Part 22 (1/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration]
XVIII.
QUEEN STREET, FROM THE DON BRIDGE TO CAROLINE STREET.
We return once more to the Don Bridge; and from that point commence a journey westward along the thoroughfare now known as Queen Street, but which at the period at present occupying our attention, was non-existent. The region through which we at first pa.s.s was long known as the Park. It was a portion of Government property not divided into lots and sold, until recent times.
Originally a great s.p.a.ce extending from the first Parliament houses, bounded southward and eastward by the water of the Bay and Don, and northward by the Castle Frank lot, was set apart as a ”Reserve for Government Buildings,” to be, it may be, according to the idea of the day, a small domain of woods and forest in connection with them; or else to be converted in the course of time into a source of ways and means for their erection and maintenance. The latter appears to have been the view taken of this property in 1811. We have seen a plan of that date, signed ”T. Ridout, S. G.,” shewing this reserve divided into a number of moderate sized lots, each marked with ”the estimated yearly rent, in dollars, as reported by the Deputy Surveyor [Samuel S. Wilmot].” The survey is therein stated to have been made ”by order of His Excellency Francis Gore, Esq., Lieutenant-Governor.”
The number of the lots is eighty-three. None of them bear a larger amount than twenty dollars. Some of them consisting of minute bits of marsh, were expected to yield not more than one dollar. The revenue from the whole if realised would have been eleven hundred and thirty-three dollars. In this plan, what is now Queen street is duly laid down, in direct continuation of the Kingston Road westward, without regard to the engineering difficulties presented by ravines; but it is ent.i.tled in large letters, ”Dundas Street.” On its north side lie forty-six, and on its south, thirty-seven of the small lots into which the whole reserve is divided The scheme was never carried into effect.
The Park, as we remember it, was a tract of land in a state of nature, densely covered, towards the north, with ma.s.sive pines; and towards the south, with a thick secondary growth of the same forest tree. Through these woods ran a devious and rather obscure track, originating in the bridle-road cut out, before the close of the preceding century, to Castle Frank; one branch led off from it to the Playter-estate, pa.s.sing down and up two very steep and difficult precipices; and another, trending to the west and north, conducted the wayfarer to a point on Yonge Street about where Yorkville is now to be seen.
To the youthful imagination, the Park, thus clothed with veritable forest--
The nodding horror of whose shady brows Awed the forlorn and wandering pa.s.senger--
and traversed by irregular, ill-defined and very solitary paths, leading to widely-separated localities, seemed a vast and rather mysterious region, the place which immediately flashed on the mind, whenever in poem or fairy tale, a wild or wold or wilderness was named. As time rolled on, too, it actually became the haunt and hiding-place of lawless characters.
After pa.s.sing, on our left, the burial-plot attached to the first Roman Catholic Church of York, and arriving where Parliament Street, at the present day, intersects, we reached the limit, in that direction, of the ”Reserve for Government Buildings.” Stretching from the point indicated, there was on the right side of the way, a range of ”park lots,”
extending some two miles to the west, all bounded on the south by what at the present time is Queen Street, but which, from being the great thoroughfare along the front of this very range, was long known as ”Lot Street.” (In the plan above spoken of, it is marked, as already stated, ”Dundas Street,” it being a section of the great military way, bearing that name, projected by the first Governor of Upper Canada to traverse the whole province from west to east, as we shall have occasion hereafter to narrate.)
In the early plan of this part of York, the names of the first locatees of the range of park-lots are given. On the first or easternmost lot we read that of John Small. On the next, that of J. White.
In this collocation of names there is something touching, when we recall an event in which the first owners of these two contiguous lots were tragically concerned. Friends, and a.s.sociates in the Public Service, the one as Clerk of the Crown, the other as Attorney-General for Upper Canada, from 1792-1800, their dream, doubtless, was to pa.s.s the evening of their days in pleasant suburban villas placed here side by side in the outskirts of the young capital. But there arose between them a difficulty, trivial enough probably at the beginning, but which, according to the barbaric conventionality of the hour, could only be finally settled by a ”meeting,” as the phrase was, in the field, where chance was to decide between them, for life or death, as between two armies--two armies reduced to the absurdity of each consisting of one man. The encounter took place in a pleasant grove at the back of the Parliament Building, immediately to the east of it, between what is now King Street and the water's edge. Mr. White was mortally wounded and soon expired. At his own request his remains were deposited in his garden on the park-lot, beneath a summer-house to which he had been accustomed to retire for purposes of study.
The _Oracle_ of Sat.u.r.day, January 4, 1800, records the duel in the following words:--”Yesterday morning a duel was fought back of the Government Buildings by John White, Esq., his Majesty's Attorney-General, and John Small, Esq., Clerk of the Executive Council, wherein the former received a wound above the right hip, which it is feared will prove mortal.” In the issue of the following Sat.u.r.day, January 11th, the announcement appears:--”It is with much regret that we express to the public, the death of John White, Esq.” It is added: ”His remains were on Tuesday evening interred in a small octagon building, erected on the rear of his Park lot.” ”The procession,” the _Oracle_ observes, ”was solemn and pensive; and shewed that though death, 'all eloquent,' had seized upon him as his victim, yet it could not take from the public mind the lively sense of his virtues. _Vivit post funera virtus._”
The _Constellation_ at Niagara, of the date January 11th, 1800, also records the event, and enjoying a greater liberty of expression than the Government organ at York, indulges in some just and sensible remarks on the irrational practice of duelling in general, and on the sadness of the special case which had just occurred. We give the _Constellation_ article:
”Died at York, on the 3rd instant, John White, Esq., Attorney-General of this Province. His death was occasioned by a wound he received in a duel fought the day before with John Small, Esq., Clerk of the Executive Council, by whom he was challenged. We have not been able to obtain the particulars of the cause of the dispute; but be the origin what it may, we have to lament the toleration and prevalency of a custom falsely deemed honourable, or the criterion of true courage, innocency or guilt, a custom to gratify the pa.s.sion of revenge in a single person, to the privation of the country and a family, of an ornament of society, and support: an outrage on humanity that is too often procured by the meanly malicious, who have preferment in office or friends.h.i.+p in view, without merit to gain it, and stupidly lacquey from family to family, or from person to person, some wonderful suspicion, the suggestions of a soft head and evil heart; and it is truly unfortunate for Society that the evil they bring on others should pa.s.s by their heads to light on those the world could illy spare. We are unwilling to attribute to either the Attorney-General or Mr. Small any improprieties of their own, or to say on whom the blame lies; but of this we feel a.s.sured, that an explanation might easily have been brought about by persons near to them, and a valuable life preserved to us. The loss is great; as a professional gentleman, the Attorney-General was eminent, as a friend, sincere; and in whatever relation he stood was highly esteemed; an honest and upright man, a friend to the poor; and dies universally lamented and we here cannot refuse to mention, at the particular request of some who have experienced his goodness, that he has refused taking fees, and discharged suits at law, by recommending to the parties, and a.s.sisting them with friendly advice, to an amicable adjustment of their differences: and this is the man whom we have lost!”
For his share in the duel Mr. Small was, on the 20th January, 1800, indicted and tried before Judge Allc.o.c.k and a jury, of which Mr. Wm.
Jarvis was the foreman. The verdict rendered was ”Not Guilty.” The seconds were--Mr. Sheriff Macdonell for Mr. Small, and the Baron DeHoen for Mr. White.
(In 1871, as some labourers were digging out sand, for building purposes, they came upon the grave of Attorney-General White. The remains were carefully removed under the inspection of Mr. Clarke Gamble, and deposited in St. James' Cemetery.)
Mr. White's park-lot became afterwards the property of Mr. Samuel Ridout, sometime Sheriff of the County, of whom we have had occasion to speak already. A portion of it was subsequently owned and built on by Mr. Edward McMahon, an Irish gentleman, long well known and greatly respected as Chief Clerk in the Attorney General's office. Mr. McMahon's name was, for a time, preserved in that of a street which here enters Queen Street from the North.
Sherborne Street, which at present divides the White park-lot from Moss Park commemorates happily the name of the old Dorsets.h.i.+re home of the main stem of the Canadian Ridouts. The original stock of this family still flourishes in the very ancient and most interesting town of Sherborne, famous as having been in the Saxon days the see of a bishop; and possessing still a s.p.a.cious and beautiful minster, familiarly known to architects as a fine study.
Like some other English names, transplanted to the American continent, that of this Dorsets.h.i.+re family has a.s.sumed here a p.r.o.nunciation slightly different from that given to it by its ancient owners. What in Canada is Ri-dout, at Sherborne and its neighbourhood, is Rid-out.
On the park-lot which const.i.tuted the Moss-Park Estate, the name of D.
W. Smith appears in the original plan. Mr. D. W. Smith was acting Surveyor-General in 1794. He was the author of ”A Short Topographical Description of His Majesty's Province of Upper Canada in North America, to which is annexed a Provincial Gazetteer:”--a work of considerable antiquarian interest now, preserving as it does, the early names, native, French and English, of many places now known by different appellations. A second edition was published in London in 1813, and was designed to accompany the new map published in that year by W. Faden, Geographer to the King and Prince Regent. The original work was compiled at the desire of Governor Simcoe, to ill.u.s.trate an earlier map of Upper Canada.
We have spoken already in our progress through Front Street, of the subsequent possessor of Mr. Smith's lot, Col. Allan. The residence at Moss Park was built by him in comparatively recent times. The homestead previously had been, as we have already seen, at the foot of Frederick Street, on the south-east corner. To the articles of capitulation on the 27th April, 1813, surrendering the town of York to Dearborn and Chauncey, the commanders of the United States force, the name of Col.
Allan, at the time Major Allan, is appended, following that of Lieut.-Col. Chewett.
Besides the many capacities in which Col. Allan did good service to the community, as detailed during our survey of Front Street, he was also, in 1801, Returning Officer on the occasion of a public election. In the _Oracle_ of the 20th of June, 1801, we have an advertis.e.m.e.nt signed by him as Returning Officer for the ”County of Durham, the East Riding of the County of York, and the County of Simcoe”--which territories conjointly are to elect one member. Mr. Allan announces that he will be in attendance ”on Thursday, the 2nd day of July next, at 10 o'clock in the forenoon, at the Hustings under the Colonnade of the Government Buildings in the Town of York--and proceed to the election of one Knight to represent the said county, riding and county in the House of a.s.sembly, whereof all freeholders of the said county, riding and county, are to take notice and attend accordingly.”