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The Cummers

It is doubtful that any pioneer family had a greater impact on North York than the Cummers. The Kummer family, as they were known in their native Germany (some sources also list their names as Koomer), began the remarkable journey that would eventually lead them to Willowdale when they sailed to North America in the mid-1700s to escape religious persecution in their home country. The Kummers were Lutherans, a denomination that had long been at odds with the Catholic Church and many of the Crown heads of Europe.

They left their home in the Palatine region of southwestern Germany, where Martin Luther had started the Reformation in 1517, to settle in Pennsylvania in 1736. The family was welcomed in those prerevolutionary days when Britain still governed their colonies south of the border. It was only natural then that the family felt a certain loyalty to Great Britain, and, although they remained in the United States for some time after the Revolutionary War of 1776, they eventually felt the pull of the British Crown and decided to move north of the border.

Jacob Kummer was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1767, three years before Beethoven. He became one of the first settlers in North York when he emigrated with his wife Elizabeth, the first three of their thirteen children, Mary, Elizabeth, and Daniel, his father Daniel, and Elizabeth’s father Jacob Fisher in 1795. Upon arriving in Upper Canada, they built a little log cabin near present-day Yonge and Eglinton, where Jacob left the rest of the family for the winter while he continued north into the wilderness to seek a more permanent home. Their son John was born in the cabin in 1797.

That same year the Kummers received their first Crown land grant for the one-hundred-and-ninety-acre Lot 18-1E halfway between Sheppard and Finch, running from Yonge Street east to Bayview. Not all lots in North York were exactly two hundred acres, owing to surveying mistakes. Jacob had carefully selected this particular lot for its combination of hard and softwood trees, as well as its excellent soil and gently rolling terrain. The family performed their settlers’ duties to the Crown’s satisfaction, including the building of another log cabin on Yonge Street, and were granted the deed to their property before the nineteenth century, one of only a handful of families who were able to make that claim.

To give some idea of just how isolated the Kummers were, it should be mentioned that there were only three neighbours in a four-mile radius around their farm. In 1797, there were only 241 people in the town of York, as well as 175 soldiers and family members at Fort York, and 196 settlers in the surrounding countryside for a grand total of 612 people in the present-day city of Toronto. They all could have fit into three subway cars. Outside, in the Toronto of 1797, bears, wolves, and foxes were a constant threat to crops and livestock.

One day when Elizabeth Kummer was home alone tending to her chores and her newborn son, John, she was startled by a Native man staring at her through the door of the cabin. He appeared to be interested in a kitchen knife that was sitting on the table. She gave him the knife, hoping he would go away and leave her in peace. He accepted the knife and went on his way. Relieved, Elizabeth went back to her chores and put the matter out of her mind. Some days later, however, the man appeared again, bearing a cradle that he had made for the baby to thank Elizabeth for the knife. He had come all the way from his home on Lake Simcoe. Perhaps he had also been taken by the very appearance of this baby, who was thought to be the first white child born in the wilderness north of Toronto. This would be the first of many happy interactions between the family and the First Nations people who still lived in the area.

More children would come in fairly rapid succession: Katherine in 1798, Jacob II in 1800, David in 1803, and Joseph in 1804. As the family grew, so too did their holdings. Even their family name would change, but more on that later.

In 1804, Jacob bought the southern ninety-five acres of the adjoining farm to the north, on Lot 19-1E, from fellow settler Lawrence Johnson. In 1817, he expanded the family’s reach in a northeasterly direction when he bought fifty acres in the centre of Lot 22-2E, a two-hundred-acre parcel bordered on the north by today’s Cummer Avenue, stretching from Bayview to Leslie Street. Two years later he would add the western hundred acres of Lot 21-2E directly to the south, and in 1821 he would add the one-hundred-and-ninety-acre Lot 23-1E, north of Cummer Avenue, running from Yonge Street east to Bayview Avenue.

Jacob Kummer now had an unbroken one-hundred-and-fifty-acre parcel between Bayview and Leslie, as well as a two-hundred-and-eighty-five-acre farm between Yonge Street and Bayview, and a one-hundred-and-ninety-acre farm further north, also stretching from Yonge to Bayview. By now the family was complete, with daughters Sarah and Nancy and sons Joshua and Samuel joining their elder siblings between 1804 and 1815. Some years after Samuel’s birth in 1815, the family would change their name to “Cummer.” Sadly, two other children would not live to see adulthood — Joseph living only from 1804 to 1813 and Peter dying the same year as Joseph at the age of one.

The family’s holdings now stood at a most impressive six-hundred-and-twenty-five acres, only twenty-four years removed from that first cabin at Yonge and Eglinton. The Yonge Street and Don Valley properties would serve different yet complementary purposes. Yonge Street was Upper Canada’s main street at the time, offering unequalled contact with other settlers and relatively quick transportation of farm products to market. The Don River, on the other hand, offered the valuable advantage of water power.

While it’s true that the headwaters of Wilket Creek rose on the Kummers’ Yonge Street property, the flow was insufficient to power any significant sort of mill and in pioneer Upper Canada, a mill could shift a man from being a “mere” farmer to the more exalted realm of merchant, for now he would be able to process his own goods for sale, as well as his neighbours’ goods for profit. The East Don River ran right through the middle of the Kummers’ more easterly holdings and had more than enough water flow to power any sort of mill. It was here on the banks of the Don River that the Kummers made their stand and left one of the only traces of their built history that survives to the present day. In 1819, the family opened a sawmill on the East Don River, where Cummer Avenue crosses the river today, west of Leslie Street. The sawmill was operated by Jacob’s son John, but the mill site would soon have value far beyond its commercial activities.

Jacob Kummer was a devout Lutheran. It has been said that his courage was rooted in his faith. Sadly for him, Lutherans were uncommon in early Upper Canada. There was a strong Methodist presence, however, and this is where Jacob elected to shift his loyalties, joining a number of his children who had already become Episcopal Methodists. The Kummer property on the Don River soon became known far and wide for the church services and camp meetings that were held there. Such was the influence of these activities that First Nations tribes from as far away as Lake Simcoe were regular participants. At the time, early settlers and Natives got along well, to the point of inter-marrying without any apparent stigma on either side.

The product of one such union was the Reverend Peter Jones, a Wesleyan missionary who was also part Native. He was the second son of the deputy provincial surveyor, Augustus Jones, who had helped Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe in the construction of Yonge Street in the 1790s, and Tuhbenahneequay, daughter of Mississauga Chief Wahbanosay of Burlington Bay, where the city of Hamilton stands today. Reverend Jones presided at one particular camp meeting on the Cummer property in the summer of 1826 where he noted that “a number of both whites and Indians professed to experience a change of heart, at the close, several Indians received the solemn ordinance of baptism.”[1]

It was not uncommon for several hundred First Nations people from the areas around Lake Simcoe and Lake Scugog to attend the meetings. At such times, the campground was ringed with board tents, including one massive tent that measured 240 feet by 15 feet and was built to simulate a Native longhouse, so that the visitors could arrange themselves in family groups within the tent and feel more comfortable while away from home. Other smaller tents were provided for other visitors. The tents featured board roofs, not surprising at a sawmill site, and sides made of boards and brush. Meetings typically lasted several days and continued well into the mid-1800s, by which time they featured upwards of thirty tents and up to half-a-dozen ministers. So popular and well-known were the meetings that the area came to be known as “Scripture Town” and later as “Angel Valley.”

The area where the campground once stood is still visible in a relatively un-altered state where Cummer Avenue crosses the East Don River, halfway between Bayview and Leslie. Cummer Avenue was originally the wagon trail that the family laid out to connect their Yonge Street farms to the mill property in the Don Valley. The Don River itself is sadly diminished from pioneer days. An article on the Cummers in The Willowdale Enterprise of June 18, 1953, describes the river at that time as “an insignificant stream.” Look to the current size of the valley to get a rough idea of how large and powerful the river must have been when it was young.

As the Kummer children grew up, they also began to acquire land in the area. John Kummer, who had been the lucky recipient of the hand-made cradle, was the most acquisitive. In 1819, the same year he began to run his father’s sawmill, John bought the two-hundred-and-ten acre Lot 21-1W, the first farm north of Finch, between Yonge Street and Bathurst Street. In 1831 he bought the northern one-hundred-and-five acres of Lot 18-1W, adjoining David Gibson’s farm on the south half of the same lot. Between 1835 and 1840, John bought the two-hundred-acre Lot 24-2E and the western one hundred acres of Lot 23-2E, directly north of the campgrounds on the East Don River, bringing the family’s holdings in the Don Valley to four-hundred-and-fifty acres and their Yonge Street properties to seven-hundred-and-ninety acres. John’s brother, Jacob II, would expand the family’s holdings to over 1,300 acres when he bought the northern eighty acres of Lot 21-2E near the northeast corner of Yonge and Finch in 1854. The family’s activities on their Yonge Street farms would prove every bit as influential as what they accomplished at the mill site and campground.

Jacob Kummer was a well-informed man who was accomplished in a dizzying array of disciplines. He was a blacksmith, a carpenter, a stonemason, tool-maker, shingle-maker, wagon- maker, inventor, and insurance agent. Not only did he make his own tools, he opened a shop where he made the tools available to his neighbours. The shop on Yonge Street became such a focal point of local activity that Willowdale was originally known as Kummer’s Settlement, and Jacob was thought of as a politician without an office.[2] He became known as the area’s unofficial peacemaker. The other early farmers were grateful to have such a skilled individual from whom to obtain their ploughs, scythes, cradles, sleighs, and wagons. One implement in particular, the Kummer Plough, was so popular that Jacob patented it and struggled to manufacture enough to keep up with the demand. Jacob employed peddlers to carry the store’s wares to those who were unable to come to the store and he would often work for his neighbours without compensation. He also served as the local veterinarian and in a pinch would treat human patients as well, this at a time when bleeding was still an accepted treatment for a number of ailments.

The Kummers’ farms were as perfect as any farm could be — clean, organized, and strict. Barns, stables, yards, and houses were exceedingly well kept. Jacob’s grain bags were made at home from flax and stamped with the initials “JK,” as was the wood from his sawmill. Jacob had a good constitution and a strong faith. He was temperate and never idle. No portrait of Jacob exists, as he lived in a time before photography and was probably too busy or just not interested in sitting still for a portrait.

At home, Elizabeth and Jacob spoke German to each other as well as English. The children spoke mostly English and eventually the use of the German language faded away. The when and why of the family’s name change is unclear. It seems likely it had a practical purpose since the family was already so well-respected in the community that they wouldn’t have had to Anglicize their name just to fit in. One family remembrance suggests that it was much easier to stamp “JC” than “JK” on the grain bags and wooden boards from the sawmill, and this is why Jacob made the change. Jacob’s daughter-in-law, Angelina, said the name was changed when her husband Joshua was a boy. As Joshua and Angelina were married in 1835, and Joshua was born in 1810, the family became the Cummers, sometime around 1820.

The Cummers’ religious involvement extended to Yonge Street as well. In 1834, Jacob donated half an acre on Yonge Street for the construction of a new church on what would one day be the north-east corner of Yonge Street and Church Avenue. Lawrence Johnson, one of the few people to settle in North York before Jacob Cummer, donated an adjoining parcel for a cemetery. Jacob, not content with merely donating the land, built the new log Episcopal Methodist meeting house virtually by himself. In 1856, some years after Jacob’s death, when the congregation had outgrown the meeting house, the Cummer and Johnson families got together again to build a new brick church.

Jacob’s son Samuel built the impressive spire, which became a landmark visible for miles around. It stood for three-quarters of a century before being toppled by a violent wind storm in the mid-1920s. The church itself suffered the indignity of having its “face” cut off to allow for the widening of Yonge Street in 1931. A number of graves were expropriated at this time as well, with some of the interred being personally reburied elsewhere by disgruntled family members.

John Cummer’s house, on the northwest corner of Yonge and Finch, had more than enough to recommend it for preservation when it was dismantled in 1959 — four years after this photo was taken. Built in 1819, with a verandah across the front, it was the scene of John’s capture by government troops on the night of December 8, 1837, after they mistakenly identified him as a participant in the Upper Canada Rebellion. While the house then gave shelter to Eliza Gibson and her children as her husband David fled for his life from the pursuing troops, it would find no shelter of its own from the grasping tentacles of a relentlessly growing city.

Photo by Ted Chirnside, Toronto Public Library, TC 38.

Another new church was built on Kenneth Avenue in 1954. The old church was demolished on the autumn equinox in 1956. A scattering of forgotten pioneer headstones were shuffled around like a cheap deck of cards and left, cracked and deteriorating on the ground when Yonge Street was further altered and expanded in the late 1970s, where they remain to this day, near an emergency exit for the subway, behind a grocery store. Jacob Cummer’s headstone fared a little better, being incorporated into a newer monument in the middle of this sad little cemetery.

Also lying on the ground is a stone that reads, “United Church of Canada 1932,” nearly one hundred years after Jacob built the log meeting house with his own two hands. The little log meeting house also played a part in the Upper Canada Rebellion. It seems that the Cummers, like the Harrisons of York Mills, made the decision to turn their backs on their Loyalist roots when they began to feel that Upper Canada’s ruling Family Compact was ignoring the farmers’ legitimate concerns.

The Family Compact, a clique of privileged and inter-

related families, rose to power by championing popular government, but once in office, their goal changed to simply maintaining their authority. Once they had gained control by making popular decisions, they became arrogant and began to make many unpopular decisions. Included among these was their decision to reserve 2,500,000 acres of Crown land for the exclusive use of the Anglican Church. Other denominations felt excluded and offended. The disgruntled farmers decided that the best way to deal with this problem was head-on, so they formed the Reform Party, which had slowly but surely taken control of Upper Canada’s Legislative Assembly or lower house by 1834. Still, the Family Compact, who controlled the upper house, refused to make legislative changes.

John Cummer, the first member of his family to be born in Upper Canada, was elected to the Legislative Assembly as a Reformer in 1834, as was his neighbour David Gibson. John, like party leader and close friend William Lyon Mackenzie, wanted to give a voice to the farmers who were fed up with corrupt politicians, land speculators, and administrative extravagance, but even though the Reformers now controlled the lower house, the Family Compact was not really interested in listening to their concerns.

A number of the Cummer brothers and their fellow Reformers gathered to pray at the little meeting house on December 4, 1837, the day the Rebellion began, to seek divine guidance. The Cummers, who were not prone to violent or treasonable acts, decided not to join the Rebellion, despite John Cummer being offered the outright command of the rebel forces by rebel leader William Lyon Mackenzie. As was seen in the story of the Montgomery/Elliot farm, the Rebellion itself was a failure in name only, for although the rag-tag group of farmers with their pitchforks and clubs were easily dispatched by the well-armed government troops, their concerns would be addressed and the rebels were eventually pardoned and allowed to return to their farms. Shortly afterwards, the government did change to address the farmers’ concerns, and create a template for today’s government.

Among those arrested in the days immediately following the Rebellion were John Cummer and his younger brother Samuel. John was arrested on December 8 at his home at Yonge and Finch. Although he had not participated in the Rebellion, government troops had observed him looking at the remains of his friend David Gibson’s house, which had been burned by the troops the previous night. This was reason enough for them to ride their horses up onto John’s verandah and take him into custody in front of his terrified wife and children.

This view of Jacob Cummer III’s house is no longer obtainable, as two houses have been built in front of it since this shot was taken by Lorna Gardner in 1967. This is a significant photograph that allows us to easily visualize the way the house looked before the two wings were added in 1930.

Courtesy of North York Historical Society, NYHS 1327.

John Cummer was roped to other captured Reformers, marched down Yonge Street in front of a jeering mob, and incarcerated in the Toronto jail on the north side of King Street, across from today’s King Edward Hotel. Luckily for John, he had Family Compact friends in the Legislative Assembly, such as his brother-in-law Peter Lawrence, who was married to his older sister Elizabeth, and business associates such as Sir Allan Napier MacNab, a prominent Markham distiller and dedicated customer of John’s sawmill, who made sure that he only spent one night in jail. In fact, Sir Allan owed John quite a bit of money at this time, so maybe he had mixed motives. John’s younger brother Samuel was also jailed, and, in fact, forcibly drafted into the government army before being cut loose the next morning when it occurred to someone in charge that he was too young to serve. Jacob’s son Joshua hid William Lyon Mackenzie’s printing press in an abandoned well on his farm so that the Reform Party could continue printing their newspaper, The Colonial Advocate. John Cummer and his family offered refuge to David Gibson’s wife, Eliza, and the four Gibson children after their house was destroyed.

Jacob Cummer died suddenly on December 5, 1841, at seventy-four years of age. And, yes, he had outlived Beethoven. For many years after his death, the community that came to be known as Willowdale continued to be referred to as Cummer’s Settlement. Jacob had led an incredible life and done his best to ensure that his children would be able to do the same. It had been his custom to give land to his sons as wedding gifts, just as many other settlers did. Jacob had executed his own will in 1834 and it showed that he played no favourites. All of his children were remembered: John inherited the sawmill that he had been running for twenty-two years, Joshua was given the deed to the north half of the original family farms on Yonge Street, and Samuel inherited the southern half. Jacob was buried in the cemetery on Yonge Street, next to the church that he built with his own two hands. In his will he specified that the church remain available to all denominations “forever.” Although nothing lasts forever, this little meeting house and the brick church that replaced it would become the spiritual birthplace of the United Church of Canada, which brought the Methodists, Congregationalists, and some groups of Presbyterians together under one roof when incorporated in 1925. Maybe Jacob got his wish after all.

Elizabeth survived her husband by a little over twelve years, living with her son Joshua and his wife Angelina Irwin. One of her grandchildren offered this memory of Elizabeth, as quoted by Gladys Allison in the the Willowdale Enterprise of June 18, 1953: “She attended to the moral and other affairs of the daily routine and used what was handiest in the due repression of any evil doing or intent on the part of the large family which looked to her as captain and helmsman.” She was kindly yet masterful and when she died on her seventy-ninth birthday on March 31, 1854, she handed the reins to the next generation of Cummers — the first generation to be born in North America, and a generation that must have been a source of great pride for Jacob and Elizabeth.

As in most families, some of the children would go on to have more of an impact on their community than others, and, with ten of them surviving their parents and marrying members of other prominent pioneer families, there is more to tell than is possible here.

Of all the members of the second generation, it was John, the first Cummer born in Upper Canada, who was the most dedicated farmer. His holdings would ultimately exceed six hundred acres at their peak, including a three-hundred-acre farm just north of the camp-meeting grounds on the Don River, a two-hundred-and-ten-acre farm that ran from Yonge Street to Bathurst Street on the north side of Finch Avenue, and a 105-acre farm that ran from Yonge to Bathurst, just north of the David Gibson farm, between Sheppard and Finch. An inventory of this latter farm from the 1830s showed the following commodities being produced: wheat, peas, oats, potatoes, hay, maple sugar, cider, apples, wool, cheese, milk, butter, pork, and beef. This was truly a well-balanced farm that would have been able to withstand market-value fluctuations by being so diverse. When the lumber from John’s sawmill on the Don River was added to this mix, there was an almost perfect combination of marketable products. Only a couple of things were missing and they would be seen to in good time.

The house that Samuel Cummer built facing Yonge Street, around 1840, is shown here, one hundred years after it was moved to 48 Parkview Avenue in 1913.

Photo by Scott Kennedy.

In 1851, ten years after his father’s death, John and his son, Jacob III, added a gristmill and a woollen mill to the family holdings in the Don Valley, near the meeting grounds. The gristmill was located near the sawmill and meeting grounds, while the woollen mill was further south along the river. They named their cluster of mills “Reading Mills” after the family’s former home in Pennsylvania. At the same time they were building the new mills, Jacob III was building one of the only two Cummer homes to survive to the present day.

Currently located at 44 Beardmore Crescent, in the valley just north of Cummer Avenue, the house originally consisted of only the centre section of the structure that exists today. The wings on either side were added in 1930 by Henry Nathanson, who owned the house at that time and used it as a summer residence to escape the heat and congestion of a still-distant Toronto.

As already noted, John’s brothers, Joshua and Samuel, each inherited one half of their father Jacob’s original farms on Lot 18-1E and Lot 19-1E. Joshua was a tinsmith. He sold his wares, as well as the shingles from his shingle mill, at the Cummer store on Yonge Street. In the 1830s he built a house there that stood at 20 McKee Avenue until the twenty-first century. The farm and house had been sold by Joshua to John Morgan for $15,000 in 1876, when Joshua moved to Aurora. John Morgan sold the property to John Arnold McKee in 1910. The property remained part of the McKee’s Hildon Farm until John Arnold’s son, John William, sold the land for development in 1923. Throughout, the house survived. But concerted conservation efforts at the dawn of the twenty-first century failed to save the house, which was still in fine shape when it was mindlessly demolished in June of 2002 for condos.

In 1856, Samuel Cummer helped to build the new brick church on Yonge Street that replaced the original log meeting house his father had built in 1834. The new place of worship stood on Yonge for one hundred years until it too was consigned to the scrap heap in 1956. Samuel also served as Willowdale postmaster from 1880–82. The brick farmhouse that Samuel built around 1840 still stands at 48 Parkview Avenue, several doors east of its original location at 34 Parkview Avenue; an address that is now home to the Ontario Historical Society. Though altered considerably and now divided into two houses, Samuel’s is one of only two remaining Cummer houses in Willowdale.

Samuel’s brother Jacob II, the first Willowdale postmaster, had taken the store over from his father and ran the post office there from 1855 until 1880 when Samuel assumed the position. Jacob II was also a tinsmith and shingle-maker, and he and his wife, the former Agnes Endicott, were much admired in the community for taking in numerous orphaned boys and girls who were then educated and treated exactly like their own children until they were able to make their way in the world.

Brothers David and Daniel were active in the Temperance movement. Both men occupied the Cummer house that is pictured on the east side of Yonge Street, facing Patricia Avenue, although they lived there at different times. Their older sister Katherine also lived in the house for many years with her husband, Elihu Pease. The house was demolished in 1964, and, unlike current demolitions where everything goes into the dumpster, some comfort can be taken from the fact that this house was carefully dismantled in the old-fashioned way, allowing the building materials to be used again.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, a strange thing began to happen — the Cummers started leaving North York. Not all of them, but enough that their influence began to wane. Their farms were sold to new families and remained productive until the late 1950s.

Despite the almost delicate appearance of the frame construction in this demolition photo from April 1964, this house served the Cummers well, and stood its ground at 6059 Yonge Street for 145 years. It is shown, vacant and awaiting demolition, but still in one piece in the chapter (3) on Elihu Pease.

Photo by A.J. Tilton, North York Historical Society, NYHS 437.

John Cummer was the first to go. Even before he built the mills in the Don Valley with his son Jacob III, he had sent another son, Lockman Abram Cummer, to supervise the construction of a new house in Waterdown, Ontario. It seems that John had contracted cholera following the Upper Canada Rebellion, and, although he recovered, health concerns dictated the move to the less-populous Waterdown. The house there was completed by 1848 and still stands at 265 Mill Street South. Lockman liked the town so much that he stayed there after the house was finished and married Rachel Lottridge, the daughter of a local businessman.

Shortly after the Cummers completed their new Don Valley mills, John, Lockman, and their new partner, William Gill, built a flour mill in Waterdown. They also opened an iron foundry to produce millstones, boilers, and steam engines in the aptly named Smokey Hollow just outside of Waterdown. The partnership was short-lived however, as depressed grain markets caused them to close the mill in 1857. The foundry was also sold and the partnership was dissolved. John moved from Waterdown to the United States to “take advantage” of opportunities created by the American Civil War. He remained there until 1863 when he returned to Waterdown and partnered in a new venture with his son’s in-laws, the Lottridges.

John Cummer, the first white person to be born north of the town of York, died at his son Franklin’s house in Toronto on September 11, 1868. His wife Sarah died of paralysis in Waterdown on April 13, 1870. Their son, Jacob III, sold the woollen mill and moved to Cadillac, Michigan, in 1860. Their children, those who remained in North York, continued to operate the family businesses for several more years. John and Sarah’s son William took over his grandfather Jacob’s store on Yonge Street from his uncle, Jacob II, in 1867, leaving the milling to his brothers Albert and Edwin. In 1878, the mills were sold to James Cooper. One has to feel for Mr. Cooper, since 1878 was the year that virtually all mills on both branches of the Don River were wiped out by a massive flood that crested for three days, from September 10 to September 13.

John’s brother Joshua sold his portion of the original farm on Yonge Street in 1876 and moved to Aurora, where he died in 1879. Brother Daniel moved to Waterloo in 1847 and to Niagara Township in 1856. He died in 1882. Brother Samuel Cummer died in June 1883 on the Yonge Street farm where he had been born sixty-eight years earlier. He had been deeply involved in his community, especially with the Methodist Episcopal Church, and his passing was mourned by all. Sister Katherine, who had been married to Elihu Pease for many years, died in 1886 at the age of eighty-eight. She was the last of Jacob and Elizabeth Cummer’s children and her death brought an end to the second generation of the Cummer family in Canada. Three years later, the last of the Cummers’ land was sold when Samuel’s son, George W. Cummer, sold the southern half of his grandfather’s original land grant to a Harriet E. Flook.

In a little over fifty years, the Cummers took over 1,300 acres of wilderness, cleared enough of it to create half a dozen farms, built roads, churches, mills, and stores, filled the stores with products that they made themselves, formed meaningful bonds with the Native people, held political office, fought for the rights of their fellow farmers, and sowed the seeds for the United Church of Canada.

What remains of their legacy? Well, not quite everything they built has been torn down yet. There is still the Samuel Cummer house on Parkview Avenue, and that one last house on Beardmore Crescent, way down there in Angel Valley — not much, but much better than nothing.