swath of virgin forest was much the same as the next. It was difficult to tell where one jurisdiction began and another ended — only that there were a lot of trees and bugs and bears and wolves and snow. Even the lot numbers reflected the borderless state that existed until the twentieth century. Starting with Lot #1 at Eglinton and Yonge and running all the way up to Lot #35 at Langstaff Road, the numbering system transcended the borders that are recognized today.
When the Crown granted Lot 24-1E to Hugh Cameron in 1801, Balcer Munshaw and his family were already established in Thornhill where he had been granted Lot 35-1E, running along the south side of today’s Langstaff Road from Yonge Street to Bayview Avenue. Hugh Cameron would only retain ownership of his land grant for two years, but the Munshaws would prevail for a lot longer than that. Mrs. Munshaw served the pioneer community as a midwife, at a time when it was necessary to ride all the way down to the town of York to summon a doctor when needed. It’s a good thing she had learned this trade, as her own daughter Susan is thought to be the first white child born in the wilderness now known as Markham.
Balcer Munshaw was elected constable for Vaughan and Markham in 1799. In 1809, he built a new frame house for his growing family and donated his old log cabin for the first school in the area. The schoolteacher was John Langstaff, who had recently arrived on horseback from 550 miles away in New Jersey. He had only come for a visit but decided to stay. Two hundred years later, Langstaff Road remains to remind us of him.
The Munshaws’ sons, George and Jacob, wasted little time expanding the family’s holdings in a southerly direction. Jacob bought Lot 27-1W, two lots north of Steeles, running from Yonge Street to Bathurst Street along the route that the CN rail line follows today. His farm became a favourite camping spot for Native people from the north as they journeyed up and down the primitive track that was Yonge Street. This interaction did much to cement positive relations between the two groups. Jacob would remain on this farm beyond the 1867 Confederation.
In 1811, the Munshaw brothers took a bite out of North York when Jacob bought the east half of Lot 24-1E and George bought the west half. Here again, Jacob would prove the more diligent of the two, farming his half until 1865 when he handed it over to his son Nicholas, who farmed there until the early 1890s before selling the land to John Brumwell. George only held on to the western half of the lot until 1815, a scant four years. Benjamin Thorne bought George’s former farmland in 1833. (In the interval between 1815 and 1833, the west half of the lot was owned by an Orm Hale and then a John Endicott.) Although most of Thorne’s tale unfolds in the town that would come to bear his name, it can now also be told here since he owned one of the farms of Willowdale.
Benjamin Thorne was twenty-six years old when he followed his brother-in-law from Dorset, England, to Upper Canada in 1820. He was born the same year that Balcer Munshaw drove his oxcart to Upper Canada. Benjamin settled on Lot 32-1W, where the Thornhill Golf and Country Club stands today. Described as a man “of capital and enterprise,”[1] he built a five-storey gristmill, considered the largest in Canada at the time, as well as a tannery, a general store, and a fine brick house near the top of the hill. By 1830, he had already started a successful import-export business in the town of York, exporting flour to Great Britain and importing iron ore and household goods into Upper Canada. By all accounts, Benjamin was a kind-hearted entrepreneur, always willing to extend credit to the struggling settlers who frequented his store in York. He was also the first man in Upper Canada to pay cash for wheat, further endearing himself to the pioneer farmers.
The house that Balcer Munshaw built to replace his log cabin in 1809, as it looked on September 16, 2011. He seems to have done a pretty good job.
Photo by Scott Kennedy.
In 1829, Benjamin petitioned for a post office in the community that would soon bear his name. At the time, residents of the little community had to travel all the way to York to pick up their mail, a round-trip journey that could take up to eight hours. His request was granted and the new post office was the first institution to bear the name “Thornhill.” William Parsons, the brother-in-law that Benjamin had followed to Upper Canada a decade earlier, was appointed postmaster, a position he would hold until one year before his death in 1861.
In 1830, Benjamin married Anna Maria Willcocks, the woman who had inspired him to build that fine brick house. It was also in 1830 that Benjamin donated land on his farm for the construction of the Holy Trinity Anglican Church, an affiliation that Benjamin shared with members of Upper Canada’s ruling Family Compact. Most of the farmers at that time were Methodists.
By 1836, Thornhill was a thriving community of three hundred souls with four churches to save them, whatever their affiliation. Benjamin’s flour mill was so busy that, despite its size, farmers were often lined up until ten o’clock at night, waiting to have their wheat ground. Business, quite literally, could not have been better and would continue in such a fashion for the next decade. In 1842, the first year that banks could freely establish branches in both halves of the newly united Province of Canada, Benjamin was appointed one of two presidents (one for Upper Canada and one for Lower Canada) of the Bank of Montreal, which had been founded in 1817. He laid the cornerstone for the bank’s building at the corner of Yonge Street and Front Street in 1845, which was replaced in 1885 by the wonderfully ornate bank building that currently houses the Hockey Hall of Fame at the same location. Two years earlier, Benjamin and partner John Barwick had bought the already established Red Mill at Holland Landing to take some of the pressure off the mill at Thornhill. Three years later, things would go horribly wrong.
In 1846, following the Irish Potato Famine, Britain repealled her so-called “Corn Laws,” which had allowed Canadian wheat and flour to enter Great Britain duty-free. The British, desperate for any food to feed their starving citizens, now dropped their tariffs on grain imports altogether. The advantage that Canadian producers had long enjoyed evaporated overnight. As countries closer to Great Britain began to take advantage of this unexpected windfall, Benjamin Thorne was literally left with shiploads of unsaleable flour. While other smaller millers were better able to absorb the blow, Benjamin’s operations were so massive that the loss of his sole customer spelled certain doom. He put his mills up for sale, but there were no takers. Trustees, acting on behalf of his creditors, seized his assets in 1848. His sudden ruin very nearly destroyed the entire village, since farmers from miles around no longer had anyone to buy their wheat.
On June 2, 1848, an auction was held to dispose of some of Benjamin’s more liquid assets such as wagons, sleighs, carts, hogs, and horses. The auction of the mills, house, and stores was soon to follow. The month after the first dispersal, a beaten Benjamin Thorne walked into the pasture behind his house and shot himself. He was fifty-four years old with a wife and eight children.
George Crookshank was born in New York City in 1773, where his United Empire Loyalist father, the owner and captain of a merchant sailing ship, found himself persona-non-grata after the British were defeated in the Revolutionary War. The family fled to New Brunswick, where George found his first employment on the family’s ships sailing to the West Indies. In 1796, George and his sister Rachel followed their married sister to Upper Canada. Here, the Crookshanks finally found a welcoming home where George was granted 1,200 acres of land spread over several parcels in York Township, both inside and outside the Town of York, as soon as he arrived.
George’s older sister Catherine was married to John McGill, who had been put in charge of stores and provisions for the fledgling town of York in 1792. George benefitted enormously from his connections and the good will extended to the family by Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe and his wife, Elizabeth. George was charged with provisioning Fort York and the other forts in the area. He performed his duties well and was rewarded with a series of promotions, including a promotion to receiver general in 1819 and a directorship at the Bank of Upper Canada. The bill to establish the Bank of Upper Canada had just been passed by the Legislative Assembly in 1819, although its charter
