A little further on was the Ontario House, a hotel built in a style common then at the Falls of Niagara and in the United States. A row of lofty pillars, well-grown pines in fact, stripped and smoothly planed, reached from the ground to the eaves, and supported two tiers of galleries, which, running behind the columns, did not interrupt their vertical lines.
Close by the Ontario House, Market Street from the west entered Front Street at an acute angle. In the gore between the two streets, a building sprang up, which, in conforming to its site, assumed the shape of a coffin. The foot of this ominous structure was the office where travellers booked themselves for various parts in the stages that from time to time started from York. It took four days to reach Niagara in 1816. We are informed by a contemporary advertisement now before us, that "on the 20th of September next [1816], a stage will commence running between York and Niagara: it will leave York every Monday, and arrive at Niagara on Thursday; and leave Queenston every Friday. The baggage is to be considered at the risk of the owner, and the fare to be paid in advance." In 1824, the mails were conveyed the same distance, via Ancaster, in three days. In a post-office advertisement for tenders, signed "William Allan, P. M.," we have the statement: "The mails are made up here [York] on the afternoon of Monday and Thursday, and must be delivered at Niagara on the Wednesday and Saturday following; and within the same period in returning." In 1835, Mr. William Weller was the proprietor of a line of stages between Toronto and Hamilton, known as the "Telegraph Line." In an advertisement before us, he engages to take passengers "through by daylight, on the Lake Road, during the winter season."
Communication with England was at this period a tedious process. So late as 1836, Mrs. Jameson thus writes in her Journal at Toronto (i. 182): "It is now seven weeks since the date of the last letters from my dear far-distant home. The Archdeacon," she adds, "told me, by way of comfort, that when he came to settle in this country, there was only one mail-post from England in the course of a whole year, and it was called, as if in mockery, the Express." To this "Express" we have a reference in a post-office advertisement to be seen in a Quebec Gazette of 1792: "A mail for the Upper Countries, comprehending Niagara and Detroit, will be closed," it says, "at this office, on Monday, the 30th inst., at 4 o'clock in the evening, to be forwarded from Montreal by the annual winter Express, on Thursday, the 3rd of Feb. next." From the same paper we learn that on the 10th of November, the latest date from Philadelphia and New York was Oct. 8th: also, that a weekly conveyance had lately been established between Montreal and Burlington, Vermont. In the Gazette of Jan. 13, 1808, we have the following: "For the information of the Public.—York, 12th Jan., 1808.—The first mail from Lower Canada is arrived, and letters are ready to be delivered by W. Allan, Acting-Deputy-Postmaster."
Compare all this with advertisements in Toronto daily papers now, from agencies in the town, of "Through Lines" weekly, to California, Vancouver's, China and Japan, connecting with Lines to Australia and New Zealand.
On the beach below the Steamboat Hotel was, at a late period, a market for the sale of fish. It was from this spot that Bartlett, in his "Canadian Scenery," made one of the sketches intended to convey to the English eye an impression of the town. In the foreground are groups of conventional, and altogether too picturesque, fishwives and squaws: in the distance is the junction of Hospital Street and Front Street, with the tapering building between. On the right are the galleries of what had been the Steamboat Hotel; it here bears another name.
Bartlett's second sketch is from the end of a long wharf or jetty to the west. The large building in front, with a covered passage through it for vehicles, is the warehouse or freight depot of Mr. William Cooper, long the owner of this favourite landing place. Westwards, the pillared front of the Ontario house is to be seen. Both of these views already look quaint, and possess a value as preserving a shadow of much that no longer exists.
Where Mr. Cooper's Wharf joined the shore there was a ship-building yard. We have a recollection of a launch that strangely took place here on a Sunday. An attempt to get the ship into the water on the preceding day had failed. Delay would have occasioned an awkward settling of the ponderous mass. We shall have occasion hereafter to speak of the early shipping of the harbour.
The lot extending northward from the Ontario House corner to King street was the property of Attorney-General Macdonell, who, while in attendance on General Brock as Provincial aide-de-camp, was slain in the engagement on Queenston Heights. His death created the vacancy to which, at an unusually early age, succeeded Mr. John Beverley Robinson, afterwards the distinguished Chief Justice of Upper Canada. Mr. Macdonell's remains are deposited with those of his military chief under the column on Queenston Heights. He bequeathed the property to which our attention has been directed, to a youthful nephew, Mr. James Macdonell, on certain conditions, one of which was that he should be educated in the tenets of the Anglican Church, notwithstanding the Roman Catholic persuasion of the rest of the family.
The track for wheels that here descended to the water's edge from the north, Church Street subsequently, was long considered a road remote from the business part of the town, like the road leading southward from Charing-cross, as shewn in Ralph Aggas' early map of London. A row of frame buildings on its eastern side, in the direction of King Street, perched high on cedar posts over excavations generally filled with water, remained in an unfinished state until the whole began to be out of the perpendicular and to become gray with the action of the weather. It was evidently a premature undertaking; the folly of an over-sanguine speculator. Yonge street beyond, where it approached the shore of the harbour, was unfrequented. In spring and autumn it was a notorious slough. In 1830, a small sum would have purchased any of the building lots on either side of Yonge Street, between Front Street and Market Street.