Samuel Taylor Coleridge & The Simcoes' Hometown River

UK TOUR DAY ELEVEN (THE RIVER OTTER): This is the mouth of the River Otter. It's in Devon, part of what they call the West Country, in the far south-west of England. The river has a connection both to the Simcoes — founders of Toronto — and to their family friends, the Coleridges. It also flows through some pretty spectacular scenery.

Here, where it meets the English Channel, the Otter is part of a World Heritage Site: the Jurassic Coast (which I wrote about yesterday). I reached its banks at the end of a long walk through the countryside and along the top of towering coastal cliffs. The sun was just beginning to set; the tide was coming in. People were riding the waves as they swept upstream (a bizarre sight for someone from Toronto) and into the marshes at the mouth of the river. You can just see the edge of those wetlands in this photo, on the right. They've been protected as a nature reserve, where saltwater and freshwater mix together in a green Eden of reedbeds and shallow pools. There are birds everywhere — and strange, colourful insects I've never seen before. There's so much biodiversity, in fact, that it's listed as a site of Special Scientific Interest.

The whole surrounding area, for miles and miles and miles around, is also one of England's official "Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty". For most of its length, the Otter flows through rolling green and yellow fields, some of the most beautiful landscapes the United Kingdom has to offer. A few kilometers upstream, you'll find the picturesque village of Otterton, home to a watermill that's been spinning on that site for at least a thousand years. (That's where I had lunch during my walk.) And if you keep following the river upstream, you'll soon find yourself in another Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty: the Blackdown Hills. There, the rolling slopes get even bigger and more spectacular, some of them rise 800 feet into the air, so high they're almost mountains. From the top of some of those hills you can see far off to the distant horizon, all the way west to the rugged moors of Dartmoor National Park.

The Otter was a particularly important river for the Simcoes. They had connections to both ends of it. As I wrote yesterday, when they got back from Canada, they bought a summer home in Budleigh Salterton, the town at the mouth of the river. But by then, they'd already developed a close relationship to the Otter. Their estate was in the Blackdown Hills. The river ran just beyond the southern edge of it. And a small tributary of the Otter — the River Wolf — flowed right through their lands.

The Blackdown Hills

The Coleridge family lived nearby too, in the parish of Ottery St. Mary. The Reverend George Coleridge was the headmaster of the local school. And after the Simcoes got back from Toronto, that's where they sent their son Francis to study. The young boy had spent his earliest years growing up in Canada. And we still remember him with a subway station in Toronto — it got its name from the log cabin the Simcoes built on a spot overlooking the Don Valley. They jokingly named it after their toddler: Castle Frank.

The Reverend's brother, James Coleridge, was in the army. He served as aide de camp to John Graves Simcoe in the years after the founder of Toronto returned home. Simcoe had been made into a General. And when it looked like Napoleon might invade England, he was put in charge of the defenses for the entire West Country. According to Simcoe's biographers, James Coleridge would climb to the top of a nearby hill every morning to look through his telescope toward Simcoe's house. If there was a towel hanging in the window, it was a signal that Simcoe needed him. And Coleridge would rush to his General's side.

It was a third brother, however, who would go down in history as one of the most famous poets of all-time. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Ottery St. Mary. And so, he grew up on the banks of the Otter. He even wrote a poem about it right around the same time the Simcoes were travelling to Canada.

It's called "To the River Otter" and it goes like this:

Dear native brook! wild streamlet of the West!
How many various-fated years have passed,
What happy and what mournful hours, since last
I skimmed the smooth thin stone along thy breast,
Numbering its light leaps! Yet so deep impressed
Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes
I never shut amid the sunny ray,
But straight with all their tints thy waters rise,
Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey,
And bedded sand that, veined with various dyes,
Gleamed through thy bright transparence! On my way,
Visions of childhood! oft have ye beguiled
Lone manhood's cares, yet waking fondest sighs:
Ah! that once more I were a careless child!

The poem — and the poet's connection to the Simcoes — leaves me wondering what kind of impact Francis Simcoe's years in Canada had on him. Sadly, he didn't live long; he was killed as a young soldier fighting Napoleon in Portugal. But for those brief years, did he remember the Don River or Lake Ontario the same way Coleridge remembered the Otter? The same way children who've grown up in Toronto still do, more than 200 years later?

The River Otter

The Otter Estuary Nature Reserve

The Otter Estuary Nature Reserve

The Otter Estuary Nature Reserve

Otterton

Otterton

The East Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty

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I'll write more about Francis Simcoe one day. Maybe even soon, as one of these UK Tour posts. One of my favourite stories about him comes from his biography by Mary Beacock Fryer. She writes that when he got back to England, he was so used to life on ships that when he descended the stairs at the Simcoe's hotel, he did it backwards.

Read more posts about The Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour and the connections between the history of Toronto and the United Kingdom here. 

This post is related to dream 30 The Conference of The Beasts Francis Simcoe, 1796

This post is related to dream 01 Metropolitan York John Graves Simcoe, 1793

This post is related to dream 34 The Upper Canadian Ball Elizabeth Simcoe, 1793

Turning The Great Lakes' Biggest Wetland Into The Port Lands

Mostly I'm posting this because Wikipedia has an entire category of photos called "Dredges In Toronto" which I happened to stumble upon. Dredges are the crane-like things people use to dig up the bottoms of bodies of water. Wikipedia has 15 photos of them in Toronto and this is the oldest: from the 1890s. Up until that point, the land that's now the Port Lands at the mouth of the Don River was a big marsh. I'll write a full post about it someday — the Ashbridge's Marsh was the biggest wetland on the Great Lakes and plays a pretty interesting role in the history of Toronto — but for now I'll just mention that by the end of the 1800s, it was polluted as fuck. The nearby Gooderham & Worts Distillery flooded it with waste — including as much as 80,000 gallons of liquid manure a day. The City tried to ignore the problem for years, but eventually the threat of cholera and looming court cases forced them into action. One of the ways they tried to deal with it was by creating the Keating Channel, re-directing the Don into the harbour to the west and Ashbridge's Bay to the east so that the waste would be dispersed more quickly. That's what they're doing with the dredge in this photo: making "the Keating cut".

Eventually, the City decided to fill the marsh in entirely — and with it most of Ashbridge's Bay. Today, the Keating Channel is still there, regularly dredged by the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority to keep it clear. It's far from picturesque, though, and not exactly an ideal habit for wildlife — the sides are lined with concrete. The new plans for the development of the Port Lands will renaturalize the mouth of the river and keep the Channel. The idea is to build a "sustainable mixed-use neighbourhood" around it, so that it "will be dramatically transform[ed] into an upbeat, unique canal destination. It will be lined with public space and traversed by a series of four new bridges for vehicles, transit, cyclists, and pedestrians... It will feature parks and promenades along its edge, water access for boats, plus it will have amenities such as shops and canal-side cafés."

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You can learn more about the development plans from Waterfront Toronto here. And more about the old-timey dredging of the Ashbridge's Marsh from the Toronto Public Library website here. 

Fishing the Don in the early 1920s

It's a Saturday in the Don Valley in the early 1920s. These boys have brought their dog along to go fishing at Riverdale Park (they're probably on the east side of the river according to the caption, with the photo looking south toward the footbridge).

People have been fishing in the Don for thousands and thousands of years, of course — and you can still do it today. There are salmon and pike and carp and plenty of other species in the river, despite the pollution that flows into it (most notably from rain and snowmelt washing our pesticides, road salt, fertilizer and other crap into the water). And unless you're a kid or pregnant, you can safely eat the fish you catch — at least, in limited quantities: the City says about four times a month.

This is a detail of a larger photo I came across on the Toronto Public Library website here.

Photo: Playing Baseball At Riverdale Park in 1914

If you've read many of these posts, you may have already started to suspect that I'm a bit of  a freak for baseball—while I have yet to mention hockey at all on this thing, this is at least my fourth post about my favourite sport. And since today is Opening Day and the Blue Jay's new season  kicks off tomorrow down at the Dome, it gives me a perfect excuse to post this photo I've been sitting on for a while: of a game held on the banks on the Don River, at Riverdale Park, in 1914.

I found it on Torontoist, in one of their always-excellent Historicists posts, this one about boyhood summers in the city. You can find it here.

Update: Kevin Plummer, who wrote said excellent Torontoist post, tipped me off to a couple of his other baseball-related Historicist columns. He talks about the T-dot's days as a minor league powerhouse here. And about our players' old-timey baseball cards here. I'm sure to steal liberally from both at some point down the line...