for the Canada Company in 1828, had fled on horseback, heading north up Yonge Street along with rebel leader William Lyon Mackenzie after the battle at Montgomery’s Tavern. Once they reached The Golden Lion Hotel, at today’s Yonge and Sheppard, with government troops hot on their heels, the two men split up. Mackenzie exchanged his horse for a fresh one at the hotel and headed west to the farms of Thomas and Jacob Shepard at Bathurst Street. Colonel Egmond, a much older man, was by now completely exhausted from the battle and pursuit and sought shelter at the much closer home of Catherine Shepard. He was captured there by government troops and imprisoned in the Toronto jail, where he contracted pneumonia and died the following January.
What a cold, hellish night it must have been, as soldiers set fire to surveyor David Gibson’s house on the lot directly to the north of the Shepard farm, and other homes in the area as well. (The current Gibson House was built in the 1850s to replace this one that was burned by the troops.) When the sun came up on December 8, Catherine could actually count herself among the lucky ones, as she still had a roof over her head, although apparently there are still charred rafters in the house as mute testimony to what happened that night.
In the days following the rebellion, government troops scoured the back roads on horseback, burning farmhouses to smoke out any remaining rebels, no doubt aided in their search by William Lyon Mackenzie’s little black book. In addition to the government troops, local farmers had to fear roving gangs of civilian, vigilante Loyalists who, with full government support, fanned out across North York, looting and burning buildings and assaulting or capturing any of their neighbours they suspected of being sympathetic to the rebel cause. In the aftermath of this all-out assault, the four Shepard boys suffered disparate fates.
Jacob and Joseph II were held in custody until May 12, 1838, when they were released and allowed to return home. Thomas and Michael were not so lucky. Six months after they were captured, they still hadn’t been brought to trial. Nonetheless, they were sent to Kingston to await banishment to Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania). Realizing that they would never see Upper Canada again if sent into exile, they escaped from custody, using the cover of a massive nighttime thunderstorm to mask their escape. They kneeled and prayed in the pouring rain before splitting up and running for their lives. Miraculously, they both found themselves in the United States a little over a week later, where they were welcomed as heroes for fighting the British troops. Their families crossed Lake Ontario to visit them in Lewiston for what they thought might have been one last time. The brothers then set out to find work while their families returned to North York. Three years later, word reached Thomas and Michael that they had been pardoned and were now free to return to Upper Canada. They didn’t have to be told a second time.
Thomas returned to the farm he had purchased in 1834, while Michael returned to the farm he had inherited from his father in 1837. It seems that Joseph was fair to the end. Realizing that his two eldest sons were now successfully farming and milling on their own properties, he left his own two farms to his two youngest sons, Michael and Joseph II. Joseph II inherited the farm where his mother Catherine still lived while Michael inherited Lot 17-1W, directly to the north. Joseph II and his family moved into Catherine’s farmhouse where they remained until 1860.
Thomas’s farm and mills were extremely productive. The farmland produced livestock and grain, as well as fruit from three acres of excellent orchards. His steam-powered sawmill was capable of cutting 4,000 feet of lumber per day and the flour he produced was sold as far away as Montreal, but his farm had one serious flaw. It seems that the hills into the valley where his mills stood were so steep that the roads became virtually impassable when rain or snow turned them to mud. At times like these, not even a team of oxen could haul a wagonload out of the valley, so Thomas would carry the one-hundred-pound bags of flour up the hill on his shoulders, one at a time, in order to satisfy his customers and get his product to market. In 1847, he offered the farm for sale but found no takers and went back to work. The Shepard brothers’ next series of land transactions would make a drunken game of musical chairs seem organized.
In 1849, Joseph II was granted thirty-eight acres of Lot 15-3E on the southeast corner of today’s Leslie and Sheppard where George S. Henry’s Oriole Lodge Farm would one day stand. In 1852, he sold the parcel to his brother Michael, who bought thirty-three acres of Lot 14-3E directly to the south at the same time, and built a sawmill on the East Don River that ran through his new holdings. The operation was a profitable enterprise, processing over 50,000 feet of lumber a month and employing two people. In 1856, Thomas was finally able to sell the farm with the steep hills. The buyer was none other than his younger brother, Joseph II, who had just sold his property at Leslie and Sheppard to Michael. Thomas then turned around and bought Michael’s farm and sawmill in Oriole. Michael then returned to Yonge and Sheppard to farm the lot his father had left him in 1837. Thomas soon added a gristmill to Michael’s former property that proved every bit as successful as the existing sawmill. Thomas ran the mills in Oriole until they were both destroyed by fire in 1869, and he retired at the age of sixty-five. Michael’s return to Lansing would soon provide us with another beautiful farmhouse that survives to this day.
In 1859, Michael completed the red brick farmhouse that still stands near the eastern entrance to the York Cemetery. Much grander than his parents’ frame house on Burndale Avenue, Michael’s late Georgian style farmhouse owes a stylistic debt to the house that his friend, David Gibson, had built just around the corner at today’s Yonge and Park Home Avenue, after he too was pardoned and allowed to return to North York. Thought by some to be a little too nice for a farmer at the time, Michael’s house outlived the raised eyebrows and graces us still with its beauty. Michael lived and farmed on this lot that reached all the way from Yonge Street to Bathurst Street until his death in 1876.
Michael Shepard’s late-Georgian-style house, which was built in 1859 with a three-bay façade, appears as a small-scale version of David Gibson’s five-bay Georgian house built several years earlier, and still standing less than a quarter of a mile north of Michael’s house. The house is shown here as it looked on November 20, 2009.
Photo by Scott Kennedy.
After Michael’s death, the farm remained intact until 1916 when the land was purchased by the Toronto General Burying Grounds as the site of a future cemetery. Michael’s house, still in fine shape, was used as a private residence until the York Cemetery opened in 1948, at which time the house assumed the dual role of cemetery office and living quarters for the cemetery manager. Although now strictly given over to office space and the pallid, near-invisible throb of fluorescent lights, Michael Shepard’s house still offers clear evidence of the enormous success of this family.
The year after Michael moved into his new farmhouse, his brother Joseph created one of the most memorable buildings in the history of North York. The combination store and living quarters he built on the northwest corner of Yonge and Sheppard would stand there for nearly 140 years as a landmark and lifeline for generations of North York families. The two-storey brick building with attic and full basement was constructed in the late Georgian style of the day, meaning simply that it exhibited the simplicity and symmetry consistent with Georgian architecture, augmented by a few details and flourishes of the neo-classical or Greek style. The building has no ninety-degree corners. It is, in fact, trapezoidal rather than square or rectangular, a situation that likely drove more than one of the bricklayers or carpenters across the street to the Golden Lion Tavern. There was a very practical reason for this somewhat bizarre construction, as shall be seen. The red and yellow bricks were said to have been hauled up from Yorkville by oxen. The wood used in the construction was produced at the Shepards’ own sawmills.
Though commonly thought of as just a store, the building actually housed commodious living quarters as well. The store occupied the southeast corner of the building. It was a big store, graced with the usual pot-bellied stove in the centre, surrounded by long counters of dry goods on one side and foodstuffs on the other. The dry goods section featured bolts of cotton, flannel, woollens,
