Along the Shore

Rediscovering Toronto’s Waterfront Heritage

By M. Jane Fairburn

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2013 M. Jane Fairburn
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77041-099-2
CHAPTER 1

The Nature of the Place

On the evening of July 29, 1793, the Mississauga, a British government vessel, set sail from Niagara for Toronto Bay. Arriving at Toronto before dawn the next morning, the vessel was piloted into the bay after daybreak by Jean-Baptiste Rousseaux, an Indian Department interpreter and trader who lived nearby. Mrs. Simcoe, the wife of the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe, awoke on board the ship later that morning and was met with a sublime view of the pristine basin.

The bay, as later described by Colonel Joseph Bouchette in The British Dominions in North America; etc., revealed a plush carpet of Carolinian forest, which cast its image on the lake, blurring the line of demarcation between the water and beach. Just to the west of the inlet was the Rousseaux home, which was at the mouth of an ancient river now known as the Humber. For countless centuries the riverbank had served as a passageway to the hinterlands and the inland regions of Canada. To the south of the mainland was a peninsula that formed the outer periphery of the bay, beginning in the west, at the mouth of the inlet, and stretching easterly as a finger of white sand as far as the eye could see.

Within days of her arrival at Toronto, Mrs. Simcoe rode on horseback easterly across this peninsula, now known as the Island. Continuing east, along a sandy beach on the north shore of the lake, she found herself in the vicinity of what we now know as the Beach and from there, despite the restrictions of a proper eighteenth-century lady’s dress, climbed into a small boat and had herself rowed farther still, until she saw a line of immense and imposing cliffs stretching far into the distance. Of the experience she wrote in her diary: “After rowing a mile we came within sight of what is named, in the map, the highlands of Toronto. The shore is extremely bold, and has the appearance of chalk cliffs, but I believe they are only white sand. They appeared so well that we talked of building a summer residence there and calling it Scarborough.” Although the Highlands had been known to early European explorers since the seventeenth century, and for countless centuries before that to the Aboriginal people who frequented the lakefront, it was Mrs. Simcoe who first recorded the sense of mystery and imagination that they continue to evoke to this day.

It was one thing for Mrs. Simcoe to write about the Highlands. It was another thing entirely, during those times, to consider living on top of them, replete as they were with insects — notably black flies — and beasts of all description and lacking road access to York, which lay, at a minimum, five and a half miles distant to the west. To say the least, this was a thoroughly unconventional idea for an English gentlewoman of her times. But Elizabeth Simcoe was by no means conventional. She appreciated and rejoiced in the unspoiled beauty of the landscape, enough so to envision herself right from the beginning on the top of the cliffs, in the middle of nature, gazing out at an unending sea of blue.

In time these cliffs came to be known as the Scarborough Highlands and, later in the twentieth century, as the Scarborough Bluffs. In 1850 the whole region — bordered on the west by what is now Victoria Park Avenue, on the north by what was then the Township of Markham, on the east by what was then the Township of Pickering, and on the south by Lake Ontario — was incorporated as