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Samuel Kennedy’s Farm

It is always hard to decide whose name to attach to a certain farm when the land may have had dozens of owners over the years, all of whom could lay claim to being the farmer of record. To this point, the most famous names or the earliest names or the most poignant stories related to a particular lot have been chosen. Here, plain old selfishness prevailed and Samuel Kennedy’s name was selected. Although not related, the opportunity to see “S. Kennedy” written on the maps of the farms of North York was irresistible.

Samuel Kennedy farmed three separate lots at the corner of Finch and Leslie, but most of his story takes place on the farm that stood on the eastern eighty-two acres of Lot 21-2E. He purchased this lot on the northwest corner of Finch and Leslie from William Johnston in 1883. The farmhouse in the picture had been built by the Johnstons some time earlier, likely in the mid-1850s, when a string of perfect weather resulted in several years of exceptional harvests and many local farmers used the profits to build new brick houses to replace earlier log cabins or frame houses. This farmhouse does in fact bear a striking stylistic resemblance to the house at Spruce Grove Farm a couple of miles to the southeast, which was completed in 1855.

The lot itself had already been home to a number of prominent farmers by the time Samuel took over. The Cummers owned the west half of the lot from 1819 to 1843. Hunters, Harrisons, and Johnstons had all owned portions of the lot before 1883. Afterwards, several smaller lots were carved out of the centre of the lot for houses along Finch Avenue, including one for Robert Risebrough II in 1891.

The first farmland that Samuel purchased in the area lay on the southeast corner of present-day Finch and Leslie. This was the western half of Lot 20-3E that he bought in 1874 from Scottish farmer and former York Township councillor John Henry. The land had previously been cleared and farmed by the Johnston family from 1817 until 1874 when they sold to John Henry. One wonders about John’s intentions, or the accuracy of the record-keeping, since the farm was sold to Samuel the same year that John bought it. The Scrace family, English settlers who had arrived in North York in 1831, had been farming the east half of this lot, which ran from Leslie Street over to the Don Valley Parkway, since 1839.

This absolutely beautiful brick house captivated visitors for nearly 120 years, from the Johnstons, to Samuel Kennedy, to Joseph Kilgour, to R.Y. Eaton, and the Eglinton Hunt Club. It is shown here in 1967, one year before it was demolished.

Photo by Lorna Gardner, North York Historical Society, NYHS 1100.

When Samuel bought this land, it was already home to the Zion Schoolhouse, which had been built there on land donated by William Johnston in 1869. In 1878, Samuel gave some of this farm for the construction of a Temperance Hall, up the hill to the east of the school. It soon became a focal point for community life, hosting church socials, meetings, concerts, and debates. A blacksmith’s shop also sat on this lot, on the southeast corner of Leslie and Finch.

Samuel’s final purchase involved the northwest fifty acres of Lot 21-3E, on the northeast corner of Finch and Leslie. The eastern half of this lot was still equally divided between the Risebrough and Scrace families, with the Zion Primitive Methodist Church standing on the Scrace property. The southwest corner of this lot, directly south of Samuel, had been farmed by the Harris family since Richard Harris arrived from England in 1839. They would remain on this land into the twentieth century.

By the turn of the century, Samuel Kennedy had assembled a most impressive 235 acres at the corner of Finch and Leslie, some of the prettiest and most productive farmland in the whole area. So what became of all this lovely farmland? Surprisingly, it would remain productive until the mid-1960s.

Joseph Kilgour’s beautiful barn, later home to the Eglinton Hunt Club, is shown here being demolished in May 1967, already surrounded by the houses that claimed its former farmland. The faded hunt club logo is still visible.

Photo by Lorna Gardner, North York Historical Society, NYHS 1150.

Sometime around 1910, Joseph Kilgour, who owned Sunnybrook Farm near Bayview and Eglinton, bought Samuel’s eighty-seven-acre parcel on the northwest corner of the intersection, including the ten-room main house. Joseph also bought Samuel’s ninety-eight-acre lot on the southeast corner, where the Zion School was still operating. Joseph refigured the properties as the centre of his cattle operations and built the beautiful, gambrel-roofed barn, shown in the photographs, to shelter his herds of beef and dairy cattle. He also added an orchard to the farm.

When Joseph died in 1925, his widow Alice donated the majority of their Sunnybrook Farm to the City of Toronto. The land remains today as the spectacular Sunnybrook Park, where the Kilgour stables are still home to horses and a riding school. The former Samuel Kennedy lands were sold to James W. Young in 1926. He held onto the property for a relatively short period of time before selling to R.Y. Eaton in November 1929, just after the stock-market crash. Clearly, the Eatons still had money. A report of the sale in the Toronto Telegram of November 23, 1929, mentions that “the southeast corner has been fully cleared and on one point of it a magnificent view of surrounding country is obtainable.” This lookout would have been near the current intersection of Don Mills Road and Finch Avenue. R.Y. Eaton converted the Kilgour barn to accommodate horses so his children could be taught to ride. He believed that if you knew how to manage a horse, you would know how to manage people.

R.Y. was not viewed as one of the Toronto Eatons, who were regarded as virtual royalty by the people of Toronto in the early part of the twentieth century. Rather, he was an Irish relation, a nephew of company founder Timothy Eaton,[1] and was regarded as an outsider and treated as such by the family. When Timothy visited his birthplace in Ireland in 1897, Robert Young Eaton was a twenty-one-year-old schoolteacher living on his father’s farm. At Timothy’s urging, the young R.Y. left teaching to work as a shipping clerk at the Eaton offices in London, England, studying in the evenings and ultimately graduating from the University of London. He was transferred to Eatons’ Paris office in 1899, and to Toronto in 1902. He was promoted to secretary in 1904, and to director and first vice-president in 1907, the same year that Timothy’s son, John Craig Eaton, took over as president.

When company president Sir John Craig Eaton (he had been knighted by King George V for his efforts in the First World War) died prematurely in 1922, the board appointed R.Y. to head the company, over the objections of Sir John’s widow, Lady Eaton. Nevertheless, R.Y. proved to be a good leader, although one universally regarded as cold and aloof. When he took over in 1922, Eatons had a combined total of twenty-three stores, factories, and purchasing offices. When he retired in 1942, that figure had jumped, nearly ten-fold, to a total of 210 separate facilities. In addition to the North York farm, R.Y. had a ten-room, fifteen-acre summer place on Lake Ontario near Port Credit (which he replaced with a new summer home on Georgian Bay when Port Credit was deemed too unfashionable), and a 20,000-square-foot mansion on four acres at One Highland Avenue in Rosedale, which is still standing, though now divided into three separate residences. The Rosedale home could, and did, accommodate six hundred guests at a time.

In the mid-1950s, the Eaton farm was sold to the Eglinton Hunt Club. The club, which had been formed at the Golden Lion Hotel in 1843 as part of the Toronto Hunt Club, had been forced to abandon its spectacular, purpose-built facilities at the corner of Avenue Road and Eglinton by the relentless growth of the city around it. Part of the original clubhouse remains there today as the centre-piece of a townhouse development.

The club would remain at the corner of Finch and Leslie until the 1960s, when it was once again uprooted by the encroaching city. The land was sold for development. Joseph Kilgour’s barn was torn down in May 1967 and the house that the Johnstons had built over one hundred years earlier was torn down in 1968. Today, the northwest corner of Finch and Leslie is home to a rather unimpressive little nest of assisted housing. To the west, across the railway tracks, are several streets of typical mid-sixties detached and semi-detached houses. To the west of that is the only portion of Samuel Kennedy’s farm that still bears a remote resemblance to what it once was. Protected from development by the Metro Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, following the flooding brought on by Hurricane Hazel in 1954, this part of the East Don River Valley that passes through the former farmland is now known as Finch East Park and is well worth a visit.

This March 31, 1961, photo shows a newly denuded and widened Finch Avenue East, looking east from Page Avenue to the Eglinton Hunt Club barn (originally Joseph Kilgour’s splendid barn) on Leslie Street in the left background. The small subdivision, built on former Donald Springer land in 1960, is visible on the southwest corner of Finch and Leslie.

Photo by Ted Chirnside, Toronto Public Library, TC 355,

The farmland on the southeast corner of Finch and Leslie was also paved over in the late 1960s. Now it’s covered by townhouses, detached houses, and the High Point Condominiums (up where that “magnificent view” was once “obtainable” at the corner of Finch and Don Mills Road). Thankfully, the little one-room Zion School still stands to remind us of what has been lost. Today, it is used as a teaching facility, and for the hosting of classes, plays, and other presentations that depict pioneer life.

The final corner of Samuel Kennedy’s farmland met the same fate, but went down swinging. The northeast corner of Finch and Leslie echoed with the sounds of cows, sheep, and chickens until the summer of 1965, when those sounds were replaced by the sounds of earth movers, road graders, hammers, and saws as the last tenant farmers on the former Richard Harris farm were finally evicted and the redevelopment began. Samuel’s former farm, bordered today by the hydro lines just to the north of the Harris farm, was ploughed under at the same time. Unless one counts the dead-end Fox Hound Court, near the northwest corner of Finch and Leslie, not even a street name exists to remind us of anything that happened here.