a verandah across the front, it was the scene of John’s capture by government troops on the night of December 8, 1837, after they mistakenly identified him as a participant in the Upper Canada Rebellion. While the house then gave shelter to Eliza Gibson and her children as her husband David fled for his life from the pursuing troops, it would find no shelter of its own from the grasping tentacles of a relentlessly growing city.Photo by Ted Chirnside, Toronto Public Library, TC 38.
Another new church was built on Kenneth Avenue in 1954. The old church was demolished on the autumn equinox in 1956. A scattering of forgotten pioneer headstones were shuffled around like a cheap deck of cards and left, cracked and deteriorating on the ground when Yonge Street was further altered and expanded in the late 1970s, where they remain to this day, near an emergency exit for the subway, behind a grocery store. Jacob Cummer’s headstone fared a little better, being incorporated into a newer monument in the middle of this sad little cemetery.
Also lying on the ground is a stone that reads, “United Church of Canada 1932,” nearly one hundred years after Jacob built the log meeting house with his own two hands. The little log meeting house also played a part in the Upper Canada Rebellion. It seems that the Cummers, like the Harrisons of York Mills, made the decision to turn their backs on their Loyalist roots when they began to feel that Upper Canada’s ruling Family Compact was ignoring the farmers’ legitimate concerns.
The Family Compact, a clique of privileged and inter-
related families, rose to power by championing popular government, but once in office, their goal changed to simply maintaining their authority. Once they had gained control by making popular decisions, they became arrogant and began to make many unpopular decisions. Included among these was their decision to reserve 2,500,000 acres of Crown land for the exclusive use of the Anglican Church. Other denominations felt excluded and offended. The disgruntled farmers decided that the best way to deal with this problem was head-on, so they formed the Reform Party, which had slowly but surely taken control of Upper Canada’s Legislative Assembly or lower house by 1834. Still, the Family Compact, who controlled the upper house, refused to make legislative changes.
John Cummer, the first member of his family to be born in Upper Canada, was elected to the Legislative Assembly as a Reformer in 1834, as was his neighbour David Gibson. John, like party leader and close friend William Lyon Mackenzie, wanted to give a voice to the farmers who were fed up with corrupt politicians, land speculators, and administrative extravagance, but even though the Reformers now controlled the lower house, the Family Compact was not really interested in listening to their concerns.
A number of the Cummer brothers and their fellow Reformers gathered to pray at the little meeting house on December 4, 1837, the day the Rebellion began, to seek divine guidance. The Cummers, who were not prone to violent or treasonable acts, decided not to join the Rebellion, despite John Cummer being offered the outright command of the rebel forces by rebel leader William Lyon Mackenzie. As was seen in the story of the Montgomery/Elliot farm, the Rebellion itself was a failure in name only, for although the rag-tag group of farmers with their pitchforks and clubs were easily dispatched by the well-armed government troops, their concerns would be addressed and the rebels were eventually pardoned and allowed to return to their farms. Shortly afterwards, the government did change to address the farmers’ concerns, and create a template for today’s government.
Among those arrested in the days immediately following the Rebellion were John Cummer and his younger brother Samuel. John was arrested on December 8 at his home at Yonge and Finch. Although he had not participated in the Rebellion, government troops had observed him looking at the remains of his friend David Gibson’s house, which had been burned by the troops the previous night. This was reason enough for them to ride their horses up onto John’s verandah and take him into custody in front of his terrified wife and children.
This view of Jacob Cummer III’s house is no longer obtainable, as two houses have been built in front of it since this shot was taken by Lorna Gardner in 1967. This is a significant photograph that allows us to easily visualize the way the house looked before the two wings were added in 1930.
Courtesy of North York Historical Society, NYHS 1327.
John Cummer was roped to other captured Reformers, marched down Yonge Street in front of a jeering mob, and incarcerated in the Toronto jail on the north side of King Street, across from today’s King Edward Hotel. Luckily for John, he had Family Compact friends in the Legislative Assembly, such as his brother-in-law Peter Lawrence, who was married to his older sister Elizabeth, and business associates such as Sir Allan Napier MacNab, a prominent Markham distiller and dedicated customer of John’s sawmill, who made sure that he only spent one night in jail. In fact, Sir Allan owed John quite a bit of money at this time, so maybe he had mixed motives. John’s younger brother Samuel was also jailed, and, in fact, forcibly drafted into the government army before being cut loose the next morning when it occurred to someone in charge that he was too young to serve. Jacob’s son Joshua hid William Lyon Mackenzie’s printing press in an abandoned well on his farm so that the Reform Party could continue printing their newspaper, The Colonial Advocate. John Cummer and his family offered refuge to David Gibson’s wife, Eliza, and the four Gibson children after their house was destroyed.
Jacob Cummer died suddenly on December 5, 1841, at seventy-four years of age. And, yes, he had outlived Beethoven. For many years after his death, the community that came to be known as Willowdale continued to be referred to as Cummer’s Settlement. Jacob had led an incredible life and done his best to ensure that his children would be able to do the same. It had been his custom to give land to his sons as wedding gifts, just as many other settlers did. Jacob had executed his own will in 1834 and it showed that he played no favourites. All of his children were remembered: John inherited the sawmill that he had been running for twenty-two years, Joshua was given the deed to the north half of the original family farms on Yonge Street, and Samuel inherited the southern half. Jacob was buried in the cemetery on Yonge Street, next to the church that he built with his own two hands. In his will he specified that the church remain available to all denominations “forever.” Although nothing lasts forever, this little meeting house and the brick church that replaced it would become the spiritual birthplace of the United Church of Canada, which brought the Methodists, Congregationalists, and some groups of Presbyterians together under one roof when incorporated in 1925. Maybe Jacob got his wish after all.
Elizabeth survived her husband by a little over twelve years, living with her son Joshua and his wife Angelina Irwin. One of her grandchildren offered this memory of Elizabeth, as quoted by Gladys Allison in the the Willowdale Enterprise of June 18, 1953: “She attended to the moral and other affairs of the daily routine and used what was handiest in the due repression of any evil doing or intent on the part of the large family which looked to her as captain and helmsman.” She was kindly yet masterful and when she died on her seventy-ninth birthday on March 31, 1854, she handed the reins to the next generation of Cummers — the first generation to be born in North America, and a generation that must have been a source of great pride for Jacob and Elizabeth.
As in most families, some of the children would go on to have more of an impact on their community than others, and, with ten of them surviving their parents and marrying members of other prominent pioneer families, there is more to tell than is possible here.
Of all the members of the second generation, it was John, the first Cummer born in Upper Canada, who was the most dedicated farmer. His holdings would ultimately exceed six hundred acres at their peak, including a three-hundred-acre farm just north of the camp-meeting grounds on the Don River, a two-hundred-and-ten-acre farm that ran from Yonge Street to Bathurst Street on the north side of Finch Avenue, and a 105-acre farm that ran from Yonge to Bathurst, just north of the David Gibson farm, between Sheppard and Finch. An inventory of this latter farm from
