of the new St. John’s Anglican Church. Joseph himself worked alongside other members of the congregation, felling the virgin timber on site and squaring the logs with axe and adze.
In the 1820s, Joseph built a sawmill and a gristmill on the West Don River that ran through the western portion of his farm near Bathurst Street, in an area that came to be known as Chuckle Hollow. The mills were run by his sons, and, like most mills in pioneer North York, they were very profitable enterprises. Joseph remained committed to the reform movement and especially to its leader, William Lyon Mackenzie, whom he had supported in Upper Canada’s election of 1832. Two years later, the Town of York reverted to its original First Nations’ name of “Toronto,” and Mackenzie was elected the town’s first mayor. This was also the year that the Shepards would really start to spread their wings.
In 1834, Joseph and Catherine’s two eldest sons bought farms of their own in the second concession west of Yonge Street. Thomas, now thirty years old, bought Lot 18-2W, which ran east from Bathurst Street to Dufferin Street, about halfway between Sheppard and Finch. The eastern portion of his farm included the majestic sweep of the West Don Valley where the Holocaust Education and Memorial Centre of Toronto stand today, just north of Bathurst and Sheppard. Jacob, a couple of years younger than Thomas, bought Lot 19-2W, directly to the north of his brother’s farm. Both sons built new mills on the West Don River and got down to the serious business of building their own farms. Back on the original farm at Yonge and Sheppard, Joseph and Catherine were about to start construction of a house to replace their log cabin — a house that is still a home today, on its original foundation, over 175 years later.
Joseph was now nearly seventy years old, but he still had his eye on the future when he decided to embark on the daunting task of constructing a new farmhouse for his family. He did a fabulous job, since even now the home is one of North York’s real treasures. Anne M. de Fort-Menares, former architectural historian to the City of North York, described the house as one of a group of “Small frame houses of exceptional finesse....” in the January 1985 edition of the Canadian Collector.[1] Though surrounded today by the more pedestrian dwellings that were erected on its former farmland, the Shepard house still manages to charm.
The much-admired home of Joseph Shepard, built circa 1835 on what is today’s Burndale Avenue, is shown here as it appeared in 1968.
Photo by Lorna Gardner, North York Historical Society, NYHS 1286.
The storey-and-a-half clapboard structure delivers all of the elegance and symmetry that its mix of late-Georgian and neo-classical Loyalist styles could only suggest. Simple, genteel, and dignified, the house offers a glimpse of a style not often seen in Toronto, where Loyalist flourishes are rare.[2] Appearing small from the outside, the centre hall layout provides an interior of surprising accommodation. Throughout the home, attention to detail elevates the simple to the sublime.
The front door case, easily the most striking feature of the house, is a complicated piece of work that at first glance appears quite wide for the overall size of the house. And yet, the meticulous attention to detail and proportion somehow manages to merge the grand and the humble in such a way that both seem completely satisfied. The recessed, six-panel door is bracketed by wide sidelights with six-over-four sliding sash windows. Four fluted Doric-style pilasters surround the door and sidelights, which originally stood alone without a transom or fanlight. Alterations by subsequent owners have added a pediment, dentils, and other embellishments, which might charitably be described as “gilding the lily.”
The quality of the woodwork is almost certainly attributable to the Shepards’ sawmills, which were now able to produce the type of millwork that Joseph and Catherine may only have dreamed of when they built their log cabin. Similarly, the many panes of glass that graced their new home would have been unobtainable thirty years earlier when the stump-riddled roads made transportation of glass an unlikely prospect. Interior decoration, while simple and unpretentious, continued to demonstrate fastidious attention to detail. Formal doorframes were decorated with hand-carved rosettes. Sensuous, well-figured newel posts almost dared you not to touch them, while reverse cyma curves seamlessly connected the tread of one stair to the next.
The house would remain in the family until 1912 when the farm began to be subdivided. Fortunately, both the years and subsequent owners have been kind, and the house has been able to absorb modern additions such as hydro, a furnace, and a washroom without losing its integrity. Located at 90 Burndale Avenue, the house defiantly faces east to Yonge Street, while its modern neighbours all face north or south.
Joseph would only enjoy his new house for a couple of years. He died on May 3, 1837, at the age of seventy-one. He had worked hard and achieved much since he first laid eyes on the virgin forests of Upper Canada more than fifty years earlier. Now it was up to the rest of the family to carry on without him. They were about to live through the most dangerous year of their lives.
In 1837, Joseph’s good friend, William Lyon Mackenzie, set the wheels in motion that would lead to the Upper Canada Rebellion. More will be said about the rebellion and these early farmers, as will be seen in later chapters, but here the focus is on the considerable involvement by the Shepard family.
All four sons were Reformers. They offered the relative isolation of the corners of their farms, which were sheltered in the valley of the West Don River, as a training ground for the Reform soldiers, and space in their mills for the manufacture of ammunition. When the time came to actually confront the government troops in early December, all the brothers were on the front lines. Their mother, Catherine, also played a major role on more than one occasion.
On December 4, approximately fifty Reformers from the north stopped in at the Shepards’ house for a little warmth and nourishment on their way down Yonge Street to engage the government troops. Catherine was only too happy to provide them with what she could. When the fateful day of December 7 came, Jacob and Joseph II were at Montgomery’s Tavern where they fought alongside the woefully inept William Lyon Mackenzie. Their rag-tag group of rebels was quickly routed by the better-equipped government troops in a battle that lasted less than an hour. Jacob and Joseph were captured and imprisoned in the Toronto jail.
The rebel leader William Lyon Mackenzie was so inept that he left his carpet bag behind when he fled Montgomery’s Tavern — his bag that contained a list of the names and addresses of every single one of his supporters. Discovered by the government troops before they burned the tavern to the ground, the bag made their next few days a whole lot easier.
Michael and Thomas Shepard led the government troops on a much merrier chase than their brothers. On the morning of December 7, they were far from Montgomery’s Tavern with a group of several hundred well-armed rebels. Commanded by Colonel Peter Matthews, they had been charged with the capture of the bridge over the Don River at King Street from the defending government troops. In this instance, it was the rebels who nearly carried the day, but, while they were able to set fire to the bridge, they did not destroy it. When news reached them that the tavern had fallen and the rebellion was lost, Michael and Thomas made it as far as the Humber River before they were captured and imprisoned in the same jail that already held their brothers. While there, they witnessed the executions of Colonel Matthews and Samuel Lount, one of the rebels who had stopped at Catherine’s house on December 4. Both men were hanged.
Catherine was again forced into action on the night of the rebellion when government troops burst into her house looking for rebels. The troops went from room to room, slashing quilts and pillows, and stabbing beds with their swords. As they left each bedroom, they set the mattresses on fire. Catherine followed frantically, dousing the blazes as best she could, trying to save her barely two-year-old home.
Despite Catherine’s best efforts, one rebel commander was captured there that night. Colonel Anthony Van Egmond, the commander
