 21-1E as well as the southern half of the neighbouring lot to the north, Lot 22-1E, which reached up to Cummer Avenue. The Francises also farmed the west half of Lot 20-2E on the southeast corner of Bayview and Finch, and the magnificent Lot 32-1E in Thornhill, where the former Francis farmhouse is now known as the Heinztman House, named after a subsequent owner.[1]
When John Francis died in 1910, his sons John and Edward sold the Yonge Street farmland to John Elliot. Maps of the day show the Finch family still farming the south half of Lot 21-1E, while John Elliot is in possession of the north half of this lot, as well as the adjoining Lot 22-1E to the north, which extended up to Cummer Avenue. The east half of both lots, however, had been severed by this point, perhaps owing to the valley created by Newtonbrook Creek. Robert Risebrough owned forty-six acres of Lot 22-1E on the southwest corner of Bayview and Cummer and a William Ford, whose descendants would farm here until the 1950s, owned an eighty-acre farm directly to the south that fronted on Bayview Avenue, where the Bayview Arena stands today. The Ford farm straddled Lots 21-1E and 22-1E.
John Elliot had emigrated from Ireland in 1860, and, in an almost exact reversal of John Montgomery’s life, spent twenty years running hotels in downtown Toronto before moving north to farm in Newtonbrook. In 1910, he sold his hotels and bought the Francis farm with the intention of raising Shorthorn cattle. He hired his neighbour William MacKenzie (not the rebel leader) to build the barn shown in the photograph that would stand on Yonge Street until it was dismantled in 1958.
The farm got off to a good start, but
