ready-made clothes available in North York at the time, although such items as hats, gloves, and handkerchiefs were part of the store’s regular stock.
The dry goods section also included a dizzying array of hardware, including tools, farm implements, saws, harnesses, rope, axes, nails, gunpowder, candles, kerosene lamps, and crockery. The food counters tempted customers with drawers full of salt, tea, oats, flour, coffee, dry mustard, chocolate, and sugar. Barrels of pickles and crackers complimented enormous, one-hundred-pound wheels of cheese just waiting to be cut to order. The barter system was still a normal way for farmers to exchange their products for the manufactured goods that they needed. This allowed the store to stock farm-fresh items such as butter, milk, eggs, fruits, and vegetables. The store kept long hours, from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., Monday to Saturday. In addition, a wagon was loaded up once a week to make deliveries to farmers who were unable to do their buying in person.
The residential accommodations were equally impressive. To the north of the store, on the main floor, were the parlour and dining room, with a huge kitchen to the rear. At the very back was the summer kitchen, where meals could be prepared in warm weather without heating up the rest of the house. Temperature extremes were a fact of life then as now, and while the summer kitchen did an admirable job of keeping the place cooler in summer, the six large bedrooms on the second floor were always cold in winter, to the point that a glass of water carried up at bedtime would be frozen solid by morning. There was no central heating of any kind — no indoor plumbing and no electricity.
A deep well out back provided water for drinking and cooking, while a soft-water pump made bathing a little more pleasant. Also located to the rear of the house was a drive shed where the sleigh, buggy, and wagons were stored, as well as a barn with horse stalls, feed bins, tools, and a hay mow that offered endless hours of amusement for the children. To the north of the store stood the busy wagon and carriage shop of Cornelius van Nostrand III, whose family had been among the first pioneer farmers in York Mills, directly to the south. In later years, the wagon works would become the first home of the R.S. Kane Funeral Home, still serving the community today on Yonge Street, just south of Steeles Avenue.
The Shepard store was built as a trapezoid so it would fit exactly into the intersection, which was not square. The importance of this shape becomes clear when it is noted that the exterior of the store was as useful to the community as the interior. Shortly after the building was completed, a porch was added that offered shelter on the east and south sides of the building. The porch was built to shelter passengers who boarded stagecoaches and later, radial cars and buses on Yonge Street. The combination of the porch and the precise fit of the building to the intersection served to keep customers dry in bad weather, an important consideration since the store also functioned as a waiting room and ticket agent for the various types of transport down through the years. Local dairy farmers also used the porch when shipping pails of their milk. They would drop them off in the morning to be conveyed into the city for sale, then pick up the empty pails in the afternoon, or in the case of the early days of the stagecoaches, whenever they could make it back through the treacherous depths of Hogg’s Hollow.
In 1866, the Shepards added another feature to the store when they were granted the rights to operate a post office. The name Lansing was suggested by Joseph’s daughter, Saida, and was soon adopted by the entire area around the crossroads. The store was popular from the outset and before long it was the focal point of the community. In 1870, Joseph E. Shepard (Joseph III) took over the operation of the store from his father. He also assumed responsibility for the operation of the family’s mills over by Bathurst Street, making his father, who had been born in 1815, an early exponent of “freedom fifty-five.” Joseph Shepard II had many good years of retirement to look forward to, although one wonders if men like Joseph ever really retired. He died on April 24, 1899, at the age of eighty-four.
In 1888, Benjamin Brown took over the operation of the store on a rental basis. He changed the business from a general store to a hardware store to better serve the needs of the rapidly growing community. It was a prescient move. The store would remain a successful hardware store for the next 101 years. In 1899, Mary Jane Shepard, daughter of Joseph Shepard II, acquired the property for “$1.00 and natural love and affection,” according to the deed, clearly a close family. In 1904, Benjamin Brown bought the property from Mary Jane and enlarged the former van Nostrand facilities to the north where a 1914 Model T Ford would soon be parked alongside the buggies, cutters, and wagons. In 1923, Benjamin sold the property to George and William Dempsey, whose family name would become as familiar to several generations of North Yorkers as the name Shepard.
By now the building had been modernized with the addition of indoor plumbing, central heating, and electricity. The Dempsey brothers, plumbers by trade, renamed the store the Dempsey Brothers’ Hardware Store. In the 1930s, the second floor was extensively renovated to create two separate apartments for George and William’s families. Dormer windows were added to the attic around the same time and the attic converted to a communal rec room that could be accessed from either of the apartments below.
The Shepard/Dempsey store as it looked in 1955. The car in front of the store is a 1939 Ford. The car to the right appears to be a 1953 Oldsmobile.
Photo by Ted Chirnside, Toronto Public Library, TC 24.
In the 1960s, the store was taken over by George’s sons, Bob and Jim. By the time they took over, the store had some local competition from such upstarts as the Kitchen family’s Lansing Building Supply at Willowdale and Sheppard Avenues, and York Mills Hardware, operated by Msrs. Bannister and Jenkins at the corner of Bayview and York Mills. Nonetheless, Dempseys’ remained the place to go for your hardware needs. Likely everyone living in North York back then has a Dempsey Brothers story or two.
In the 1950s and 1960s, a Saturday morning trip to Dempseys’ was like a ritual. Many of the Second World War vets who now populated the area were pretty handy with a hammer and saw and much of the interior finishing work on the post-war houses that were covering the farms of North York was done by the owners. If the job was too complex for one person, neighbours could always be counted on to lend a hand, much like the barn-raisings of a not-too-distant past. Whether the job called for ten thousand nails or just one, Dempseys’ could help, and the staff all knew just what kind of nail would do the job. The floors sagged and creaked underfoot. The bins behind the counter groaned under the weight of a seemingly endless array of screws, nails, nuts, bolts, and washers. Anything that might fall under the heading of “hardware” was in there somewhere. Maybe it was hanging from the ceiling or in a little drawer behind the counter or out back with the bags of fertilizer and cement or stashed upstairs or hidden in the basement, but if anyone in the whole city had it, it was probably the Dempsey brothers. Bob Dempsey liked to joke that he could fill a customer’s order before the customer could get his wallet onto the counter.
By the end of the 1980s, the next mutation of North York was well underway. Mayor Mel Lastman’s dream of a new downtown took root, as the high-rise wind tunnel endured today blew down precious history and replaced it with what many perceive to be an ill-conceived attempt to be something North York never was. In 1989, the Dempsey Brothers’ Hardware Store was sold to the Canderel Development Corporation and the Prudential Assurance Company Limited. The new owners thought so much of their new acquisition that they turned it into a dollar store. A visit to the new store only emphasized the soullessness of the place. In place of the complex inventory of sturdy, essential items was a haphazard array of flimsy imported trinkets. In place of a caring, knowledgeable staff were bored, dismissive, and detached clock-watchers. The indignity continued for several years until the developers, finally devoid of ideas, gave the place to North York to avoid the cost of tearing it down.
North York wasted little time in devising a rescue strategy and soon a plan was in place that would see the old store moved out of harm’s way. Building-moving specialists Charles Matthews Limited stabilized the structure and prepared
