1850s Toronto: A Look Back

Introduction

When Jem Hallam, hero of Michael Redhill’s Consolation, arrived in Toronto in 1856, he came to a city on the verge of great change, one that would be almost unrecognizable to residents and visitors of today. To begin with, Toronto was much smaller both in population and extent than the present metropolis of 2.5 million people and 632 square kilometres. 

Initially the site of native portages and French forts, modern Toronto was founded in 1793 as the capital of the new province of Upper Canada and renamed York.  Reverting to its aboriginal name when it became a city in 1834, from then until 1883 (the start of several annexations), Toronto’s boundaries were essentially Dufferin Street, Lake Ontario, the Don River and Bloor Street. 

After the United Province of Canada was created in 1842, Toronto was its capital only sporadically, between 1849-51 and 1855-59.  With 30,775 residents in 1851, it was the largest city in Canada West (now Ontario), but was considerably smaller than Montreal (57,715) and Quebec City (42,052) in Canada East (now Quebec).  Although growth had slowed from the previous two decades, Toronto’s population still increased almost 45 percent between 1851 and 1861, when the city reached 44,821 people.

Toronto’s only suburb was Yorkville, just north of Bloor Street on Yonge, Toronto’s “second street of importance, and greatest in length, extending 30 miles into the countryside,” noted the 1856 city directory.  Yorkville was the source of much of the distinctive yellowish-white brick favoured for prominent buildings constructed during the late 1840s and 1850s - “one of the best architectural periods” according to historian J. M. S. Careless. These included the Provincial Lunatic Asylum and Trinity College on Queen Street West near the city limits, St. Michael's Cathedral, most of St. Lawrence Hall, St. James Cathedral and much of University College to name only a few examples.  Several of these buildings survive to enrich today’s Toronto.   

Toronto's People

Despite his initial loneliness and isolation, the fictional Hallam shared a similar background with the majority of Torontonians.  With two-thirds born outside of Canada in 1851, Toronto was a city of immigrants.  Ninety percent of the newcomers had emigrated from Great Britain: 4,958 from England and Wales, 2,169 from Scotland and a whopping 11,305 from Ireland.  The so-called “foreign-born,” those whose birthplace was neither Canada nor Britain, consisted of 1,405 from the United States, 113 from Germany and Holland, and 402 from “all other places.” 

A decade later, British-born still formed the majority, but their proportion had decreased to 51 percent.  Through natural increase and in-migration from other parts of the country, Canadian-born citizens now formed 43 percent, mostly “not of French origin.”  Undoubtedly, some aboriginals also resided in the city, although none were listed in either census.  The proportion of “foreign-born” remained constant at 6 percent, although in the 1861 census more birthplaces were specified.  Making their first showing that year were modest numbers from the West Indies (79), France (66), Russia and Poland (23), Italy and Greece (22), East Indies (10), Spain and Portugal (8), Sweden and Norway (7) and Switzerland (6).  Numbers from these and other places increased as time passed, contributing to the city’s multicultural diversity.

Toronto’s Black population, tracing their roots here back to the 1790s, swelled to 526 residents in 1851 with an additional 287 “coloured persons” in York County. Canada became a safe haven once the United States passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850.  It required the return of runaway slaves, and also threatened the safety of free Blacks in the northern states. 

Religion reflected the Anglo-Celtic origin of most Torontonians.  Three-quarters were Protestant in 1851.  The Church of England comprised the largest group with 37 percent. The exodus from famine-stricken Ireland in the late 1840s had given Toronto a sizeable Roman Catholic population (25 per cent in 1851).  Some minority groups established their own places of worship.  Four churches of the “coloured population” operated in 1856 – three Baptist and one Methodist.  German Lutherans opened a church on Bond Street in 1857, the exact site of the present church.  Jews, the only non-Christians, formed less than 1 percent, but their population tripled during the decade from 57 to 153 in 1861.  The first Jewish congregation in Canada West was established in 1856, with services held in a building on Richmond just east of Yonge – the beginning of Holy Blossom Temple.  

There was some religious discord, especially between Catholics and Protestants of Irish origin, mainly on the Catholic celebration of St. Patrick on March 17 and the Protestant commemoration of the 1690 battle of the Boyne on July 12.  The Orange Order, started in Ulster and established in Canada before 1812 as a guardian of British Protestant ascendancy, had 20 lodges in Toronto in 1856, and wielded considerable power in civic politics.  Irish Catholics were toward the bottom of the city’s social scale, and were most likely to appear before the police magistrate on drunk and disorderly charges or be committed to the lunatic asylum. 

The Changing Face of Toronto

Immigration was not the only force changing the city.  Toronto entered the railway era on May 16, 1853 when the Toronto steam-engine of the Ontario, Simcoe & Huron Railroad (renamed the Northern Railway by 1858) pulled four cars to Machell's Corners (Aurora); service soon was extended to Barrie and to Collingwood on Georgian Bay in 1855.  The Grand Trunk Railway’s east-west line opened its Toronto-Brampton route in October 1855, completed to Sarnia in 1859, and the Montreal-Toronto section in 1856; both sections connected to points in the United States. The Great Western Railway came from Hamilton in December 1855, and linked Toronto to the London and the American Midwest. 

As its own regional reach extended more widely, the city’s commercial institutions grew.  The Toronto Stock Exchange began in 1852, the Canada Permanent Buildings and Savings Society in 1855 and the Bank of Toronto in 1856.  Reflecting the rising prosperity, the Rossin House, a five-storey luxury hotel, opened at King and York in May 1857. Hand in hand with these developments, Toronto suffered a severe crash in 1857, and the economic downturn lasted well into the early 1860s. 

The physical face of the city began to change, as Toronto became the main railway hub of Canada West.  The railways’ need for land for track, stations and yards led to a 100-foot landfill strip across the harbour in the mid-1850s, the beginning of the eastern Esplanade and the first of many lakefills, which would gradually move the shoreline southwards.

Industrial and residential areas started to separate, at least for the more affluent. By 1851, most Torontonians lived north of Queen, the original boundary of York.  Migration north (and west) continued in the 1850s, as the gentry subdivided original park lots between Queen and Bloor and laid out new streets, targeting working and middle classes.  Some suburban development also was underway. In 1854, a plan for the Rosedale estate in Yorkville created 61 villa lots for the wealthy on several winding streets, the first break from Toronto’s historic grid pattern (aside from St. James’s Cemetery). Slums including Macauleytown in the vicinity of today’s Queen and Bay streets became even more congested as poor immigrants crammed into shoddy shanty dwellings. 

Growth of Services

In spite of poverty and crowding, the crumbling, fire-prone slums where Hallam first meets Ennis and Rowe in Consolation were changing in the 1850s, as government services and regulations increased.  Sewers and gaslights, installed on many streets in the 1840s, were expanded to new areas.  Road were laid with macadam and sidewalks with plank boards.  Following the great fire of 1849, the city required new development in the downtown area to be more fire resistant.  Nevertheless, almost three-quarters of Toronto’s 8,438 houses were frame in 1861, although the proportion of brick dwellings (mostly three-stories) was increasing and shanties had disappeared, according to the census; fewer than 40 houses were stone.  Four fire stations operated in 1856; steam-powered fire engines replaced hand-pumped machines by 1861.  The police force had more than 60 men after reforms in the late 1850s.

A new Toronto General Hospital opened in the northeast section in 1855.  It was close to the Necropolis Cemetery established in 1850 to relieve overcrowding at Potter’s Field in Yorkville, which contrary to popular belief, was not a paupers' burial ground but simply a non-sectarian one for "persons of all creeds, and persons of no creeds."

Two public parks also began: Allan Gardens in 1857 and Queen’s Park in 1860, where new legislative buildings were built in 1893, a quarter-century after Toronto became the permanent capital of Ontario following Canada’s 1867 confederation.
Education expanded during the 1850s.  A public school board was created in 1850; the city’s schools were “open to all without to distinction of colour,” noted an 1857 report.  In reaction to the establishment of the sectarian University of Toronto in 1849, the Anglican Trinity College started in 1852, the same year as the handsome new provincial Normal School for training teachers opened.  St. Michael’s College for Roman Catholics began in 1855.  The Toronto Mechanics’ Institute’s started a large building in 1854, but it did locate its classes and library (the predecessor of the Toronto Public Library) there until 1861. 

Work and Leisure

Torontonians worked at a many jobs in the 1850s, with labourers and female servants comprising the two single largest groups.  Railway work expanded from less a dozen contractors and agents in 1851 to 237 employees in 1861.  The fictional Hallam's occupations also grew over the course of the decade; the number of "chemists, druggists and apothecaries" doubled from 29 to 57, while four "daguerrists" were transformed into 12 "photographists." In 1855-6, William Armstrong and his nephew, Daniel Manders Beere. advertised themselves as "Engineers, Draughtsmen and Photographists over Simpson & Dunspaugh, Chemists, King Street."  A third ‘photographist’, Humphrey Lloyd Hime, joined their firm in 1857.  Armstrong, Beere & Hime took the earliest known photographs of Toronto – Redhill’s inspiration for Consolation. 

King Street was the city's main commercial, cultural, and ceremonial thoroughfare.  Toronto’s three daily newspapers were located here – George Brown’s Globe, James Beaty’s Leader, and the Colonist, edited by Samuel Thompson. St. Lawrence Hall, on King East, offered sophisticated activities like the recital of the Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind, and lectures by the American abolitionist, Frederick Douglass.  The Royal Lyceum Theatre, next to the Rossin House on King West, provided opera and drama, and was a principal stop for touring companies.  

Travelling circuses led parades through the city to the Fair Green on the lakeshore and other open spaces.  The old Military Garrison was the site of many events, including the provincial exhibition in 1858 when a Crystal Palace was constructed.  People danced the Elephant Polka and the Grand Trunk Mazurka at charity and military balls. In the summertime, pleasure steamers went to Toronto Island (actually a peninsula until a violent storm in 1858) and to the Humber River.  In the winter, ice-boating, skating and fishing were popular pastimes on the frozen harbour.  Sports clubs for cricket, curling, and bowling thrived.  There were a wide variety of societies for national and cultural interests, and to support the less fortunate, including the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, a Victorian distinction.  For some, social activities centred at the city’s 35 churches, while for others leisure hours were spent at Toronto’s 200 hotels, taverns and saloons.