support for their petition to secede from York Township and form their own township. Their efforts were successful and on the thirteenth of June, 1922, the provincial government granted their request and the Township of North York was born. John lived in a farmhouse that the Munshaws built on Bayview Avenue, across the street from today’s St. Joseph’s Convent and high school, which has recently been sold to another religious order, the Tyndale College and Seminary. John Brumwell’s descendants farmed this land until the middle of the twentieth century, when it was sold for housing.
Benjamin Thorne’s house outlived him by 115 years. After Benjamin’s death, the house burned but was not destroyed. John Langstaff, who by now had abandoned his teaching career in favour of manufacturing shingles and eavestroughs, grafted the upper floor of another abandoned house onto the Thorne house to create a functional, yet extremely odd-looking new dwelling. In later years this structure housed the Thornhill Mineral Springs Resort before becoming the clubhouse of the Thornhill Golf Club, which opened on May 24, 1922, with a course designed by Canada’s foremost golf course architect, Stanley Thompson. When the club became the Thornhill Golf and Country Club, the poor old house was demolished in 1963 to make room for curling rinks, lounges, locker rooms, and a new dining room.
This house was built by Jacob Munshaw on Bayview Avenue, on the eastern border of Lot 24-1E. It is pictured here around 1910 when it was owned by John Brumwell, with John’s wife, Jane (Kennedy) Brumwell, standing on the back porch.
Photographer unknown, North York Historical Society, NYHS 789.
Balcer Munshaw died in 1830. He and his wife were proud grandparents to forty-three grandchildren — clearly a family with few intimacy issues. Their second house, built in 1809 to replace the family’s log cabin, still stands at 10 Ruggles Avenue, which runs south from Langstaff Road, just east of Yonge Street. It survived as a private residence for over 175 years, but has now been reduced to industrial office space.
It is fortunate that two of the houses built by these pioneers still exist, and although they don’t exist in North York, they are close enough that they are certainly worth a visit. In addition, there is another Heinztman house still standing in North York. It was built by one of Charles’s sons in the late 1940s on former Harrison family farmland and has recently been renovated, rather than demolished like the majority of its neighbours. It would be nice to think that this unlikely survivor at 116 Forest Heights Boulevard points the way to a new appreciation of the area’s remaining historic properties.
{Chapter Twelve}
The Cummers
It is doubtful that any pioneer family had a greater impact on North York than the Cummers. The Kummer family, as they were known in their native Germany (some sources also list their names as Koomer), began the remarkable journey that would eventually lead them to Willowdale when they sailed to North America in the mid-1700s to escape religious persecution in their home country. The Kummers were Lutherans, a denomination that had long been at odds with the Catholic Church and many of the Crown heads of Europe.
They left their home in the Palatine region of southwestern Germany, where Martin Luther had started the Reformation in 1517, to settle in Pennsylvania in 1736. The family was welcomed in those prerevolutionary days when Britain still governed their colonies south of the border. It was only natural then that the family felt a certain loyalty to Great Britain, and, although they remained in the United States for some time after the Revolutionary War of 1776, they eventually felt the pull of the British Crown and decided to move north of the border.
Jacob Kummer was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1767, three years before Beethoven. He became one of the first settlers in North York when he emigrated with his wife Elizabeth, the first three of their thirteen children, Mary, Elizabeth, and Daniel, his father Daniel, and Elizabeth’s father Jacob Fisher in 1795. Upon arriving in Upper Canada, they built a little log cabin near present-day Yonge and Eglinton, where Jacob left the rest of the family for the winter while he continued north into the wilderness to seek a more permanent home. Their son John was born in the cabin in 1797.
That same year the Kummers received their first Crown land grant for the one-hundred-and-ninety-acre Lot 18-1E halfway between Sheppard and Finch, running from Yonge Street east to Bayview. Not all lots in North York were exactly two hundred acres, owing to surveying mistakes. Jacob had carefully selected this particular lot for its combination of hard and softwood trees, as well as its excellent soil and gently rolling terrain. The family performed their settlers’ duties to the Crown’s satisfaction, including the building of another log cabin on Yonge Street, and were granted the deed to their property before the nineteenth century, one of only a handful of families who were able to make that claim.
To give some idea of just how isolated the Kummers were, it should be mentioned that there were only three neighbours in a four-mile radius around their farm. In 1797, there were only 241 people in the town of York, as well as 175 soldiers and family members at Fort York, and 196 settlers in the surrounding countryside for a grand total of 612 people in the present-day city of Toronto. They all could have fit into three subway cars. Outside, in the Toronto of 1797, bears, wolves, and foxes were a constant threat to crops and livestock.
One day when Elizabeth Kummer was home alone tending to her chores and her newborn son, John, she was startled by a Native man staring at her through the door of the cabin. He appeared to be interested in a kitchen knife that was sitting on the table. She gave him the knife, hoping he would go away and leave her in peace. He accepted the knife and went on his way. Relieved, Elizabeth went back to her chores and put the matter out of her mind. Some days later, however, the man appeared again, bearing a cradle that he had made for the baby to thank Elizabeth for the knife. He had come all the way from his home on Lake Simcoe. Perhaps he had also been taken by the very appearance of this baby, who was thought to be the first white child born in the wilderness north of Toronto. This would be the first of many happy interactions between the family and the First Nations people who still lived in the area.
More children would come in fairly rapid succession: Katherine in 1798, Jacob II in 1800, David in 1803, and Joseph in 1804. As the family grew, so too did their holdings. Even their family name would change, but more on that later.
In 1804, Jacob bought the southern ninety-five acres of the adjoining farm to the north, on Lot 19-1E, from fellow settler Lawrence Johnson. In 1817, he expanded the family’s reach in a northeasterly direction when he bought fifty acres in the centre of Lot 22-2E, a two-hundred-acre parcel bordered on the north by today’s Cummer Avenue, stretching from Bayview to Leslie Street. Two years later he would add the western hundred acres of Lot 21-2E directly to the south, and in 1821 he would add the one-hundred-and-ninety-acre Lot 23-1E, north of Cummer Avenue, running from Yonge Street east to Bayview Avenue.
Jacob Kummer now had an unbroken one-hundred-and-fifty-acre parcel between Bayview and Leslie, as well as a two-hundred-and-eighty-five-acre farm between Yonge Street and Bayview, and a one-hundred-and-ninety-acre farm further north, also stretching from Yonge to Bayview. By now the family was complete, with daughters Sarah and Nancy and sons Joshua and Samuel joining their elder siblings between 1804 and 1815. Some years after Samuel’s birth in 1815, the family would change their name to “Cummer.” Sadly, two other children would not live to see adulthood — Joseph living only from 1804 to 1813 and Peter dying the same year as Joseph at the age of one.
The family’s holdings now stood at a most impressive six-hundred-and-twenty-five acres, only twenty-four years removed from that first cabin at Yonge and Eglinton. The Yonge Street and Don Valley properties would serve different yet complementary purposes. Yonge Street was Upper Canada’s main street at the time, offering unequalled contact with other settlers and relatively quick transportation of farm products to market. The Don River,
