A Lovelorn Soldier during the First World War

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. More than 600,000 Canadians would serve during the most terrible conflict the world had ever seen — that was almost 10% of our total population back then. Nearly 70,000 of them would die. And Canadians formed just a small percentage of the total deaths: there were more than 9 million people killed around the world. It was, of course, an incredibly important and deeply tragic event for Toronto along with the rest of the planet.

It's likely that over the course of 2014, we'll see a massive effort by the Conservative government to glorify the war, arguing that it's the moment Canada became a real country, much as they did with the War of 1812. I'm planning on writing more about that in the days ahead — I was lucky enough to have attended the National History Forum in 2012, which dealt with the question of how to remember the war — but for now I wanted to post one of my favourite WWI-related images before we descend down that dubiously patriotic rabbit hole.

This photo was taken in 1916. I found it thanks to the Toronto Archives. A note with the photo says, "Tip top lady for soldiers, picture of girl on step."

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I've already written a few posts about Toronto and the First World War. You can learn about William Faulkner drunk in the cockpit of a biplane at U of T here. Or A.Y. Jackson and the Group of Seven on the Western Front here. Or the story behind the Torontonian who wrote "In Flanders Fields" here.

The Islands In Winter

The Toronto Islands are, of course, one of our city's most popular attractions. But not so much during the winter, when the cold and snow and ice and lack of ferry service tend to keep most people away. So, as the polar vortex loosened its grip last week, a friend and I decided to head out across the harbour for the first time in the winter. It was a pretty remarkable experience. In the fresh snow and ice, the Islands were absolutely gorgeous. And while the ferry folk did warn us that the boat might get stuck in the ice — the Ward's Island ferry is the only one in service during the off-season — we didn't run into any trouble. We even got a private tour of the barn at Far Enough Farm (next to the deserted Centreville) and had a close encounter with some remarkably friendly mallards. I've uploaded a gallery of my photos from our excursion, along with a few archival pics, to Facebook, which you can check out here (whether you have a Facebook account or not):

FULL GALLERY

I've also got a little video of those ducks, which you can watch here. And, as always, you can follow me on Instagram at @todreamsproject.

Me & The Canadian Music Hall of Fame

If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you probably already know about this, but I figured I should post something about it here, too: a few months ago, I starting a weekly column for the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. It's a "This Week in Canadian Music History" series, which means I get to write a bit about the history of music in Toronto — as well as the history of music in the rest of the country. So far I've posted about everything from Canada's first gun-running opera composer to the birth of the Horseshoe Tavern (it started out as a blacksmith's shop in the 1860s) to a vaudeville troupe performing on the front lines of the First World War.

For last week's Hall of Fame column, I wrote about "The First Lady of Canadian Song": Gisèle MacKenzie. She studied at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto and had her own show on the CBC in the 1940s before heading south to become a star on American television. She's even got her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. You can check out my post about her here. And watch a great little comedy bit she used to do with Jack Benny here.

To keep an eye on my column — as well as James Sandham's more eclectic and contemporary contributions — you can follow the Canadian Music Hall of Fame blog here. And I'll try to post links to some of the more Toronto-related on this blog whenever I remember to actually do that.

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I've actually been writing about music for a lot longer than I've been writing about the history of Toronto: as the old Editor-in-Chief of SoundProof Magazine and a contributor to PopMatters, Crawdaddy!, 24 Hours, AUX and a few other places. I'm lucky enough to be on the jury for the Polaris Music Prize. And I still write about my favourite Toronto bands on regular basis over at The Little Red Umbrella.

Elizabeth Simcoe's 1794 Nightmare — The Story Behind One of Toronto's First Recorded Dreams

Toronto was founded in a troubled time. It was the summer of 1793 when the first British soldiers showed up to clear the forest and make way for our brand new town. Just ten years earlier, some of those same men had been fighting in the American Revolution. Their commander, John Graves Simcoe, was a hero of that bloody war; no stranger to danger and death. In fact, he seems lucky to have survived the Revolution at all. He was wounded three times — once very seriously. At one point, he was captured and spent six months in an American prison. But by the end of the Revolution, he had earned a reputation as one of the bright and rising stars of the British military. He did so well that when the British created a brand new province in what's now southern Ontario — a home for Loyalists driven out of the United States by the rebels — they chose Simcoe to run it: the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada.

The Revolution was over, but there was still plenty of anger on both sides. Another war with the Americans seemed inevitable. Imminent, even. As Lieutenant Governor, Simcoe spent much of his time preparing for it. One of the first things he did was to move the capital of Upper Canada (originally at Niagara) away from the American border where it was vulnerable to attack. He sent a hundred of his men to a spot in the woods on the northern shore of Lake Ontario — a place called Toronto — to build a new capital: York. It had a natural harbour which would be easy to defend. And the very first thing his men did when they got here was to start building a military base: Fort York. Soon, they'd carve new highways through the ancient forests — roads like Dundas and Yonge — so that Simcoe's army would be able to move quickly through the province in response to any American invasion.

About a week after those first soldiers arrived in Toronto that July, Simcoe joined them in person. He brought his family with him: his wife Elizabeth, some of their children, a house cat and a pet dog. At first, they lived in a fancy tent on the beach at the mouth of Garrison Creek, near where the soldiers were building Fort York.

While Simcoe set to work planning his new capital, Elizabeth was charged with the task of bringing aristocratic British culture to this remote outpost tucked between the primordial Canadian forest and the vast waters of Lake Ontario. As the fledgling town began to take shape and the families of other government officials arrived, Elizabeth Simcoe was at the centre of social life in the new settlement. She paid visits to the other families, entertained, held dances and dos. Meanwhile, she painted watercolours and kept a detailed diary, providing an invaluable historical record of Toronto's earliest days.

But it was also a worrying time. The Simcoes were among King George's highest ranking representatives on the entire continent — living in a tent on the very edge of the Empire just across the lake from a powerful new nation that loathed the monarchy and might declare war at any time. The sails of American warships could appear above the horizon at any moment, without warning, there to seize the new capital — and the Simcoes with it.

And it wasn't just the Americans. The Revolution in the United States had inspired an even bloodier uprising in France. The French Revolution was in full swing during the summer Toronto was founded. The Reign of Terror began that same fall. While the Simcoes were bringing aristocracy to their tent on the beach in Toronto, aristocrats in Paris were losing their heads to the guillotine. A few months earlier, the new French Republic had officially declared war on the British Empire.

During their time in Toronto, the Simcoes received a slow trickle of news from France. In August, they were visited by a pair of French aristocrats who hoped to settle in Upper Canada. The men told a morbid anecdote about King Louis XVI's famously botched attempt to escape his captors. In fact, just a few months before the Simcoes arrived in Toronto, the French king had been executed. A few months after they arrived, Marie Antoinette followed her husband to the guillotine.

The news of her death took several months to travel across the Atlantic and up the St. Lawrence to Toronto. It was on the first day of March in 1794 that the first lady of Upper Canada learned of the fate of the first lady of France. Elizabeth Simcoe recorded the event in her diary: "The News received of the death of the Queen of France." Despite the British war with the French, the rulers of Upper Canada marked the occasion with solemn respect. "Orders given out for Mourning in which everybody appeared this Evening & the dance was postponed."

Pages from Simcoe's diary

Just four days later, Elizabeth Simcoe wrote another diary entry about her growing fears. "There have been apprehensions that the french Republicans at New York would attack Lower Canada [Québec] from Albany this winter, but a mutiny on board some of their Ships carried them to France. If the Americans were to attack this Province I should go to Quebec [City]."

All of this helps to explain the nightmare Elizabeth Simcoe recorded in her diary the following week. It was, of course, far from the first dream in the history of Toronto. People have been having nightmares in this place for twelve thousand years, stretching back to a time long before the founding of our city: to the First Nations and their ancestors, and more recently to the first French explorers and missionaries. As far as I know, there may even have been dreams recorded in those few months between the first arrival of Simcoe's soldiers and his wife's nightmare; you'd have to check all the diaries and all the letters of all the soldiers and all the settlers and all the others who passed through town in order to be sure. But this brief mention in Elizabeth Simcoe's diary is, at the very least, among the very first recorded dreams in the history of our city:

"I dreamt some time since that the Gov. [Simcoe], Mr. Talbot [Simcoe's personal secretary] & I were passing a wood, possessed by an Enemy who fired ball at us as fast as possible. I was so frightened, that I have never since liked to hear a musquet fired & I am quite nervous when I hear of the probability of this Country being attacked."

It's just a brief mention, and it's unclear on exactly which night she had the dream, but those few lines give a remarkable insight into the emotional life of our city's earliest days. It's a reminder that Toronto didn't start out as a completely safe haven. It was born at a time of war and upheaval on a dangerous frontier thousands of kilometers away from the heart of the British Empire. It was a beautiful and serene place, but for those first few inexperienced settlers, it was also remote and frightening. The fear was so strong that it haunted even the dreams of the most powerful woman in the province.

The Simcoes only spent two more years in Canada before the Lieutenant Governor fell ill and the family was forced to return home to England. But the spectre of war continued to haunt them for the rest of their trip. The situation with the Americans was deteriorating. Simcoe was convinced that war was about to break out; he was already hard at work trying to secure First Nations allies. That winter, the Simcoes decided it was too dangerous for the family to remain at York. The Lieutenant Governor headed to a British military fort on the border at Detroit, while Elizabeth Simcoe took the children to the relative safety of Québec City.

A peace treaty did finally manage to avert an immediate war with the Americans, but the British were still at war with the French. It was in 1796 that the Simcoes finally sailed down the St. Lawrence toward the ocean and home. But when they reached the mouth of the St. Lawrence, French warships were waiting for them. They were chased out into the Atlantic. The French seized some other English vessels sailing nearby. Guns were heard in the distance as they dodged icebergs off the coast of Labrador.

Elizabeth Simcoe and the children hid themselves in the cramped quarters below deck. They were stuck there for days on end. She wrote in her diary that she was "in perfect misery every moment expecting to hear the Guns fire, as I had no Idea what it was to be so frightened. Some refreshment was sent me but I could not eat... I played at Backgammon & Cards which tranquilizes my mind but it will be a great while before I recover my fight."

It took weeks to sail across the open ocean before the Simcoes finally reached the safety of home.

Elizabeth Simcoe never did get fired upon from the cover of a Canadian forest. But her nightmare did prove to be at least a bit prophetic. Twenty years after the Simcoes founded Toronto, the Americans did invade Upper Canada. The capital was attacked and occupied by American soldiers during the War of 1812. They looted homes and burned public buildings, including the very same Parliament Buildings commissioned by John Graves Simcoe. Muskets were fired from the cover of the forest. Many other women and their families had to face the same terror that had disturbed Elizabeth Simcoe's sleep all those years before. Today, two hundred years later, Toronto is one of the most peaceful cities in the world — a place for people to escape those kinds of nightmares — but in our early days, the fear of invasion must have inspired countless bad dreams.

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A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

You can read about John Graves Simcoe's vision for Toronto — a city so awesome it would undo the American Revolution — here. You can read about Toronto's first house cat here. Or about how the turmoil caused by the French Revolution indirectly led to the creation of one of our city's most beautiful walking trails here. I've also got a little about one of Elizabeth Simcoe's paitings, from when Toronto was ten days old, here.

The top image is a portrait of Elizabeth Simcoe and one of her paintings of the Don Valley. That painting and the image of her diary are both via the Archives of Ontario.

You can read Elizabeth Simcoe's diary online here. You can borrow it from the Toronto Public Library here. Or buy it from Amazon here.

The always excellent Dictionary of Canadian Biography has a full bio for Elizabeth Simcoe here. And John Graves Simcoe here. Google Book has excerpts from another Elizabeth Simcoe biography, by Mary Beacock Fryer, here. You can read Bathsheba Susannah Wesley's fascinating Master's thesis about her habit of setting small fires during her time in Canada here [PDF]. You can learn more about the soldiers who built Toronto, the Queen's Rangers, here. And learn more about the fancy tent in which the Simcoes lived here (it used to belong to the legendary explorer James Cook).

Sadly, war wasn't the only thing the Simcoes had to fear. While they were living in Toronto, their infant daugther Katherine died of malaria or a similar disease. She was buried somewhere in the old cemetery that is now Victoria Square, a couple of blocks south-east of King & Bathurst.

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01 Metropolitan York
John Graves Simcoe, 1793

My Twelve Most Favourite Posts from 2013

Well, we've finally come to the end of a pretty terrible year for the city of Toronto. Ice storms, floods, crack cocaine. But 2013 was actually a pretty wonderful year for the Toronto Dreams Project. I launched ten brand new dreams, started the Toronto Historical Jukebox, teamed up with the AGO, and published a whole whack of blogposts — both here and over at Spacing. Now, as the year winds down, I've got the perfect opportunity to be completely self-indulgent and look back at some of the posts I had the most fun writing in 2013. And you've got the perfect opportunity to catch any of the best stuff you might have missed over the course of the last twelve months. I've picked my favourite dozen stories — some of them are also the most popular; some are just personal faves. But hopefully you'll enjoy them all. And have a wonderful New Year.

Here we go:

How Napoleon Bonaparte Is Indirectly Responsible For One Of The Best Walking Trails in Toronto

One of my very favourite places in Toronto is the Mast Trail. It's in Rouge Park on the very eastern edge of the city, right on the border with Pickering. The forests there are absolutely gorgeous. So beautiful, in fact, that Rouge Park is slated to become a national park. But the natural beauty is only part of why I love it so much. It also has a rich heritage stretching back into prehistory, through the days of the First Nations and the first French explorers into the reign of the British Empire. In this post from February, I told one of my favourite Rouge Park stories: how the Mast Trails owes its beginning to the war with Napoleon.

Toronto ♥s Stalingrad

I've long been fascinated by Canadian attitudes toward Communism. In particular, the way public opinion and official government policy has swung wildly back and forth on the subject. Some days, the Prime Minster is trying to have the leader of the Canadian Communist Party assassinated. Other days, Eaton's department stores are putting together window displays glorifying Stalin. So I was intrigued when I stumbled across a mention of a mostly forgotten chapter from Toronto's history: the time we "adopted" the Soviet city of Stalingrad. It was during the Second World War, after one of the bloodiest battles in history. And the post I wrote about it in March is still one of my favourites from 2013.

Toronto's First Great Baseball Team — the old-timey Toronto Baseball Club of 1887

Back in April, baseball fans in Toronto were full of optimism. The Blue Jays had just traded for some of the biggest stars in the sport. Las Vegas was declaring our team to be World Series favourites. So I seized the opportunity to write about some of the rich history that baseball enjoys in Toronto, which stretches back to about a century before our city got our first major league team. Our first championship came all the way back in 1887 thanks to a team filled with memorable characters and superstars. I wrote about them in this post on Opening Day.

Lee's Palace Before It Was Lee's Palace

My most popular post of 2013 was about what Lee's Palace looked like before it became Lee's Palace. The building — which is now one of most famous music venues in Toronto — started out all the way back in the spring of 1919. It was a silent movie theatre back then, designed by an architect who would make his name building some of the most beautiful modern masterpieces from Detroit's golden age. The post about Lee's has been racking up page views since I first published it back in May.

The Story Behind the Sakura Blossoms of High Park

This was a particularly good year for the cherry blossoms in High Park. They burst into full bloom just in time for one of the very first weekends of gorgeous weather we got to enjoy this Spring. Thousands upon thousands of people flooded to the slope above Grenadier Pond to take a look, snap some Instagram pics, or have a picnic under the beautiful pink and white flowers. Few of them, I suspect, knew the history behind the trees. I certainly didn't until I got home and Googled it. The trees were a gift from the people of Tokyo, commemorating Toronto's welcoming of Japanese-Canadians during one of the darkest episodes in Canadian history. I told the story in a post I published during that weekend of warm weather back in May.

A Brief History of the Pigeons of Toronto

This might very well be my favourite post of the entire year. Pretty much ever since I started the Dreams Project, I'd been thinking about the pigeons in our city. Where the hell they all came from — and why urban pigeons here look like urban pigeons everywhere else. I finally dug into the research for the post this summer, and used it as an opportunity to also explore the history of the wild Passenger Pigeons who used to live here. There were billions of them in North America when the first Europeans arrived. When Toronto was first founded, they flew above our city in flocks so huge they could block out of the sun for days on end. And yet, by the early 1900s, there wasn't a single bird left on Earth. It's one of the most disturbing — and, I think, most important — stories from the history of our city. I wrote about it in this post in June.

A Bird's-Eye Tour of Toronto in the Early 1930s

Some of my favourite posts to write are the ones where I take an old map or an archival photo and add a legend to it. That's what did with this aerial photo of the city taken back in the early 1930s. It was a fascinating period in the history of Toronto. As I point out in the post, many of the city's most beautiful landmarks opened in the few years leading up to this photo: everything from Maple Leaf Gardens to Union Station to what was, at the time, the tallest skyscraper in the British Empire. Many of them would remain our most striking new architectural icons for years to come — the Great Depression and the Second World War meant that most other major building projects would be put on hold. It's been one of the most popular posts on the blog since I published it back in July.

Simcoe's Vision for Toronto: A City So Awesome It Would Undo The American Revolution

Since Toronto was founded only about 200 years ago, we've got a much closer connection to our roots than many of the cities in the rest of the world. We're particularly lucky to have records kept by the founders of our metropolis. Elizabeth Simcoe's diary is one my favourite Toronto documents, telling the story of the earliest days of the building of our city, while she and her family lived in a tent on the beach by the lake. But this post is about a letter written by her husband, John Graves Simcoe, the Lieutenant Governor who founded Toronto back in 1793. He wrote it to a famous British scientist before he'd even left England for Canada — and in it, he lays out his vision for what he hoped Toronto would become. As I say in the post, "His plan, in short, was to make our city and our province so undeniably amazing that Americans couldn't help but realize how terrible America was by comparison. They would voluntarily give up their silly notions of independence and beg to be let back into the Empire." I published this post in August.

Star Trek & Nathan Phillips Square

Toronto, as it turns out, has a particularly strong connection to science-fiction. And that might not be too surprising when you take a look at City Hall: that alien modernist masterpiece built in the 1960s. In fact, it's turned up in the world of Star Trek on two different occasions. Once in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and once in a weird Star Trek comic book. The post I wrote about it has been one of the most popular posts on the site since I published it in September.

Toronto's Lucky Lion: The Story of One of Our Most Famous Early Monuments

As I mentioned above, the Toronto Dreams Project teamed up with Art Gallery of Ontario in 2013. I wrote three new dreams about Torontonian artists with work in the AGO's Canadian Collection. One of then was Francis Loring. She and her partner Florence Wyle were two of the most interesting figures I've come across since I started the project. They were both sculptors who moved here from the States in the early 1900s. Their home became the closest thing our city had to the Bohemian art salons of Paris. They became good friends with the Group of Seven and Dr. Frederick Banting. And their work can still be found all over the city. Loring's crowning achievement was the so-called "Lucky Lion" at the entrance to the QEW. Once, it was once of our city's most famous landmarks; today, it's mostly forgotten. And the story of how that happened seemed particularly important in September, while Toronto debated what should be done with the glowing neon disks of the Sam the Record Man sign.

A.Y. Jackson Goes To War — The Group of Seven on the Western Front

Another one of the artists I wrote a dream about for the AGO was the Group of Seven's A.Y. Jackson. He, too, has a fascinating history. I was particularly interested by his experiences during the First World War. He would eventually become one of the most famous artists in Canadian history, but back then his modernist work was being dismissed as meaningless rubbish. He enlisted, fought on the frontlines at Ypres, and was wounded before finally being saved: he was commissioned as an official war artist. His paintings of the Western Front are hauntingly beautiful — and an amazing piece of Canadian history. I wrote about Jackson's time in Europe and those incredible paintings in this post from November.

The Torontonian Roots of Doctor Who — the Canadian Behind the Legendary TV Show

On a completely nerdy personal note, I'm also going to remember about 2013 as the year I discovered how awesome Doctor Who is. I've been completely obsessed with the show it ever since. (I even write about every new episode over at The Little Red Umbrella). So I was stunned and thrilled to learn that the quintessentially British show was actually created by a Torontonian, Sydney Newman. And that he played an extremely important role in the history of Canadian film and television. He ran the NFB and was the head of Drama for the CBC; he's even the guy who put Hockey Night In Canada and the Grey Cup on television for the very first time. I looked forward to writing a post about Newman for most of the year, and finally published this post during Doctor Who's 50th anniversary last month.

Morley Callaghan on Winter & The Canadian Heart

The first post I ever wrote on this blog was about the Torontonian writer Morley Callaghan (and the time he punched Ernest Hemingway right in the face). I've come back to him from time to time. Earlier this week, I was listening to a CBC "Rewind" podcast about his life, which you can stream online here. It features an old interview he did with Michael Enright in November of 1974, which included a little snippet about Callaghan's love of Canadian winters. He was famous for it — and for his daily walks through Rosedale with his dog. (In fact, that's the subject of what I suspect is the most beautifully sad plaque in Toronto.)

Since this year's winter has finally just arrived, I thought I'd share a snippet of his thoughts (complete, unfortunately, with his dated pronoun usage):

"The other thing about winter is... that on a winter night, if it's not too cold — now I'm not pretending to be a lover of those harsh winter winds — but on a lovely winter night when there is snow and when there is sort of unbroken snow, I love the cities. I love the cities when they're absolutely snow-covered and there's a kind of unearthly winter calm about them. And I feel a curious sense of peace and ease with myself and you can walk... and it's great, you know, when you yourself can break the snow. And somehow or other you get a sense of well-being in that kind of weather that you don't get in the hot summer...

"The winter is in the Canadian. It's in his heart. It's in his imagination, even when he grouses about it and damns it and so on."

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That photo, amazingly, is Bloor Street West in the winter of 1910. Right near High Park. (Which I found via the Toronto Archives.)

Toronto in 1851 — a snapshot of the booming city at the dawn of a new age

In 1851, the year this painting was painted, Toronto was beginning to boom. It had been less than 60 years since the first British soldiers showed up to clear the ancient forest and make way for the new capital of Upper Canada, but the population was already skyrocketing. By the time of this painting, there were something like 30,000 people living in the city. The population had doubled over the last decade and would double again over the next. It was truly the dawning of a new age: in 1851 we started building our very first railroad. In fact, the City's own website uses this year as a defining line in the history of Toronto: between "A Provincial Centre" and "An Industrializing City."

There were big new public buildings opening all over town. Some of them are still there today. Near King and Jarvis, the gorgeous St. Lawrence Hall had just opened, the city's main venue for concerts, political meetings and other public events. In 1851, it hosted an important anti-slavery gathering: the North American Convention of Colored Freemen, which included a speech by Frederick Douglass. Today, it's a National Historic Site. A block away, a new building had just been built at the St. Lawrence Market: it served as Toronto's City Hall for the next 50 years and can still be seen in the facade of the current Market. Far to the west on Queen Street, near Parkdale, the new Provincial "Lunatic Asylum" had recently begun taking its very first patients. It lasted all the way to the 1970s before we tore the beautiful old building down. It was in 1851 that the first in a series of brick walls was designed for the grounds. The patients were used as free labour to build them. A section of the walls survives to this day, on the eastern edge of what's now the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

Meanwhile, the Province of Canada had just become a real democracy. Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine had recently won an overwhelming majority on an election platform demanding the British government allow Canadians to make our own laws. They called it Responsible Government. Some of the Tories who opposed them were so pissed off they attacked the Parliament Buildings in Montreal, burned them to the ground, and threatened further violence. As a result, the capital was moved to Toronto. As 1851 began, Baldwin and LaFontaine were hard at work in our Parliament Buildings down on Front Street (where the CBC building is now). Their government would become known as "The Great Ministry." In a few short years, they brought in public education, a public postal service, an independent judiciary, our jury system, and our appeals system; they brought democratic reform to municipal governments and made sure anyone — not just the upper class — had access to the courts and could be appointed to the civil service. They also extended the right to vote — it wasn't just for property owners anymore — though, at the same time, they restricted that right to men only.

Despite all this change, we still remained an overwhelmingly British city: in 1851, 97% of Torontonians had been born in the British Isles or traced their ancestry there. It would be a long time before that changed: fifty years later, in 1901, the figure was still 92%.

But now, more than ever before, we were a particularly Irish city. Ireland had just been devastated by the Great Famine. More than a million people died in just a few years; many others fled. Tens of thousands of Irish refugees flooded Toronto in the years leading up to 1851 — at one point during the terrible summer of 1847, there were more refugees in the city than non-refugees. Hundreds died of typhoid at the old General Hospital on the corner of King & John (where the TIFF Lightbox is now) and in the temporary fever sheds built out back. It was the beginning of a great wave of Irish immigration that changed the face of our city. Soon, we'd earn the nickname of the "Belfast of North America."

Toronto had always been a very Protestant town. In fact, for the first four decades of the city's history, Anglican ministers were the only ones allowed to perform marriage ceremonies. The Protestant Orange Order was immensely powerful — just like in Belfast — and they didn't hesitate to use that power against Catholics. Prejudice was rampant. In the few decades after 1851, as the city became home to ever-more Irish-Catholics, Toronto found itself dealing with some of the same sectarian violence that plagued Ireland. There would be dozens of riots between Protestants and Catholics before the end of the century.

But it was also a time of growing respect for diversity. Baldwin (an anglophone Protestant from Toronto) and LaFontaine (a francophone Catholic from Montreal) were helping to lay some of the early foundations of Canadian multiculturalism. They made Canada officially bilingual, opened Canadian ports to ships from all over the world, and challenged the exclusive privileges of the Protestant clergy. They took over King's College, an Anglican school in Toronto, severed its ties to the church, and turned it into the secular University of Toronto. Meanwhile, the city's first Catholic cathedral, St. Michael's, had just been consecrated at Church & Shuter. It would soon be joined by St. Michael's College, a Catholic school which would eventually also become part of U of T.

By the end of 1851, however, the era of Baldwin and LaFontaine was suddenly over. They had granted an amnesty to the rebels of 1837, allowing them to return from exile. For the first time in more than a decade, the old trouble-making former mayor, William Lyon Mackenzie, was back at home living in Toronto. He was joined by other returning rebels — unsurprisingly, they were more radical than the moderate liberals (like Baldwin and LaFontaine) who had refused to take up arms. It didn't take long for Mackenzie to get elected to parliament and to cause problems for the Great Ministry. Baldwin and LaFontaine were relatively young — in their 40s — but they were already exhausted from years of political struggle and plagued by a variety of illnesses. (Most famously, Baldwin had been suffering from severe depression since the death of his wife 15 years earlier.) When one of Mackenzie's bills to overturn one of Baldwin's new laws got unexpectedly strong support, Baldwin resigned. LaFontaine wasn't far behind.

And so, as 1851 turned into 1852, the Province of Canada was in the hands of a new generation of political leaders. In the wake of the Great Ministry, people like George Brown and John A. Macdonald would rise to prominence. The fight for Responsible Government was over. Now, it was time to start down the road to Confederation.

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Image: it was an artist born in Germany who painted this painting. Augustus Köller had been raised in Düsseldorf and now lived in Philadelphia. He made his living off watercolours and lithographs. His work took him to cities all over North America. For this painting, he seems to have taken a vantage point looking out over the city from the ancient shore of the prehistoric Lake Iroquois, just north of Davenport Road now. The land up on top of the hill had long belonged to the city's elite — it's where many had their country estates. In fact, up on that hill right next to where Casa Loma is now, Robert Baldwin's family built the first Spadina House.