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The Bales Family Farms

Of all the pioneer families in North York, none was more politically active than the Bales family. By the fourth generation, family members had held the offices of school trustee, councillor, deputy reeve, and reeve; as well as Ontario MPP and provincial cabinet minister. It all began when John Bales of Cumberland and his wife, Elizabeth Scott, originally from Yorkshire, decided to leave England for the New World in 1819.

Shortly after their arrival in what became the Township of North York, John and Elizabeth purchased the western sixty acres of Lot 15-1W. Their farm occupied the southeast corner of present-day Bathurst and Sheppard. The eastern border of the farm was the massive valley of the West Don River. Their neighbours on the lot were John Sheppard, who owned the northeastern section, which reached all the way over to Yonge Street, and Andrew McGlashan, who owned the southeast corner of the lot, between Yonge Street and the river.

The house that the Bales’ built on their farm in 1822 still stands today, and a good thing too, for the house is apparently one of only a few of its kind to ever be built in pioneer Ontario. The one-and-a-half-storey house is built of logs and covered in rough-cast concrete — a combination of mortar and small pebbles. The symmetrical plan and elevation of the house echo the style of the rural English cottages of the Bales’s youth, and although this style and construction method are rare in Ontario, similar houses are quite common in New York State. A kitchen wing was added to the house sometime before 1850 to accommodate a growing family that would eventually include ten children. It goes without saying that the house was well built since it has already survived for nearly 190 years. The house still sits on its original site, which is now part of the north end of Earl Bales Park, not too far south of Sheppard Avenue. In 1833, John expanded the farm to 160 acres when he purchased one hundred acres of Lot 14-1W, directly to the south, the lot that had originally been granted to potter Thomas Humberstone in 1812.

In 1881, the farm was sold to the Grand Trunk Transportation Company, although no rail lines were ever laid anywhere near the farm. In fact, this part of Bathurst Street was long considered to be ill-suited to any type of travel owing to the extreme width and depth of the river valley.

John Bales’s house, the first farmhouse that the family built in Upper Canada. Ironically, the only one of their homes still standing, is shown here in Earl Bales Park on February 19, 2010.

Photo by Scott Kennedy

Maps from 1892 to 1910 show a stable period of ownership for the farms on the two lots, with George McCormack farming the northeast ninety acres of Lot 15-1W, which was formerly owned by John Sheppard, and the Shedden Company owning the Bales’s 160 acres at Bathurst and Sheppard. The Shedden Company, also spelled “Sheddon” on some documents, was formed in 1887 to operate flour mills in the area. As well as milling on the former Bales farm, the company also operated another mill a mile or so downriver in Hogg’s Hollow until 1897.

The farms would exist until the 1950s when the acreage to the east of the river valley was subdivided for houses, and the Bales farm, to the west of the valley, became the York Downs Golf Club. The club continued as a part of the community, preserving a tremendous amount of green space until 1968, when the land was sold to the City of Toronto and the club moved to a new facility near the corner of Kennedy Road and Sixteenth Avenue in Markham. The former golf course was then transformed into the current Earl Bales Park and Earl Bales Ski and Snowboard Centre — the steep hills are still in use and were just upgraded with a million-dollar-plus ski lift, paid for by the City of Toronto. Remnants of the golf course’s landscaping are still clearly visible on the park’s tableland along Bathurst Street.

So who exactly is Earl Bales? His story will appear as part of that fourth generation of Bales (later in this chapter). Several of John and Elizabeth’s children would marry and leave North York to farm elsewhere. Son Joseph, however, stayed put and started the branch of the family that would ensure the Bales name would not soon be forgotten.

In 1885, Joseph Bales bought a farm on Lot 15-1E from the Harrison family of York Mills. The northern border of the farm was Sheppard Avenue. It was bounded by Bayview Avenue to the east and Yonge Street to the west. The farm had previously been owned by members of other pioneer families, including Stillwell Willson, Jacob Cummer, Elihu Pease, and Christopher Harrison II. In 1888, Joseph bought the western half of Lot 14-1E directly to the south. He now had nearly three hundred acres of farmland at the corner of Yonge and Sheppard. In 1896, the land was passed on to his sons. Joseph Christie Bales settled on Lot 15-1E and his brother, Oliver Douglas Bales, settled on the western half of Lot 14-1E. Maps from 1910 show that the farms were still owned by the two brothers.

In the 1920s, Joseph and Oliver employed a family of gypsies to work on their farms. The gypsies were skilled blacksmiths who spent much of their time shoeing the Bales’ horses. On Sundays the little family would take their covered wagon, which contained all of their worldly goods, down to the river in Hogg’s Hollow where they would do their laundry and hang it up to dry under the old bridge that once spanned the river just north of the Jolly Miller. The horses and dogs enjoyed a well-deserved dip in the cool water while the family bathed and swam before moving to the sand beach that once existed where the Miller’s parking lot is today. There they would play games and enjoy a picnic lunch while their clothes dried in the summer breeze. When the shadows began to grow long they would pack up their wagon and trundle back up the hill to the Bales’ farms.

Once common in Canada, the nomadic gypsies quietly disappeared or were assimilated into conventional society as the twentieth century progressed. One of the last remnants of their presence in North York was an abandoned gypsy wagon that survived into the 1960s, abandoned by a little creek,[1] now buried, that flowed parallel to Bannatyne Drive on the former Harrison farm in York Mills.

By the 1920s, parts of the Bales’ farms were being sold for housing as the city pushed ever further northward. Initially, the sales were to individuals for construction of individual houses, but as the years progressed, the concept of the “subdivision” reared its inevitable head. This concept of simultaneous construction of massive numbers of houses in a given area would prove the death knell for all of the farms in North York, and yet the Bales’ farms would survive a lot longer than most of their neighbours’.

Brothers Joseph Christie Bales and Oliver Douglas Bales belonged to the third generation of their family to farm in North York, but they were the first members of their family to become active in local politics. Oliver served on the first North York Council from 1922 to 1923, along with James Muirhead, William Scrace, W.J. Buchanan, and Reeve R.F. Hicks. Joseph Christie Bales would also serve on council in 1927.

Above: The success of the Bales family farms is amply demonstrated by the style, size, and detail of Oliver Douglas Bales’s farmhouse on Yonge Street, south of Sheppard; shown circa 1910.

Photographer unknown, The North York Historical Society, NYHS 1024.

Left: Later additions and renovations to the Bales farmhouse, such as the enclosed sunroom and wraparound porch, give further indication of the Bales family’s continued success. The house is shown in 1959 on the corner of Yonge Street and the fledgling Highway 401, which had been built through this area four years earlier and was still only two uncrowded lanes in each direction.

Photo by Ted Chirnside, Toronto Public Library, TC 268.

The accompanying photos show Joseph Christie’s house still standing at Yonge and Sheppard in 1955, and his brother’s house and barn stubbornly ensconced at the corner of Yonge and the 401 in 1959. The former would not last long, and the latter farm, down to one acre when the photos were taken in 1959, would be sold by the family in 1960. As riveting as these photos are, it would be the accomplishments of two of the men who were born in these houses that would outshine the pioneer family’s farming history. One of these men was the aforementioned Earl Bales, of Earl Bales Park fame.

Oliver Douglas Bales’s twin sons, Earl and Allen, were born in 1896. Earl joined the army to serve in the field artillery in 1915. After returning from the First World War he married Ruth Bick. Together, they would raise two daughters, Barbara and Mary. In 1931, Earl followed in his father’s footsteps when he was elected as a North York councillor. In 1933, he was elected deputy reeve and in 1934 became the youngest reeve in North York history at the age of thirty-eight. When he took over as reeve from George Elliot, whose farm is also featured in these pages, he landed squarely in the middle of the fiscal nightmare of the Great Depression.

In 1933, North York had defaulted on payments to its bond holders, a situation shared by virtually every other municipality in the province. In 1935, shortly after Earl had taken power, North York was put under provincial supervision by Queen’s Park. This meant that any financial transactions made by North York would have to be approved by the provincial government. Under Earl’s leadership, North York performed admirably, and, by the end of 1937, they had paid off all of their bond holders. Earl Bales would remain as reeve until 1940. In 1941, North York was released from the supervision of the provincial government, one of only a handful of municipalities in the entire province to have achieved this goal. During these years Earl was also a member of the York County Council.

After his days as an elected official were over, Earl Bales returned to private life for a while before finding a new home on the North York Planning Board. He served on the board for twenty-six years, from 1946 to 1972, and was the chairman for seventeen of those years. His tenure encompassed the greatest population boom in the history of North York. Earl was particularly well suited to this challenge, for despite his pioneer roots and farming background, he was overwhelmingly pro-development. When the fields, farms, and orchards of his youth began to be replaced by housing, he wasn’t mournful or bitter. Rather, he embraced the change, and, in fact, facilitated the rapid urbanization by sanctioning new zoning bylaws, which allowed for the construction of high-rise apartment buildings.

It seems that he viewed the loss of the farms as inevitable and wanted to retain some degree of control as to how the bulldozers rolled. In an interview with Sheila White, published in the Willowdale Mirror on January 9, 1985, Earl recalled that: “After World War II the boom started from the Humber River right over to Victoria Park Avenue. We wanted to create proper development which would be a benefit to North York, not a burden. We always looked forward to developing this area.”

Earl would live out the latter part of his life in one of these new developments, at Bayview Village on the former Kingsdale Farm property, after selling and vacating the last acre of the family farm at Yonge Street and Highway 401 in 1960. True to his farm roots, he looked after his ravine property on Forest Grove Drive as long as his health would allow, continuing to take care of the gardening and snow shovelling until he was nearly ninety. He died there suddenly on July 31, 1992. He was ninety-five. His cousin and best friend, Dalton Bales, would climb even higher on the political ladder but would meet a much more bizarre and premature end.

The message of this book is aptly summarized in this 1955 photograph by Ted Chirnside. This is the corner of Yonge and Sheppard on a sweltering summer afternoon, as seen from beneath the protective overhang of the Dempsey Brothers’ store. Looking to the southeast: from left to right, a new branch of the Bank of Toronto; Joseph Christie Bales’s farmhouse, abandoned and soon to be demolished for a plaza; a billboard for the now-vanquished Simpson’s department stores; and an honour box belonging to the Globe and Mail — a photograph more eloquent than words.

Courtesy of Toronto Public Library, TC 24A.

The modern world takes over as the McLean-Hunter building, built on former Bales farmland in 1949, lurks behind the barn on Oliver Douglas Bales’s farm on the northeast corner of Yonge Street and Highway 401 in 1959.The massive printing facility, one of North York’s earliest industries, was demolished in 1995 for condominium towers.

Photo by J.V. Salmon, Toronto Public Library, S 1-3149C.

Joseph Christie Bales’s son Dalton was born in 1920. He grew up on his parents’ farm at the corner of Yonge and Sheppard. After graduating from high school he decided to pursue a career in law. He eventually became a partner in the Toronto firm of McLaughlin, Soward, a firm he joined as a student in 1946. Three years later, he was called to the bar. His political career began in 1959 when he was elected to the North York Township council, where his father, uncle, and cousin Earl had served in previous decades. He would remain a councillor until 1962, in addition to serving as chairman of the North York Board of Health from 1960 to 1965, yet he had ambitions beyond the confines of municipal politics.

In 1963, Dalton was elected to the Ontario Legislature as the member from the riding of York Mills, a riding he would represent for twelve years. In 1966, he was appointed minister of labour by then-Premier John Robarts. He was later appointed provincial attorney general, a position he held from 1972 until 1974, while simultaneously serving as the minister of municipal affairs. He suffered a heart attack in 1974 and quit politics the following year, citing obvious concerns for his health. He then retired to his home near Bayview and York Mills.

On the evening of October 30, 1979, one night before Hallowe’en, Dalton Bales was attempting to cross Bayview Avenue about a block south of York Mills Road when he was struck and killed by a car in the northbound passing lane. He was fifty-nine.

So what remains as the family’s legacy? Well, first of all, there is that magnificent park — one of the few places left in North York where you can still stand on open land where cattle once grazed and crops once grew. The existence of the park has also assured the survival of the family’s original farmhouse and even parts of their barns, which now serve as maintenance sheds for park staff. The house is currently used as an Ontario Early Years Centre for parents and children.

The park is also home to the Earl Bales Community Centre, the Holocaust Education and Memorial Centre of Toronto and the previously mentioned ski centre. Other than that, there is not much left of the farms, except for the tiny Bales Avenue, a two-block road to nowhere, east of Yonge Street and south of Sheppard, which is currently little more than a shortcut for construction vehicles. Near the southern end of Bales Avenue, on Harrison Garden Boulevard, stands the front half of the Elihu Pease house that Joseph Christie Bales cut in half and moved to Avondale Avenue in 1921. The house was moved to its current location in 2002.

But it’s the most obscure piece of the Bales’ family legacy that may be the most charming. In 1921, when Joseph Christie Bales moved Elihu Pease’s farmhouse from Yonge and Sheppard to make room for his own house, he also dismantled an old shed on the property that had once been the original St. John’s Anglican Church, built in 1817, high on a hill overlooking Hogg’s Hollow. When the current stone church was built on the site in 1844, Elihu bought the old church, dismantled it, and moved it to his farm, where it was rebuilt to serve as a shed. In 1921, the timbers of the former church/shed were stored in the Bales’ barn, where they remained until 1948. That year, St. John’s began building an addition that would include a new chancel and memorial chapel. When the Bales family heard of the new construction, they donated the timbers of the original wooden church to be used in the ceiling of the new chancel and chapel. The adze marks made by the men who squared these primeval timbers nearly two hundred years ago, are still clearly visible today