The Town Of York 1793 1815

This volume, the fifth of the Ontario Series of the Champlain Society, tells the history of the town of York (Toronto) from the arrival of John Graves Simcoe in 1793 through the war of 1812 until news of the peace reached the town in the spring of 1815. The selection of contemporary documents attempts to show why York was chosen for a settlement in the first place, the kind of community that developed, and the effect of the War on that community. Apart from the normal problems connected with the establishment of any settlement, the officials of the town of York were faced with the necessity of creating a worthy capital city for Upper Canada at a time when Kingston because of its pre-eminence as the military and naval centre of the province and its commercial prosperity overshadowed all other settlements. The book also illustrates the gradual integration into a corporate body of many diverse elements—senior government officials, discharged soldiers, tradesmen, labourers—so that by 1815 the characteristics of modern Toronto were beginning to be evident in York. This collection of documents and the editor's Introduction will provide the student of local history with a good deal of primary material and the general reader with an interesting account of the early years of the modern metropolis of Toronto. Vol. V, Ontario Series, Champlain Society.

In Mixed Company explores taverns as colonial public space and how men and women of diverse backgrounds � Native and newcomer, privileged and labouring, white and non-white � negotiated a place for themselves within them. The stories that emerge unsettle comfortable certainties about who belonged where in colonial society. Colonial taverns were places where labourers enjoyed libations with wealthy Aboriginal traders like Captain Thomas, who also treated a Scotsman to a small bowl of punch; where white soldiers rubbed shoulders with black colonists out to celebrate Emancipation Day; where English ladies and their small children sought refuge for a night. The records of the past tell stories of time spent in mixed company but also of the myriad, unequal ways that colonists found room in taverns and a place in Upper Canadian culture and society. Reconstructed from tavern-keepers' accounts, court records, diaries, travelogues, and letters, In Mixed Company is essential reading for tavern aficionados and anyone interested in the history of gender, race, and culture in Canadian or colonial society.

This is the remarkable story of the trail that became the longest street in the world, as officially recognized by The Guinness Book of Records. Begun in 1794, Yonge Street was planned by the ambitious Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe as a military route between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron. Anxious to bolster Upper Canada's defences against the new republic to the south, which he heartily loathed, Simcoe had his Queen's Rangers survey and develop the route from Toronto to present-day Holland Landing, and laid out lots for settlement. Even the trusty Rangers, as one surveyor complained in 1799, needed little excuse to lay down tools and vanish "to carouse upon St. George's day." Handsomely illustrated with the author's drawings, and painstakingly researched, this book captures the not-so-distant days when muddy Yonge Street was the backbone of pioneer Ontario.

Fearing an American invasion of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe had Fort York built in 1793 as an emergency defensive measure. That act became the first step in the founding of modern Toronto. Twenty years later, the Fort was the scene of the bloody Battle of York in which the famous American explorer, Zebulon Pike, died leading U.S. forces against the Fort’s outnumbered Canadian, British and Aboriginal defenders. The Americans won this battle – their first major victory in the War of 1812 – and torched the province’s public buildings during a six-day occupation. A year later, British forces retaliated by capturing Washington and burning its government buildings, including the White House. Rebuilt in time to drive off another American attack in 1814, Fort York was maintained through the 1880s to guard against internal unrest and potential American annexation. Even after its defences became obsolete, Fort York continued to serve as barracks and training grounds for the Toronto garrison until the 1930s, when it reopened as a historic site museum. In this book, Carl Benn explores the dramatic roles Fort York played in the frontier war of the 1790s, the birth of Toronto, the War of 1812, the Rebellion of 1837 and the defence of Canada during the American Civil War, and describes how Toronto’s most important heritage site came to be preserved as a tangible link to Canada’s turbulent military past.