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The Montgomery/Elliot Farm

Some may remember the Algonquin Tavern on the east side of Yonge Street between Cummer and Finch, and likewise the Willowdale Golf Club, the Simpson Auction Barn, the Newtonbrook Airfield, and the Limberlost Riding Academy. Many are probably familiar with St. John’s Rehab Hospital on Cummer Avenue or the Finch subway station with the hydro towers marching through its parking lot.

The one thing that all of these places have in common is that they were all built on the farm that John Elliot bought in 1910. More intriguing still is the realization that the farm was already over one hundred years old when John acquired it.

The history of this farm reaches all the way back to the late 1700s, when the Johnson family left their native Pennsylvania and settled in North York. Lawrence Johnson and his sons Nicholas, Thomas, Abraham, and Joseph settled on five different lots on both sides of Yonge Street, just north of the Cummer family holdings. By 1798 the family had built four log cabins and cleared ten to twelve acres of each lot in accordance with the conditions of their Crown land grants. Thomas, who settled on the southernmost Lot 21-1E was the only one who hadn’t built a cabin by 1798, but he must have pulled his socks up as he was granted full deed to his land by the Crown in 1800.

Thomas would remain there until 1811, at which point an Alexander Gray’s name would appear on the deed. This is a different Alexander Gray than the one who emigrated from Paisley, Scotland, in 1820 to run a number of mills near present-day Don Mills and York Mills Roads. The farm would then tumble through the hands of four different owners in four years before Alexander Montgomery and his son John bought the property in 1815. This Alexander had previously owned farms on Lot 10-2E and Lot 12-3E, near the current Leslie and York Mills. This, his third farm, would remain in the family for over thirty years, through some of the most riveting events in the history of Upper Canada.

John and his father built the first of several inns, which John would own in his lifetime, on this farm in 1820. The Bird in Hand Inn, mentioned in the previous chapter, was a two-storey frame structure built around a centre hall plan. It was an immediate success with the travellers of the day, who depended on hospitable inns every few miles to mitigate the misery of the muddy, rutted roads. Things went well for several years, before a disagreement between father and son would lead to one of the more bizarre incidents in the history of North York.

It seems that John and Alexander had been having ever more frequent arguments over the operation of the inn. In January 1827, following legal proceedings, a court order led to the inn being cut in half — literally. The structure was sawn in half, from the peak of the roof down to the ground. John continued to operate the inn in the southern portion of the building while Alexander retired to the northern part, which was now his private home. Apparently this arrangement worked well, as The Bird in Hand continued under John’s ownership until the 1830s, at which time he leased the inn to John Finch and moved south to Yonge and Eglinton, where he would build the most notorious tavern in Canadian history.

Montgomery’s Tavern was a two-storey frame structure on the west side of Yonge Street, just up the hill from Eglinton Avenue on one of the highest points of land in the entire area. The tavern wouldn’t last long, for in 1837 the most famous battle of the Upper Canada Rebellion was fought here, and before the day was out Montgomery’s Tavern would be burned to the ground.

On December 3, 1837, several hundred rebel reformers gathered at Montgomery’s Tavern, most having travelled from many miles away in the cold and snow. They were mostly disenchanted farmers, fed up with the way their concerns were routinely ignored by the ruling Family Compact. Although December 7 had been chosen as the day to engage the government troops, this particular group had grown impatient. By December 5, they had run out of food and decided to march down Yonge Street themselves, without waiting for either their fellow rebels or the assigned day. On this night they were cold, tired, and armed mostly with simple farm implements. They marched down Yonge Street to Maitland Avenue, where they were met by Sheriff William Jarvis and a smaller, though much better armed government force that included twenty-seven sharpshooters.

The skirmish was brief. The rebels, severely outgunned, retreated. Both sides re-grouped, and two days later the government troops marched up Yonge Street with two cannons and numerous sharpshooters, engaging the rebels at Montgomery’s Tavern. Once again, the skirmish was brief, and after a cannon ball was shot through the tavern, the rebels retreated and the loyalist commander, Lieutenant-Governor Sir Francis Bond Head, ordered the tavern burned to the ground. The tavern, intriguingly, had been rented to a John Linfoot just the week before.

When his tavern was burned to the ground, John Montgomery’s family was relatively safe in Newtonbrook, about seven miles away. Nonetheless, John was arrested for his part in the uprising, as were many others. But the Rebellion worked in strange ways. Although a total failure as an actual rebellion, it would quickly lead to the government reforms that the farmers had been seeking all along. Lieutenant-Governor Sir Francis Bond Head, the de facto head of the Family Compact, was recalled to England and never held public office again. Four years after the Rebellion, the government’s Durham Report would initiate many of the reforms that the farmers had fought for, and would also lay the groundwork for our current system of provincial government.

Although two of the rebels were executed for their role in the Rebellion, John Montgomery and many others were eventually pardoned by the Crown. The news reached John in the United States, where he had fled after being sentenced to banishment in Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania). John, like Thomas and Michael Shepard, had escaped from prison in Kingston while awaiting banishment, and made his way across the lake to the United States. After he was pardoned, he returned to Yonge and Eglinton, where he built a new hotel just south of the old one. He would go on to open two more hotels in downtown Toronto, while turning the Yonge and Eglinton property over to his son, William. Today’s extension of Broadway Avenue west of Yonge Street is called Montgomery Avenue.

This moment, captured on a summer evening in the mid-1950s, by photographer Ted Chirnside, will surely bring a smile to the many North York residents who passed through this iconic front door in search of adult beverages: ladies and escorts to the main room and dance floor on the right, men only to the beverage room behind the sombre brick wall on the left. Though long considered one of the rougher taverns in the area, it wasn’t such a bad place once they got to know you. The former Elliot family barn, shown to the left, disappeared nearly thirty years before last call at the Algonquin in 1986.

Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library, TC 68.

Meanwhile, back up in Newtonbrook, John Finch closed The Bird in Hand in 1847 and built a new hotel on the same farm, on the northeast corner of today’s Yonge and Finch. Finch’s Hotel operated until 1873, when it was sold to Charles McBride. He dismantled it and used the timbers to build a new hotel, the Bedford Park Hotel, on his farm, which lay south of Fairlawn Avenue on the west side of Yonge Street.

Maps of Newtonbrook show John Finch and his descendants retaining ownership of the south half of the Newtonbrook farm into the 1900s. Their one-hundred-acre parcel stretched along the north side of Finch Avenue from Yonge Street to Bayview, and, yes, they were the Finches who gave their name to the concession that formed the southern boundary of their farm. The north half of the farm would again tumble through a series of owners after the Montgomerys left, with everyone from the Bank of Canada to the Cummer family being listed as owners of one parcel or another.

The situation solidified somewhat around 1861 with John and Mary Francis owning the north half of Lot 21-1E as well as the southern half of the neighbouring lot to the north, Lot 22-1E, which reached up to Cummer Avenue. The Francises also farmed the west half of Lot 20-2E on the southeast corner of Bayview and Finch, and the magnificent Lot 32-1E in Thornhill, where the former Francis farmhouse is now known as the Heinztman House, named after a subsequent owner.[1]

When John Francis died in 1910, his sons John and Edward sold the Yonge Street farmland to John Elliot. Maps of the day show the Finch family still farming the south half of Lot 21-1E, while John Elliot is in possession of the north half of this lot, as well as the adjoining Lot 22-1E to the north, which extended up to Cummer Avenue. The east half of both lots, however, had been severed by this point, perhaps owing to the valley created by Newtonbrook Creek. Robert Risebrough owned forty-six acres of Lot 22-1E on the southwest corner of Bayview and Cummer and a William Ford, whose descendants would farm here until the 1950s, owned an eighty-acre farm directly to the south that fronted on Bayview Avenue, where the Bayview Arena stands today. The Ford farm straddled Lots 21-1E and 22-1E.

John Elliot had emigrated from Ireland in 1860, and, in an almost exact reversal of John Montgomery’s life, spent twenty years running hotels in downtown Toronto before moving north to farm in Newtonbrook. In 1910, he sold his hotels and bought the Francis farm with the intention of raising Shorthorn cattle. He hired his neighbour William MacKenzie (not the rebel leader) to build the barn shown in the photograph that would stand on Yonge Street until it was dismantled in 1958.

The farm got off to a good start, but John Ellitt suffered a stroke in 1912 and died three years later. His sons, George, Matthew, and Edward took over. Though the brothers would continue to farm, they would also become increasingly adept at finding new ways to build on their inheritance. In 1928, they opened an airfield behind the barn on Yonge Street. They also moved another barn next door to the Yonge Street barn and converted it into a home where George and Matthew lived. In 1936, they turned this structure into the Algonquin Tavern, which they operated for sixteen years before selling it in 1952.

George Elliot was also active in local politics. He was elected deputy-reeve of North York from 1929–30 and as reeve from 1931–33. He struggled through the early years of the Depression, trying to help the needy, though his hands were largely tied by the extensive international scope of the circumstances.

George had previously served in the First World War. Several years after his return he bought two of the downtown hotels that had once belonged to his father and continued to operate them until the 1940s. He was also a well-known horse breeder and rider who won many trophies in addition to judging horse shows in Canada and the United States between 1922 and 1962, the year he established a two-hundred-acre farm in Markham.

In 1929, the brothers opened the Willowdale Golf Course, which extended east from Yonge Street to the Newtonbrook Creek ravine. An old farmhouse was turned into a luxurious clubhouse with the addition of two new wings. The clubhouse featured separate mens’ and ladies’ lounges, as well as a grand dining room and elaborate landscaping. Still, the brothers weren’t satisfied, so they hired Stanley Thompson, Canada’s pre-eminent golf-course architect, to turn their course into something special. When it opened in 1931 as the rechristened Willowdale Golf Club, the 165-acre layout was recognized as the first course in the province to conform to the regulations of the newly-formed Ontario Golf Association. George and Matthew would continue to operate the Willowdale Golf Club for the next twenty-five years. George died at his farm in Markham in 1971.

Meanwhile, the brothers continued to find new ways to improve the cash crop from their father’s farm. In 1932, they sold thirty-two acres to Ontario Hydro for the power lines, which can still be seen marching across the property today. In 1934, they sold twenty-five acres on the north side of the farm to the Sisters of St. John for a convalescent hospital that opened in 1937 and continues to serve the community as a state-of-the-art rehabilitation facility to this day.

The hospital can trace its roots all the way back to 1884 and the founding of the Anglican Sisterhood of St. John the Divine — the first all-Canadian order in the country. The very next year, the sisters opened a hospital in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, to tend to the victims of the bloody Riel Rebellion. After the rebellion was put down later that year, they returned to Toronto and opened a women’s hospital on Major Street, near College and Spadina. This hospital operated until the 1930s, when the sisters were convinced by Vincent Massey, soon to be Canada’s first native-born governor-general, and the highly regarded hospital consultant, Dr. Harvey Agnew, to open a convalescent hospital. They were assisted in their efforts by numerous fundraising events and a generous legacy.

The sisterhood vacated their downtown hospital, which would then operate as Doctors’ Hospital until the end of the century, and moved to the new St. John’s Convalescent Hospital on the twenty-five acres on Cummer Avenue that they had purchased from the Elliots for $18,000. There was still work to be done however, and more years and fundraisers would pass before the new hospital was fully furnished and equipped. It stands there to this day, still serving the community with a slightly updated name.

The Elliots were good neighbours and would often take their horses and sleighs over to the hospital to take the patients of St. John’s out for sleigh rides in the wintertime. The remaining Elliot land was leased to the Limberlost Riding Academy and later to the operators of the Simpson Auction Barn.

The Willowdale Golf Club was sold to developers in 1958 to become the Newtonbrook subdivision. The Algonquin Tavern would continue to quench thirsts until it too was demolished in 1986, taking with it the last trace of John Elliot’s farm. People can still walk the open portion of the hydro right-of-way, however, from Willowdale Avenue all the way over to Bayview, and, in so doing, gain a new appreciation for the farmers who once worked this beautiful land.