MUDDY LITTLE YORK.
When we landed at York, it contained 8,500 inhabitants or thereabouts,
being the same population nearly as Belleville, St. Catharines, and
Brantford severally claimed in 1881. In addition to King street the
principal thoroughfares were Lot, Hospital, and Newgate streets, now
more euphoniously styled Queen, Richmond and Adelaide streets
respectively; Church, George, Bay and York streets were almost without
buildings; Yonge street ran north thirty-three miles to Lake Simcoe, and
Dundas street extended westward a hundred miles to London. More or less
isolated wooden stores there were on King and Yonge streets; taverns
were pretty numerous; a wooden English church; Methodist, Presbyterian,
and Roman Catholic churches of the like construction; a brick gaol and
court-house of the ugliest architecture: scattered private houses, a
wheat-field where now stands the Rossin House; beyond it a rough-cast
Government House, brick Parliament Buildings uglier even than the gaol,
and some government offices located in one-story brick buildings
twenty-five feet square,--comprised the lions of the Toronto of that
day. Of brick private buildings, only Moore's hotel at the corner of
Market square; J. S. Baldwin's residence, now the Canada Company's
office; James F. Smith's grocery (afterwards the _Colonist_ office), on
King street; Ridout's hardware store at the corner of King and Yonge
streets, occur to my memory, but there may have been one or two others.
So well did the town merit its muddy soubriquet, that in crossing Church
street near St. James's Church, boots were drawn off the feet by the
tough clay soil; and to reach our tavern on Market lane (now Colborne
street), we had to hop from stone to stone placed loosely along the
roadside. There was rude flagged pavement here and there, but not a
solitary planked footpath throughout the town.
To us the sole attraction was the Emigrant Office. At that time, Sir
John Colborne, Lieut. Governor of Upper Canada, was exerting himself to
induce retired army officers, and other well-to-do settlers, to take up
lands in the country north and west of Lake Simcoe. U. E. rights,
_i.e._, location tickets for two hundred acres of land, subject to
conditions of actual settlement, were easily obtainable. We purchased
one of these for a hundred dollars, or rather for twenty pounds
sterling--dollars and cents not being current in Canada at that
date--and forthwith booked ourselves for Lake Simcoe, in an open waggon
without springs, loaded with the bedding and cooking utensils of
intending settlers, some of them our shipmates of the _Asia_. A day's
journey brought us to Holland Landing, whence a small steamer conveyed
us across the lake to Barrie. The Holland River was then a mere muddy
ditch, swarming with huge bullfrogs and black snakes, and winding in and
out through thickets of reeds and rushes. Arrived at Barrie, we found a
wharf, a log bakery, two log taverns--one of them also a store--and a
farm house, likewise log. Other farm-houses there were at some little
distance, hidden by trees.
Some of our fellow travellers were discouraged by the solitary
appearance of things here, and turned back at once. My brothers and
myself, and one other emigrant, determined to go on; and next afternoon,
armed with axes, guns, and mosquito nets, off we started for the unknown
forest, then reaching, unbroken, from Lake Simcoe to Lake Huron. From
Barrie to the Nottawasaga river, eleven miles, a road had been chopped
and logged sixty-six feet wide; beyond the river, nothing but a bush
path existed.