Toronto of Old / Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of Ontario

by Henry Scadding

I.

PALACE STREET TO THE MARKET PLACE.

n Rome, at the present day, the parts that are the most attractive to the tourist of archæological tastes, are those that are the most desolate; quarters that, apart from their associations, are the most uninviting. It is the same with many another venerable town of the world beyond the Atlantic, of far less note than the old Imperial capital, with Avignon, for example; with Nismes and Vienne in France; with Paris itself, also, to some extent; with Chester, and York, and St. Albans, the Verulam of the Roman period, in England.

It is the same with our American towns, wherever any relics of their brief past are extant. Detroit, we remember, had once a quaint, dilapidated, primæval quarter. It is the same with our own Toronto. He that would examine the vestiges of the original settlement, out of which the actual town has grown, must betake himself, in the first instance, to localities now deserted by fashion, and be content to contemplate objects that, to the indifferent eye, will seem commonplace and insignificant.

To invest such places and things with any degree of interest will appear difficult. An attempt in that direction may even be pronounced visionary. Nevertheless, it is a duty which we owe to our forefathers to take what note we can of the labours of their hands; to forbid, so far as we may, the utter oblivion of their early efforts, and deeds, and sayings, the outcome of their ideas, of their humours and anxieties; to forbid, even, so far as we may, the utter oblivion of the form and fashion of their persons.

The excavations which the first inhabitants made in the construction of their dwellings and in engineering operations, civil and military, were neither deep nor extensive; the materials which they employed were, for the most part, soft and perishable. In a few years all the original edifices of York, the infant Toronto, together with all the primitive delvings and cuttings, will, of necessity, have vanished. Natural decay will have destroyed some. Winds, fires, and floods will have removed others. The rest will have been deliberately taken out of the way, or obliterated in the accomplishment of modern improvements, the rude and fragile giving way before the commodious and enduring.

At St. Petersburg, we believe, the original log-hut of Peter the Great is preserved to the present day, in a casing of stone, with a kind of religious reverence. And in Rome of old, through the influence of a similar sacred regard for the past, the lowly cottage of Romulus was long protected in a similar manner. There are probably no material relics of our founders and forefathers which we should care to invest with a like forced and artificial permanence. But memorials of those relics, and records of the associations that may here and there be found to cluster round them,—these we may think it worth our while to collect and cherish.

Overlooking the harbour of the modern Toronto, far down in the east, there stands at the present day, a large structure of grey cut-stone. Its radiating wings, the turret placed at a central point aloft, evidently for the ready oversight of the subjacent premises; the unornamented blank walls, pierced high up in each storey with a row of circular-heading openings, suggestive of shadowy corridors and cells within, all help to give to this pile an unmistakable prison-aspect.

It was very nearly on the site of this rather hard-featured building that the first Houses of Parliament of Upper Canada were placed—humble but commodious structures of wood, built before the close of the eighteenth century, and destroyed by the incendiary hand of the invader in 1813. "They consisted," as a contemporary document sets forth, "of two elegant Halls, with convenient offices, for the accommodation of the Legislature and the Courts of Justice."—"The Library, and all the papers and records belonging to these institutions were consumed, and, at the same time," the document adds, "the Church was robbed, and the Town Library totally pillaged."—The injuries thus inflicted were a few months afterwards avenged by the destruction of the Public Buildings at Washington, by a British force. "We consider," said an Address of the Legislative Council of Lower Canada to Sir George Prevost, "the destruction of the Public Buildings at Washington as a just retribution for the outrages committed by an American force at the seat of Government of Upper Canada."