Parkview Avenue, and that one last house on Beardmore Crescent, way down there in Angel Valley — not much, but much better than nothing.
{Chapter Thirteen}
The David Gibson Farm
For someone with less than two hundred acres of farmland, David Gibson certainly made his presence known, not only in North York but throughout Upper Canada. His name crops up frequently, since he interacts with many of the more notable families of early North York. His name often appears in the present day as well, for he was the man who built Gibson House at Yonge Street and Park Home Avenue, arguably the most accurately restored and maintained pioneer farmhouse in all of North York. Though currently being dwarfed by the construction of yet another high-rise development, to be named Gibson Square, of course, one needs only to step over the threshold to forget such intrusions and become absorbed into the lives that were once lived here. Gibson House is, in fact, the second house the family built on the property, the first having been burned by government troops following the Upper Canada Rebellion in 1837.
The only child of tenant farmer James Gibson and his wife Margaret, David was born in the parish of Glamis, Forfarshire, Scotland, on March 9, 1804. His uncle, Alexander Milne, also born in Forfarshire in 1777, had immigrated to the United States in 1801, and made considerable money working as a weaver and running a woollen mill, as well as patenting and popularizing a new method of bleaching cotton, before coming to Upper Canada in 1817. David’s mother died in 1811. His father married Isobel Cathow around eight years later, and they would have four more children together: James Junior, William, John, and Isabella.
When David Gibson was still a young boy, William Blackadder, a surveyor working near the Gibson home, asked for the boy’s assistance. David must have acquitted himself well, for when the survey was completed, Blackadder asked if David might train as his apprentice. James Gibson agreed and David spent the next five years learning the surveyor’s trade. David’s apprenticeship, begun in 1819, was completed by June 1824. Armed with his new credentials and letters of recommendation, David set sail from Dundee on the brigantine Gratitude on March 28, 1825, bound for Canada.
By May he was settled in Quebec City where he was received by the surveyor general of Quebec who sent him with one other surveyor and four Native guides to survey the headwaters of the Saint John River, which rise in what is now the state of Maine. For thirty-two days they travelled on foot, crossing lakes on homemade rafts, and living on rations of bread, salt pork, peas, and whatever fish or partridges they could catch. When that job was completed, David found a position with a crew who were surveying the border between the United States and Quebec. He worked in Quebec until the end of September, then decided to head west to seek out his uncles, Alexander and Peter Milne, in the autumn of 1825. By then they were the proprietors of a sawmill, a gristmill, a woollen mill, and a dry goods store in Markham Township, in the area then known as Markham Mills, at the corner of present-day Highways 7 and 48.
The Gibson House Museum in restored condition, as it looked in 2010, snuggled among the same pine trees that have kept it company since before Canada was a country.
Photo by Scott Kennedy.
Leaving snow-covered Montreal in late October, David travelled night and day to reach Kingston, but once there he discovered that there were no schooners or stagecoaches heading to York, so he continued on foot. He recalled the journey in a letter to a friend back in Scotland, dated April 27, 1827:
I put a clean shirt and pair of stockings in my pocket and six days afterwards I arrived in the Township of Markham about eighteen miles north east of York in U. Canada where I was kindly received by my friends. They wrote me when in Quebec to come to Upper Canada, that they had no doubt that I would get plenty of employment, and gave me great encouragement. My friends were very glad to see the letters I had with me from the Governor of Lower Canada. I went to York a few days after and delivered my Introductory Letters, the one was to the Rev. Dr. Strachan and the other to the Lieut. Governor, they both advised me to get appointed a Deputy Surveyor of Land. I was examined by the Surveyor General, found competent and got a commission written out in the usual form signed by the Lieut. Governor (after I found security in the amount of £500 for my good behaviour, my friends in Markham were my securities) the Lieut. Governor gave me back Lord Dalhousie’s letter and stated that there was no situation vacant then but as soon as I saw a situation vacant that I would like to apply for it and again show Lord Dalhousie’s letter. Since I was appointed a Deputy Surveyor I petitioned the Magistrates of the Home District to appoint me a Surveyor of Highways of the Home District which they granted, the clerk of the quarter Sessions then stated to the Magistrates that the Surveyor of Highways for the Eastern division of the Home District was a very illiterate sort of man and that they never got a proper report from him and also asked if they would have any objection to appoint me for the Eastern Division also which they readily granted since I have been appointed Surveyor of Highways for the Southern division of the Home District I have as much business as I can attend to.[1]
David used the time between December 28, 1825, when he was commissioned as a surveyor for Upper Canada, and the spring of 1826 when given his actual appointments, to get his surveying equipment in order, a task that involved cutting the rings for his surveying chain, linking the chain together, grinding the glass in his surveying instruments, and calibrating the instruments by finding a true Meridian Line from the stars. The Gibson family still has David’s original chain.
The scope of his appointments, all made in May 1826, was almost unbelievable. Under David Gibson’s direction, colonization roads were built from as far east as Whitby to as far west as Southampton on Lake Huron, and north to Owen Sound on Georgian Bay. He surveyed much of Simcoe, Grey, Huron, and Bruce Counties as well as townships in Wellington and Wentworth Counties, and those for the future Dufferin County. He was later put in charge of surveying the roads in the Algoma District, all this at a time when these areas were complete wilderness. After all, until someone laid out the colonization roads, there could be no settlers.
This portrait of David Gibson, dated circa 1855, is on display in Gibson House Museum.
Courtesy of the City of Toronto and the Gibson House Museum.
A photograph of Eliza Gibson hangs beside the photo of her husband David. Her picture is believed to have been taken about fifteen years later.
On March 4, 1828, David took time out from his labours to get married. His bride was his cousin, Eliza Milne, daughter of Alexander, who was then operating a mill where Toronto’s Edwards Gardens stands today. The newlyweds built their first house on the Milne property at Leslie and Lawrence. The following year, David and Eliza purchased the southern half of Lot 18-1W from John Willson III for £400 and settled down to the business of farming. Their new frame house stood on the same spot where the current Gibson house stands today. The farm property, the southern one hundred and five acres of Lot 18-1W, ran west from today’s Yonge Street to Bathurst Street, about halfway between Sheppard and Finch Avenues.
Much of the land was already cleared. It had been granted, in 1805, to John Willson II, who had fought with the British during the American Revolution, and had remained in the Willson family for twenty-four years. Following the war, the Willsons had been forced to flee to New Brunswick after their property south of the border was confiscated. They arrived in Upper Canada at the end of the eighteenth century and were among the most prominent of the early families in North York, eventually giving their slightly modified name to Wilson Avenue.
In 1833, David Gibson acquired some additional
