north end of Beecroft Road. On February 18, 1996, hundreds of people gathered in bone-chilling weather to witness a 463-ton building lifted off its foundations and driven down Beecroft Road. Supported by 128 wheels on nineteen dollies, the store began its laborious journey, taking nearly twelve hours to travel the half-mile distance. Once at the new location, the building was carefully placed on its new foundation.
The building was then restored under the supervision of the architectural firm Philip Goldsmith and Company Limited. The exterior of the building was restored to appear as it was in the Shepards’ time. This meant the removal of the third-floor dormer windows and the re-creation of the original porch. The interior was completely re-imagined to serve an altogether new purpose as the new home of the North York Archives. Students, researchers, and members of the general public all looked forward to utilizing this precious resource. The architects were particularly proud of their accomplishment. A special publication called “The Dempsey Archivist” was published by the North York Mirror on Saturday, September 13, 1997, to mark the opening of the new archives. In it, architect Philip Goldsmith said:
Archives and archive storage facilities generally are the toughest uses to put into a historic building. Archives, by their very nature, are for the long term storage of fragile material. We needed to create the maximum storage capacity in our work. We created a separate zone in the basement that was column free and high enough to maximize storage. In essence, we created a small building in a building. Also, we designed and incorporated our own vapour-barrier system to contain and control the humidity factor primarily in this space.
All in all, it was an expensive and time-consuming task that was extremely well done. Then something went terribly wrong.
In 1998, the provincial government, under then-premier Mike Harris, shocked the citizens of North York, East York, Scarborough, Etobicoke, York, and the City of Toronto by forcibly amalgamating these six separate entities into one unmanageable blob under the banner of “Toronto,” despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of residents had voted against the amalgamation. The subsequent years have proven the residents right and the premier wrong as infrastructure and services have deteriorated to the point where few citizens ever expect to see a return to the modest efficiencies of pre-amalgamation. The casualties could fill a separate book, but the one that concerns us here is the fate of the North York Archives. On January 1, 1998, North York ceased to exist. It was now just a corner of Toronto. Shortly after, the archives that had been so proudly installed in the newly-renovated Shepard store were removed and amalgamated — some say “dumped,” into the Toronto Archives on Spadina Road. The Shepards’ store was abandoned once again.
Today, the building is home to the Beecroft Education Centre, named after Beecroft Road, where it now stands. The doors are all locked and there isn’t so much as a plaque to tell passers-by this incredible story that embraces 150 years of our history. The northwest corner of Yonge and Sheppard was finally built upon in 2012, over fifteen years after the store was rolled away. It is now home to a 7-Eleven and a McDonald’s. Perhaps that is all we need to know about the current state of land-use planning and respect for Canadian history in the new city of Toronto — but what about that extra “p” in Sheppard Avenue?
It seems that there was another family in Lansing at the time, known as “Sheppard,” “Shepherd,” and “Shephard.” Record-keeping and literacy were a little rough-hewn in those days and such discrepancies were by no means uncommon. Most sources use “Sheppard” for the “other” family, as shown here. No one knows for sure which family the avenue was named after, and the prevailing opinion seems to be that it could be either/or.
In 1824, Thomas Sheppard bought the eastern 150 acres of Lot 15-1W, on the southwest corner of today’s Yonge and Sheppard. That same year he built the Golden Lion Hotel, also referred to as the Golden Lion Inn, right on the southwest corner of the intersection. The Golden Lion was a large, square, two-storey frame structure with covered verandahs on both floors. There were large stables and barns to the south of the hotel and drive sheds to the north that could accommodate a dozen horses and horse-drawn vehicles. Upstairs were accommodations for twenty guests. Downstairs was a mud-brick kitchen at the back, and a tavern on the main floor. Thomas Sheppard’s brother, Paul, was a noted wood carver, who carved the wooden spires of St. Paul’s Anglican Church in L’Amoreaux (at the corner of Warden and Finch Avenues in Scarborough) and the original St. James’s in the town of York. He created a spectacular mascot for his brother’s new hotel when he carved a life-sized lion from a single pine stump.
The golden-coloured lion seemed to have a mind of its own, since some pictures show it on the second-floor balcony while others show it on the main floor, outside the front door. After many years of loyal service, it was replaced by another golden lion carved by Paul Sheppard around 1840, this time from oak with a flowing mane sculpted in plaster. (Dates given for this second statue range from 1833 to 1845.) The Golden Lion Hotel was an extremely important part of the community, hosting all sorts of events, from political meetings to dances, where Thomas and his sons, all accomplished musicians, provided the music in a dance hall that was built over the drive sheds. The dances would attract people from as far away as the town of York, some eight miles to the south, when a trip of that distance could have taken the better part of a day. Travellers of all stripes made frequent use of the Golden Lion and the other hotels up and down Yonge Street as a welcome respite from the gruelling road conditions. A common lament sung by farmers of the day went something like this:
“Here I am
On my way to Zion
I find my sons
In the Golden Lion.”[3]
The Golden Lion Hotel as it appeared in the early 1900s, with the second Golden Lion statue guarding the front door.
Photographer unknown, North York Historical Society, NYHS, 1080.
Thomas retired as proprietor in 1851. A John Meek took over as proprietor and ran the hotel until Thomas Sheppard’s death in 1857. Thomas’s son Charles inherited the farm and ran the hotel until 1869, at which point his sister Fanny and her husband, Cornelius van Nostrand II, took the hotel over and served as proprietors until 1870. That was the year that Charles sold the farm and hotel, keeping only the house he had built on present-day Sheppard Avenue in 1865.
In 1875, Charles sold the house to Mrs. Ann Carruthers. The storey-and-a-half clapboard house with the lovely bargeboard trim stood at 25 Sheppard Avenue West — a familiar and welcome sight to local residents making their way home on the TTC, since the house stood directly opposite the bus terminal where it offered a tantalizing glimpse into our past until it was destroyed by fire in 1988.
The Golden Lion Hotel continued to operate into the early twentieth century when it was purchased by the Reverend Thomas Webster Pickett and converted to a residence. The reverend converted the tavern into a meeting room where a Methodist Sunday School would meet and the roots of the Lansing United Church took hold. In 1902, the reverend’s daughter, Anna-Keitha, married George S. Henry of Oriole Lodge Farm near Leslie and Sheppard. After the Picketts left the building, it served as the first municipal offices for the new municipality of North York, which was created in 1922. Six years later, the venerable old building was dismantled. Anna was given the golden lion, which lived on the verandah of Oriole Lodge until it was donated to the Sharon Temple Museum, just north of Newmarket, in 1953.
When the North York Historical Society was formed in 1960, the lion was returned to North York and can currently be found prowling the sixth floor of the North York Public Library.
{Chapter Two}
The McBride Family Farms
A
