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Lot 16-2E and the Bayview Village Plaza

Imagine standing on the northeast corner of Bayview and Sheppard, just south of the subway station, and looking east. The Bayview Village Mall, apartment buildings, and condominiums fill the entire field of vision. Now look north for a quarter-of-a-mile, past the subway station, past the condo building that thinks it’s a cruise ship, and past the townhouses of the Bayview Mews, all the way to the southern edge of Bayview Gardens. Now look east again — right over to Leslie Street. This expanse of two hundred acres is Lot 16-2E, a most impressive piece of land in anyone’s book. Imagine how beautiful it must have been when it was all farmland, when soft wheat bent to the wind on a hot summer day, when Jersey cows sheltered under towering elms beneath the hanging-basket nests of Baltimore orioles, when there was no sound, save for the wind and the birds.

This is the challenge of the mind, really — to imagine this land when it was all farmland. It isn’t easy. It’s heartbreaking sometimes. Yet, often the best way to accept the future is to picture the past.

This chapter isn’t named after a farm or a farmer or a family, but the actual lot number. This seemed appropriate, as Lot 16-2E is one of the few lots in this book that was divided among a number of families, almost from the beginning. This lot was farmed by one of the most convivial groups of farmers in Willowdale. It was farmed primarily by three families from the early 1800s into the 1950s. Thomas Clark of Barberry Place, just across Sheppard Avenue to the south, farmed part of the lot, as did William Smith, who also had a farm and a home on the former St. John’s Clergy Reserve, the Glebe land granted to St. John’s Anglican Church in York Mills, two lots to the south. The first family of Lot 16-2E, however, was the Millers, who farmed here for over 130 years after Jacob Miller purchased the entire lot in 1807. The families were so friendly, in fact, that Thomas Clark married his neighbour, Nancy Miller, after his first wife died in 1844.

When Jacob Miller bought the complete lot, it was almost certainly virgin field and forest. Originally granted by the Crown to a Mary Garner in 1802,[1] the lot was sold to a Christian Hendricks in 1806. When Jacob Miller acquired the spectacular property, he had to build a log cabin to shelter his family, which is a pretty strong indication that the property was still in its original condition when the Millers took possession.

There was still plenty of farming to be done on the northeast corner of Bayview and Sheppard when this photo was taken in the 1920s. Levi Smith, pictured here, would pass this farm along to his son, just as his father had passed it along to him.

Outside: Photographer unknown, North York Historical Society, NYHS 1036., Inside: Photographer unknown, North York Historical Society, NYHS 1032.

It would be wonderful to know what Frances Morrison and Levi Smith’s cow were trying to tell each other one summer day in the 1920s.

By 1822, ownership of the lot had changed, with Jacob’s sons James and Jacob Jr. holding separate fifty-acre parcels on the west half of the lot, while a Francis Lee appeared as owner of the eastern one hundred acres. This farm was passed down through the Lee family until 1887, including to Christopher E. Lee, whose name suggests he was part horror-movie star and part Civil War general. Christopher inherited the eastern half of the lot in 1854, by which time he had also been farming the southwest corner of Lot 8-2E, down by Post Road, for eight years — clearly a man who knew his way up and down Bayview Avenue.

One year after Christopher inherited his one hundred acres, he sold the western fifty acres to Thomas Clark. The Clarks would farm this lot for even longer than they farmed their Barberry Place farm, which they sold to Samuel William Armstrong in 1887. Francis Clark inherited part of the eastern half of Lot 16-2E from his father, Thomas, in 1883, and bought the remaining fifty-three acres from the Lee family in 1887. The Clarks would farm Lot 16-2E well into the 1930s.

As the 1890s dawned, ownership of the lot would stabilize for the next twenty years or so, with the Clarks on the eastern half, the Smiths still farming the western fifty acres of the lot that William Smith had purchased in 1871, and the Millers farming the fifty acres between the two. Other families, including members of the surveyor David Gibson’s family, would occupy a ten-acre corner on the southwest of the Clarks’ land until the end of the 1800s, but, by 1910, it was all down to “the firm” of Smith, Miller, and Clark.

Levi Smith first appears on the fifty-acre farm he inherited from his father, William, at the corner of Bayview and Sheppard around 1910. William’s son, Jacob, inherited his farm on Lots 11 and 12-2E at the corner of Bayview and York Mills, while another son, William II, inherited his father’s third farm on the former St. John’s Clergy Reserve on Lot 14-2E. Levi is pictured here with his trusty sheepdog and pitchfork. It’s hard to believe that this picture, with crops in the fields and towering evergreens, was taken at the corner of Bayview and Sheppard. The other picture of Levi’s farm always touches the heart. This image of little Frances Morrison dressed in her Sunday best, looking shyly down at the ground while one of Levi’s Jersey cows regards her with a degree of bemusement, is what photography is all about. The fact that these two seem so alive to us now, nearly hundred years after this fleeting moment was captured, seems proof positive that time can stand still.

Joseph Miller, grandson of Jacob, pictured around 1905 in front of the house that his father James had built some sixty-five years earlier, inherited his father’s fifty-acre farm in the middle of Lot 16-2E in 1882. Pictured here with his wife, daughter Edith, and two of the Webster boys who were related to the Millers by marriage, Joseph willed the farm to his children just as his father had willed it to him.

Francis Clark is shown as the sole owner of the eastern one hundred acres at the corner of Leslie and Sheppard in 1910. The accompanying photo, taken sometime in the 1920s, shows Clark family members in front of Arthur Clark’s house, built on Lot 16-2E, on the north side of Sheppard Avenue East.

By the end of the Second World War, the combination of improved roads and a wave of returning servicemen eager to find new jobs and start families began to change the face of North York forever, especially along main thoroughfares like Sheppard Avenue. Portions of Lot 16-2E were beginning to be severed to create smaller parcels for businesses such as the fledgling garden centre that Len Cullen,[2] co-founder of Weall and Cullen Nurseries (now a part of Sheridan Nurseries, who still occupy this site at least until re-development, scheduled for sometime in 2014), built on the five acres of Lot 16-2E he purchased in 1948 for $900 an acre. The shed that served as his original office was built on former Clark farmland, between a pigpen and an abattoir. Residential development of this area was still some time in the future, however, and while maps from the mid-1950s show both sides of Sheppard Avenue between Yonge Street and Bayview as fully subdivided, Lot 16-2E, and, indeed everything north and east of it, was still farmland. Sadly, this bucolic situation was not to last.

Will today’s generation look as interesting to Willowdale residents of 2114 as Joseph Miller’s family appears in this photo from the first decade of the twentieth century? Shown here are (left–right): Edith Miller, ? , Harold Webster, William Webster, and Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Miller.

Photo by Ted Chirnside, Toronto Public Library, TC 24.

Hard work and perseverance seem to have paid off for Willowdale carpenter Robert J. Clark, seen on the right, and his brother-in-law, Dr. Melhuish of Toronto, as they are photographed sometime in the 1920s at the Sheppard Avenue home of Robert’s brother, Arthur.

Photographer unknown, North York Historical Society, NYHS 1039.

Twelve acres of the Miller farm were purchased in 1951 for the construction of St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church. The completed church and attached fifteen-bedroom monastery were officially opened on June 7, 1953, when Sheppard Avenue was still a two-lane country road. The church served the community well for over fifty years. Not only did its walls house a place of worship, they also engaged the community in ways that churches of today could only imagine, such as the Saturday night dances at the parish hall that attracted teenagers from all across Toronto to hear performers such as The Guess Who.

Half-a-mile north of Bayview and Sheppard, construction of the Bayview Village subdivision was underway on former farmland by 1955. A couple of years later, the much smaller Bayview Gardens subdivision was built on part of Lot 17-2E, south of today’s Citation Drive. Retail outlets soon followed, including the full-fledged Weall and Cullen Garden Centre that started out as that little shed, gas stations like Gerry Balabik’s Shell, and the Loblaws store that was built on the northeast corner of Bayview and Sheppard, in a muddy pit that had once been part of Levi Smith’s farm. In fact, when the big yellow Loblaws with the green neon sign opened in 1959, the parking lot was such a mud pit that the store had to hire local tow-truck drivers to extricate shoppers so they could go home.

It didn’t take long for this farmland on Lot 16-2E to be ingested — five years tops. No effort was made to honour or preserve anything. It was strictly “out with the old and in with the new.” The outdoor Bayview Village Plaza sprouted to the east of Loblaws in 1963. Low-rise apartments were built to the east of Saint Gabriel’s. A strip mall or two, more gas stations, restaurants, office buildings, the Miller Paving yards near Leslie and Sheppard — all took their bites out of Lot 16-2E until nothing remained, save for the deep valley of the East Don River on the northeast corner of Leslie and Sheppard, where development was forbidden following Hurricane Hazel.

Then the re-development began. The plaza was re-built into an indoor mall. High-rise apartments succeeded low-rise apartments. Townhouses took the place of detached houses. And condos — the inescapable, inevitable condos — rose and covered the land. Even Saint Gabriel’s was demolished for a condominium project. The garden centre is still there and the CNR trestle across the East Don Valley, but that’s about it.

Should you ever pass the corner of Bayview and Sheppard, try to remember one thing. Remember the photo of little Frances Morrison and Levi Smith’s cow, and don’t be surprised if you catch yourself smiling.