Toronto On The Day Before Christmas, 1853

Hello all! Hope you're having a wonderful, snowy holiday season. I'll get back to regular posts in the new year, but figured I'd quickly share this drawing by one of our city's most famous historical artists, C.W. Jeffreys. (Dude even has a high school named after him.) He drew this in 1944, but it shows King Street a block west of Yonge on Christmas Eve in 1853. You can see the headquarters for George Brown's Globe newspaper (they'd just started printing their new daily edition that fall) in the  middle of the image, along with George Brown himself right outside the office, a newspaper tucked under his arm and a top hat atop his head.

I'm not so sure about the shops next to the Globe, but Toronto's first Surveyor General was named D.W. Smith. He made lots of the city's earliest maps, provided one of the most famous early descriptions of York back in the late 1700s, and built one of the very first houses in Toronto, Maryville Lodge, sort of near Front & Sherbourne, in 1794.

I found this on the Toronto Archives site, here.