produced: wheat, peas, oats, potatoes, hay, maple sugar, cider, apples, wool, cheese, milk, butter, pork, and beef. This was truly a well-balanced farm that would have been able to withstand market-value fluctuations by being so diverse. When the lumber from John’s sawmill on the Don River was added to this mix, there was an almost perfect combination of marketable products. Only a couple of things were missing and they would be seen to in good time.
The house that Samuel Cummer built facing Yonge Street, around 1840, is shown here, one hundred years after it was moved to 48 Parkview Avenue in 1913.
Photo by Scott Kennedy.
In 1851, ten years after his father’s death, John and his son, Jacob III, added a gristmill and a woollen mill to the family holdings in the Don Valley, near the meeting grounds. The gristmill was located near the sawmill and meeting grounds, while the woollen mill was further south along the river. They named their cluster of mills “Reading Mills” after the family’s former home in Pennsylvania. At the same time they were building the new mills, Jacob III was building one of the only two Cummer homes to survive to the present day.
Currently located at 44 Beardmore Crescent, in the valley just north of Cummer Avenue, the house originally consisted of only the centre section of the structure that exists today. The wings on either side were added in 1930 by Henry Nathanson, who owned the house at that time and used it as a summer residence to escape the heat and congestion of a still-distant Toronto.
As already noted, John’s brothers, Joshua and Samuel, each inherited one half of their father Jacob’s original farms on Lot 18-1E and Lot 19-1E. Joshua was a tinsmith. He sold his wares, as well as the shingles from his shingle mill, at the Cummer store on Yonge Street. In the 1830s he built a house there that stood at 20 McKee Avenue until the twenty-first century. The farm and house had been sold by Joshua to John Morgan for $15,000 in 1876, when Joshua moved to Aurora. John Morgan sold the property to John Arnold McKee in 1910. The property remained part of the McKee’s Hildon Farm until John Arnold’s son, John William, sold the land for development in 1923. Throughout, the house survived. But concerted conservation efforts at the dawn of the twenty-first century failed to save the house, which was still in fine shape when it was mindlessly demolished in June of 2002 for condos.
In 1856, Samuel Cummer helped to build the new brick church on Yonge Street that replaced the original log meeting house his father had built in 1834. The new place of worship stood on Yonge for one hundred years until it too was consigned to the scrap heap in 1956. Samuel also served as Willowdale postmaster from 1880–82. The brick farmhouse that Samuel built around 1840 still stands at 48 Parkview Avenue, several doors east of its original location at 34 Parkview Avenue; an address that is now home to the Ontario Historical Society. Though altered considerably and now divided into two houses, Samuel’s is one of only two remaining Cummer houses in Willowdale.
Samuel’s brother Jacob II, the first Willowdale postmaster, had taken the store over from his father and ran the post office there from 1855 until 1880 when Samuel assumed the position. Jacob II was also a tinsmith and shingle-maker, and he and his wife, the former Agnes Endicott, were much admired in the community for taking in numerous orphaned boys and girls who were then educated and treated exactly like their own children until they were able to make their way in the world.
Brothers David and Daniel were active in the Temperance movement. Both men occupied the Cummer house that is pictured on the east side of Yonge Street, facing Patricia Avenue, although they lived there at different times. Their older sister Katherine also lived in the house for many years with her husband, Elihu Pease. The house was demolished in 1964, and, unlike current demolitions where everything goes into the dumpster, some comfort can be taken from the fact that this house was carefully dismantled in the old-fashioned way, allowing the building materials to be used again.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, a strange thing began to happen — the Cummers started leaving North York. Not all of them, but enough that their influence began to wane. Their farms were sold to new families and remained productive until the late 1950s.
Despite the almost delicate appearance of the frame construction in this demolition photo from April 1964, this house served the Cummers well, and stood its ground at 6059 Yonge Street for 145 years. It is shown, vacant and awaiting demolition, but still in one piece in the chapter (3) on Elihu Pease.
Photo by A.J. Tilton, North York Historical Society, NYHS 437.
John Cummer was the first to go. Even before he built the mills in the Don Valley with his son Jacob III, he had sent another son, Lockman Abram Cummer, to supervise the construction of a new house in Waterdown, Ontario. It seems that John had contracted cholera following the Upper Canada Rebellion, and, although he recovered, health concerns dictated the move to the less-populous Waterdown. The house there was completed by 1848 and still stands at 265 Mill Street South. Lockman liked the town so much that he stayed there after the house was finished and married Rachel Lottridge, the daughter of a local businessman.
Shortly after the Cummers completed their new Don Valley mills, John, Lockman, and their new partner, William Gill, built a flour mill in Waterdown. They also opened an iron foundry to produce millstones, boilers, and steam engines in the aptly named Smokey Hollow just outside of Waterdown. The partnership was short-lived however, as depressed grain markets caused them to close the mill in 1857. The foundry was also sold and the partnership was dissolved. John moved from Waterdown to the United States to “take advantage” of opportunities created by the American Civil War. He remained there until 1863 when he returned to Waterdown and partnered in a new venture with his son’s in-laws, the Lottridges.
John Cummer, the first white person to be born north of the town of York, died at his son Franklin’s house in Toronto on September 11, 1868. His wife Sarah died of paralysis in Waterdown on April 13, 1870. Their son, Jacob III, sold the woollen mill and moved to Cadillac, Michigan, in 1860. Their children, those who remained in North York, continued to operate the family businesses for several more years. John and Sarah’s son William took over his grandfather Jacob’s store on Yonge Street from his uncle, Jacob II, in 1867, leaving the milling to his brothers Albert and Edwin. In 1878, the mills were sold to James Cooper. One has to feel for Mr. Cooper, since 1878 was the year that virtually all mills on both branches of the Don River were wiped out by a massive flood that crested for three days, from September 10 to September 13.
John’s brother Joshua sold his portion of the original farm on Yonge Street in 1876 and moved to Aurora, where he died in 1879. Brother Daniel moved to Waterloo in 1847 and to Niagara Township in 1856. He died in 1882. Brother Samuel Cummer died in June 1883 on the Yonge Street farm where he had been born sixty-eight years earlier. He had been deeply involved in his community, especially with the Methodist Episcopal Church, and his passing was mourned by all. Sister Katherine, who had been married to Elihu Pease for many years, died in 1886 at the age of eighty-eight. She was the last of Jacob and Elizabeth Cummer’s children and her death brought an end to the second generation of the Cummer family in Canada. Three years later, the last of the Cummers’ land was sold when Samuel’s son, George W. Cummer, sold the southern half of his grandfather’s original land grant to a Harriet E. Flook.
In a little over fifty years, the Cummers took over 1,300 acres of wilderness, cleared enough of it to create half a dozen farms, built roads, churches, mills, and stores, filled the stores with products that they made themselves, formed meaningful bonds with the Native people, held political office, fought for the rights of their fellow farmers, and sowed the seeds for the United Church of Canada.
What remains of their legacy? Well, not quite everything they built has been torn down yet. There is still
