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Mazo de la Roche, Brébeuf, and the Zoroastrians

Research into the history of this farm revealed an amazing depth of layer upon layer of history. From Crown lands granted before the War of 1812 to Mayor Mel Lastman in the swingin’ seventies, the stories unravelled with such unpretentious ease that it was almost like watching a television program. This lot, Lot 25-1E, must have been breathtaking when it was granted to Richard Lawrence in 1808. It’s a long way from the southeast corner of Yonge and Steeles, east to Willowdale Avenue and all the way down the big hill to the valley of the East Don River at Bayview Avenue. Still an impressive sight today, this piece of land would have been even more impressive when Richard first gazed upon it in its original state.

Land records indicate just what a daunting task it was to clear and farm this land, as they tell us that seven years after being granted the property, Richard sold the east half to Alexander Gray, who had previously owned part of the Montgomery/Elliot farm four lots to the south. In 1819, Richard sold the west half of Lot 25-1E to a John D. Baldwin. The lot would never be reunited under one owner again, although a couple of families would demonstrate their loyalty to the place by farming their separate halves for generations.

James Robinson set the longest stretch of family involvement when he bought Alexander Gray’s farm in 1823. The Robinsons were still farming there over 130 years later. George Crookshank, whose story is told more completely in the chapter on Lot 24-1E, bought John Baldwin’s farm on the west half of the lot in 1837. Although records indicate that this farm was owned by Julia Lambert in 1860, after George Crookshank’s death (and sold to Stephen Heward in 1868 and farmed by Stephen’s son in 1892), maps from 1910 show the farm in possession of the “Cruikshank” Estate. (George Crookshank married Sarah Lambert in 1821. Their only daughter, Catherine, married into the Heward family).

Other records from Thornhill and North York confirm the name change from Crookshank to Cruikshank. The same 1910 maps show a P.W. Burton farming on the east half of Lot 25-1E on the Bayview-end of the property.

In the early 1930s, a portion of the Burton farm on the southwest corner of Bayview and Steeles was sold to a Mrs. Lands from Hamilton who, in 1933, built a house there, which she used as a summer retreat. Consider that for a minute — a woman from Hamilton coming to North York for her summer vacation! That says something about just how bucolic North York really was, not all that long ago. Mrs. Land’s country idyll didn’t last long, however, and, in 1939, she sold the property to Mazo de la Roche, one of the most successful authors in Canadian history, and also a woman of considerable mystery. Even her name was a fabrication.

Mazo Roche was born in Newmarket on January 15, 1879. Her father owned a general store in town, but, despite his best efforts, the store failed when little Mazo was only six. The family then moved to Toronto where Mr. Roche never seemed to find any employment that lasted for more than a year or two. In 1910, the family moved to Bronte, near Oakville, where Mazo, now a spinster past her thirtieth birthday, would find the inspiration she needed to forge a new life for herself. She had already realized some moderate success as a writer of short stories and now, inspired by a nearby house called Benares, she began to formulate her image of a fictitious family she called the Whiteoaks of Jalna.

When Mazo Roche began to seriously consider a career as a writer, she changed her name to Mazo de la Roche. She now claimed to be descended from French aristocracy, with a mysterious drop of Irish blood. By 1927, she had written several reasonably successful novels and moved to a flat at 86 Yorkville Avenue in Toronto, which she shared with her cousin Caroline Clement.

Caroline had been taken in by Mazo’s family when she was just a child and almost immediately became Mazo’s lifelong companion. After the couple moved to Toronto, Caroline took a government job to provide them with some financial stability and also accepted additional duties as Mazo’s accountant, typist, manager, and editor. That same year, all hell broke loose as the literary world beat a path to the door of that second-floor flat in Yorkville when Atlantic Monthly announced that they had awarded Mazo de la Roche their annual prize for novel of the year. The prize was $10,000 — in 1927 dollars.—when such a sum would have been enough to buy three detached, brick houses in central Toronto. The novel was Jalna.

Mazo was now forty-eight years old. Hers had not been an overnight success, but suddenly she was an international phenomenon. Reporters from all over North America journeyed to Toronto in hopes of being granted an interview. The City of Toronto honoured her with a banquet. All in all, it was too much for such a reclusive person. Shortly after the initial hoopla died down, Caroline quit her job and the two women left for an extended European vacation — so extended in fact that they did not return to Canada for several years.

After travelling through continental Europe, the couple settled near London, in the vicinity of Windsor Castle, in a Tudor mansion called Vale House. Once they were settled in, Mazo set to work adapting her novel for the London stage. Renamed “Whiteoaks,” the production ran for a record-breaking three years before touring Canada and the United States with Ethel Barrymore in one of the starring roles. In 1931, the novel was turned into a feature film that still pops up on evening television.

While in England, Mazo and Caroline decided that they would like to adopt two children, but their request was met with formidable resistance because, in the parlance of the times, two spinsters just didn’t go about adopting children. It was only through the intervention of Mazo’s publisher (and future British prime minister) Harold Macmillan that the women were able to realize their dreams by adopting a daughter named Esmée and a son, René. The two women adored the English country lifestyle, but the war clouds that loomed in 1939 forced them to head for home.

Upon their return to Canada, they set out to duplicate the country life they had enjoyed so much in England. They chose North York as the place to do so when they purchased Mrs. Land’s summer house at Bayview and Steeles. The house as constructed in 1933 was a little too square and stodgy for the couple’s taste, so they added new wings to the east and west sides of the house, embellished with impressive Tudor details. The west wing housed garages and servants’ quarters while the east wing was dominated by a spectacular English-style library with an eighteen-foot ceiling and a soaring, floor-to-ceiling bay window. The library’s interior was panelled in hand-carved dark oak and featured two fireplaces with carved mantelpieces, one on the east wall and one on the north wall, where Mazo did much of her writing. A hidden door next to this fireplace led to the master bedroom on the second floor. A balcony off the master bedroom looked down into the library below. Mazo named the new estate “Windrush Hill.”

Surely one of the most beautiful homes ever constructed in the current city of Toronto and still standing on its original height of land at Bayview and Steeles, “Windrush Hill” is pictured here in this 1961 photo by Lorna Gardner.

Courtesy of North York Historical Society, NYHS 1417.

Life at Windrush Hill was all that Caroline and Mazo had hoped it would be. The children swam in the East Don in summertime and skated on it in the winter. The family added some dogs to the mix and the forested grounds became the scene of many childhood adventures. They welcomed other artists into their home including Angus Macdonald, who lived in the former Benjamin Fish gristmill on the northeast corner of Bayview and Steeles, where the gas station stands today, and whose stained glass would grace such edifices as the original Sunnybrook Hospital. The family maintained the country lifestyle by doing their shopping in Thornhill rather than Toronto. In the summer they enjoyed riding their bikes on the generally empty two-lane dirt roads that were Bayview and Steeles back then. Mazo continued her prolific series of Jalna novels, but country life was not without its drawbacks.

The isolation meant that winters could be cold and lonely, never more so than when the family was snowed in. During those times, there was often no way to reach the outside world other than to strap on snowshoes and walk to Yonge Street to catch a radial car. Remember that there were few snowploughs and no buses serving the area around Bayview and Steeles until the 1950s. In addition, the huge house was extremely difficult to heat, and the outdoor oil tank and over-worked furnace failed numerous times. Mazo de la Roche was also beginning to be plagued by the health problems that would follow her for the rest of life, most notably a chronic kidney infection and arthritis. There were also problems getting domestic staff to agree to such isolation, and, when the children grew to school age, their transportation provided some unique problems as well. Esmée attended Havergal College at Lawrence and Avenue Road while René was enrolled at Upper Canada College, even further south. Most of the family’s war-time gas ration was used up transporting the children to and from school. Gas rationing also made local delivery companies reluctant to travel so far out of town. The first problem was solved when Esmée and René took up residence at their respective schools, but this soon presented a new problem.

As the children grew older they began to resent the isolation of Windrush Hill and crave the excitement of the city that their school friends enjoyed as a matter of course. By 1945 all of these various problems made it clear to Mazo that she would have to abandon her dream of a country estate and move into the city. It could have been worse. The family’s financial stability meant that they had their pick of virtually any house in Toronto. They first moved to a house on Russell Hill Road before finally settling into another Tudor-style house that still stands at 3 Ava Crescent in Forest Hill — the same crescent where Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris lived until he left Ontario in 1934. (His awe-inspiring art deco mansion still stands at 2 Ava Crescent.) Caroline and Mazo’s days at Windrush Hill had been eerily book-ended by the Second World War.

Mazo de la Roche’s last days were dominated by her health problems, although she never let her fans see her suffer. She died in 1961 after spending the last months of her life in a wheelchair. She died working on the seventeenth Jalna novel. In her lifetime she sold an astonishing ten million books. She was once the most widely read author in all of France and was so revered in Norway that people named their children and pets after characters in her novels. Her books were bestsellers in the United States and have never gone out of print in Great Britain, where even members of the Royal Family have proven to be devoted fans. Queen Mary once requested a signed copy of The Master of Jalna; a request that Mazo was only too happy to honour with a one-off, hand-tooled leather volume that she designed and paid for herself. Years later, King George VI declined the offer of a Jalna novel, saying that both he and the Queen had already read it. Their daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, was also a fan of these remarkable books that piqued her early interest in the dominion she would one day rule. Mazo often said that the only country in the world that never appreciated her was Canada — to which thousands of other Canadian artists would add a resounding “Amen.” Interestingly, her books are currently being kept in print in Canada and have become very popular as e-books.[1] The spirit of Mazo de la Roche is now very much alive for a whole new generation of readers.

Shortly before she died, Mazo de la Roche wrote an account of her life that curiously ended with her arrival at Windrush Hill. Perhaps this was her way of refusing to accept the fact that she had been unable to import and maintain the English country lifestyle she had tried so hard to reconstruct in her native country. One of her biographers, Ronald Hambleton, who was often thwarted by her family in his effort to tell her story, once said that “her chief significance is as ‘the last mourner for the dying English influence in Canada.’”[2]

Mazo de la Roche was laid to rest in 1961 in the breathtakingly beautiful cemetery of St. George’s Anglican Church on Hedge Road, just east of Jackson’s Point, high on a cliff overlooking the blue waters of Lake Simcoe. A stained glass window in the church, depicting St. Francis of Assisi and the animals that Mazo loved so much is dedicated to her memory. One of her neighbours there is Stephen Leacock, the only Canadian author of the time who had more readers than she did. Her papers and diaries were burned, as per her request. Caroline Clement lived in the house on Ava Crescent until she died in 1972 and was laid to rest beside Mazo. By this time, Windrush Hill was surrounded by subdivisions. It was still as beautiful as ever though, on its wooded hilltop, and still a private home. The family that bought the property from Mazo and Caroline added a sunroom, pool, and landscaped gardens.

Meanwhile, back on the portion of Lot 25-1E on Yonge Street, the farmland had been subdivided and developed shortly after the end of the Second World War. Like almost every lot in this area, it was subdivided sequentially as development flowed east and west from Yonge Street, since this was the only street that had public transit running into the city. By 1947, aerial photos show the northwest corner of Lot 25-1E covered in detached houses from Yonge Street to Willowdale Avenue and south to Newton Drive. Development would continue in an easterly direction throughout the 1950s and ’60s.

In 1963, Brébeuf College School was constructed, just west of Conacher Drive, under the direction of Jesuit priests, to provide a high-school education for Catholic boys in the community. The school was named after Roman Catholic missionary Father Jean de Brébeuf, who had settled in Huronia, near Penetanguishene, on the shores of Georgian Bay in 1634. He is remembered today as the composer of the popular “Huron Carol,” and as a martyr. The tragic story of his being captured and tortured to death by the Iroquois during their attack on the Hurons in 1649 is too brutal to be conveyed here. The St. Agnes Catholic Elementary School opened just to the south of Brébeuf College, and the Lillian Street Public School was built four streets to the west. Since no one opens schools without potential pupils, the transformation of the surrounding farmland to detached housing was occurring simultaneously.

If ever a photo could show just how much things can change in one person’s lifetime, this one, taken in 1956 from the former Mazo de la Roche property, could well be it. The East Don River is shown passing beneath the concrete bow-string bridge that carried the two dirt lanes of Bayview Avenue to the jog at Steeles Avenue East, where the white car is heading west. The Benjamin Fish gristmill, in the centre, was constructed in 1832 and demolished in 1965. It was partnered with the miller’s house to the right, where farmers, who travelled long distances to have their grain ground, would often spend the night.

Photo by Ted Chirnside, Toronto Public Library, TC 54-C.

By the mid-1970s, Windrush Hill had fallen into unsympathetic hands. JFM Developments Limited had purchased the house and its surrounding nine-plus acres for $1,600,000, and submitted a plan to the North York Planning Board that called for the demolition of the house to make way for a new subdivision. The planning board approved the plan but North York Council granted a six-week reprieve to see if the house could be saved while the acreage around it was developed. Local resident Marilyn Herz tried to raise money to buy the house and convert it to a museum but did not have enough time to reach her goal.

After North York Alderman Mike Smith persuaded council to talk to the developers about saving the house, Mayor Mel Lastman, who initially had washed his hands of the problem, despite a flood of letters to save the house, somehow managed to broker a deal that saw millionaire Don Mills developer Harry Winton purchasing the house and an additional 1.3 acres of land from JFM for $320,000. This was in late May of 1976. There were smiles all around as Harry declared his intention of turning the two-acre property into a mini-Edwards Gardens, with the library converted to a Mazo de la Roche museum, while the Winton family lived in the rest of the house. The mayor claimed that the house would become a showpiece for North York.

Harry Winton soon got down to the business of renovating his new home while New Style Construction, JFM’s partners in the eight-acre subdivision, prepared to build their subdivision. By June of 1977, Harry’s renovations were complete, while the subdivision was still under construction. Up until now things had proceeded in a civilized fashion, but, by mid-June, Harry and New Style were at each others’ throats. Harry, himself a developer, had allowed New Style an access road through his property to facilitate the construction of the subdivision, but when New Style cut down a row of forty-foot-tall pine trees near the border of the two properties, Harry closed the access road. The row of trees, known as the Whispering Pines, had afforded Windrush Hill a degree of isolation from the new subdivision and after they were cut down, Harry was so infuriated that he put the house up for sale.

Windrush Hill was advertised for sale in the Globe and Mail on August 12, 1977 for $600,000 as a war of words erupted between Harry and the Borough of North York that would last for over six months. Harry claimed he was turned down by the borough when he tried to re-zone the house as a museum — bizarrely, as an Estonian Art Centre Museum, not a Mazo de la Roche museum. Mel Lastman said Harry never applied for re-zoning. Harry then said he never applied because the process would have taken a year. Harry blamed a lack of borough cooperation when he put the house up for sale. Alderman Mike Smith countered that Harry had been much more difficult to deal with than the borough and suggested that Harry was crying crocodile tears since he stood to realize a $100,000 profit from the sale of the house. A group of nuns from Boston expressed interest in the house as a retreat, but the borough turned them down.

In October of 1977, Harry Winton, unable to find a buyer, applied for a demolition permit, which was granted. The same week, the permit was cancelled by building commissioner Sam Beckett and borough solicitor Charles Onley, who pointed out that Harry had signed an agreement not to demolish the house for at least twenty years. It seems that then, as now, the left and right hands of government are frequently unaware of what the other hand is up to. Harry said he’d sue, but apparently he never did.

The following February, Harry accepted an offer from the Zoroastrian Society of Ontario to purchase the property. Sam Beckett signed a letter on February 17 to confirm that a place of worship was an acceptable use of the property under the then-current bylaws. That same day, Harry accepted the offer to purchase. On February 27, North York Council passed a new bylaw to restrict the property to single-family use after receiving over 250 letters expressing concerns about increased traffic and congestion.

The bylaw was enacted with unusual rapidity — one council meeting with no prior notice — in spite of the fact that Charles Onley stated that the borough had violated the Planning Act by not informing Harry and the Zoroastrian Society of the meeting and the proposed rezoning. The Zoroastrian Society went ahead with the purchase on the basis of Sam Beckett’s letter of approval and were not challenged by the borough.

Today, Windrush Hill is a Zoroastrian temple, and, since full Zoroastrian congregations only meet a few times a year, the blame for the current traffic woes that despoil the once-idyllic intersection of Bayview and Steeles must be laid at someone else’s feet.