Researching a walk

This weekend, Heritage Toronto opens their season with an event I put soem research into along with Kimberley Landoni and Lee Rickwood. It's called 1834 Toronto: Beating the Bounds and invites walkers to take a hike around the boundaries of the 1834 city.

A lot of planning, reading and searching was done by all of us. We started off by brainstorming the types of information walkers would want to know about 1834 Toronto.
* What exactly did the City of Toronto Act say?
* How did the Act change things?
* How much of Toronto was settled and what was the lay of the land?
* What was life like here?
* What else started in 1834?

We divvied up the list and set out searching in our favourite places.

Me? I love city directories and maps. I love to track how a neighbourhood came together. In this case, my big focus was on the park lots and Dundas Street. I knew that Dundas was twisting road because it was cobbled together from streets each of the park lot owners had put through his own lot at some point. Mostly this happened as the lot was being subdivided for housing.

So the first task was to track when each of the park lots (100-acre strips of land running from Queen to Bloor) was being sold and divided. The eastern boundary, Parliament St., fell between lots 2 and 3 and the western line, Bathurst, was between lots 18 and 19. Then it was a matter of tracking between the maps and the directories, when each little street -- Arthur, St Patrick, Agnes, Anderson, Crookshank and Beech was put through.

The big challenge for me was that directories and maps were not updated each year back then. And city directories only sometimes included listings by street. Nevertheless, the picture started to emerge.

The earliest segment - just west of Yonge -- was laid out by the early 1840s. Most of the rest was laid out in the 1850s with one hold-out -- the part through the Grange estate, not going through until the early 1870s.

Bathurst Street itself, remained just a country lane through George Crookshank's estate, which comprised two of the original park lots. Crookshank, a one time Receiver General in the Assembly of Upper Canada, didn't sell of his land until the 1850s, letting the lane be renamed to match the street south of Queen -- Bathurst -- and letting it run through to Bloor.

Researching takes a lot of hours because to get at the real story, tracking down publications made at the time is required and they aren't computer searchable, nor were they written ro compiled with future researchers in mind. For history buffs, that's part of the fun. And when you get a story out of it, it's magic.


More details of the research we did is to be published on the Heritage Toronto website shortly after the walk.