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The Shepards:

Joseph and Catherine

Of all the pioneer names in this book, none resonate more with present-day Torontonians than this one does. The east-west artery named after this earliest of pioneer families is one of the busiest and most talked about in the city. Sheppard Avenue (as was common then, both spellings, Shepard and Sheppard, are found in the records) runs all the way from the Humber River in the west to the Rouge River in the east. Like its neighbour to the south, Lawrence Avenue, also named for a pioneer family, Sheppard Avenue spans virtually the entire city. A major transportation corridor, as well as a magnet for development, it is seldom out of the news — a fitting legacy for patriarch Joseph Shepard, who traversed this land on a regular basis in a time before white settlement.

Joseph’s early days are cloaked in mystery, owing to the destruction of many records around the time of the Revolutionary War in the United States, but it seems he was born in New Hampshire to Irish immigrant parents, on August 10, 1765. Mozart was nine years old and had already spent over three years performing in the palaces and concert halls of Europe. Joseph Shepard — while precocious in his own way — would prove a much later bloomer. In 1774, when Beethoven was turning four, the Shepards moved to Upper Canada, apparently settling in the Bay of Quinte area. They were Loyalists and likely felt uncomfortable living south of the border, as the potential of armed conflict with Britain became ever more likely.

Sporadic mentions of Joseph appear during the late 1700s, but it’s hard to know who to believe. The Globe newspaper of April 26, 1899, reported that he came to North York in 1785 to travel with Native traders, as he had done in the Quinte area. This seems quite likely, as Joseph would be twenty years old by then, and practised in the physical challenges that travelling with Natives on their trading routes demanded. The next we hear of Joseph is that he apparently applied for and received a land grant in Kingston in 1790 that he did not accept. His permanent relationship with North York would begin three years later.

By 1793, Joseph Shepard was helping the very first white settlers in the area to erect their initial primitive log cabins. In 1798, after helping the others with their shanties, Joseph built his own cabin on the northwest corner of present-day Yonge and Sheppard. In 1802, he bought the lot where his cabin stood from a William Dickson, who had acquired this Lot 16-1W (on the north side of Sheppard, running west from Yonge Street to Bathurst) in 1798, a year after it had been granted to James Johnson. It was still mostly forest when Joseph purchased it.

On April 11, 1803, Joseph married Catherine Fisher, a member of the Pennsylvania German family, led by patriarch Jacob Fisher, who had come to Upper Canada in 1796 and settled near what today is Dufferin and Steeles after receiving a land grant from the Crown. The Fishers were accompanied on their move by Jacob Kummer (later to become Cummer), who had married Catherine’s sister, Elizabeth, when the families lived in Pennsylvania. The Fisher family farmed, constructed mills, opened a blacksmith shop, and soon a little village named Fisherville was born at the crossroads. The Fisherville Presbyterian Church, constructed in 1856, was moved to Black Creek Pioneer Village in 1960, where it can still receive visitors.

At present-day Yonge and Sheppard, Joseph and Catherine were wasting little time starting their family. Their first child, Thomas, was born in 1804, followed by three other sons and four daughters. In 1805, Joseph applied for and was granted the deed to Lot 17-1W, directly north of the family’s first farm, giving them all a little something to look forward to and some room to grow.

The Shepards’ days were now defined by hard labour and incremental progress — clearing land, burning the stumps, selling the potash, planting whatever they could, raising some livestock, raising a family, and making their cabin more comfortable. The latter two responsibilities would have fallen almost exclusively to Catherine. Joseph, still as involved and gregarious as ever, somehow found time to serve York Township in a number of appointed and elected positions. Beginning in 1804, he was township assessor for three terms and pound-keeper for two, which, in those days, included more lost and errant horses, swine, and cattle than cats and dogs. He was also elected overseer of highways and fence-viewer.

Both these latter positions had the potential to put Joseph in frequent conflict with his neighbours. As an overseer of highways, he had to make sure that the settlers were clearing the road allowances around their farms as per the conditions of their Crown land grant applications and take action if they were negligent. As a fence-viewer, he was obliged to settle disputes among neighbouring farmers with respect to livestock caught wandering onto other peoples’ farms. At the time, hogs and cattle were marked for identification, but allowed to graze at large in the country. When they were caught “trespassing” on fenced land, they were impounded by the landowner and the fence viewer was called in to make sure that the fences on the property met the township specifications that had been designed to keep the wandering livestock out. As can be imagined, this would have sparked many a heated argument that Joseph would have had to settle in such a way that all parties, Joseph included, would be able to continue living as neighbours on good terms.

In 1807, Joseph took his political involvement to the next level when he allied himself with the fledgling reform movement in Upper Canada, which was beginning to speak out against injustices the farmers believed themselves to be suffering at the hands of the ruling Family Compact. The farmers felt that the Family Compact, who controlled the government through their closed network of entitled families, were guilty of corruption, land speculation, religious favouritism, and administrative extravagance. That year, Joseph chaired meetings to support Robert Thorpe, a judge of the Court of the King’s Bench in Upper Canada, in his campaign to make the Family Compact more accountable. Though the reform movement wasn’t really organized until the 1820s, Joseph stood for election to Upper Canada’s lower house, running on a reform platform. A split in the reform vote led to his defeat by the government candidate, Thomas Ridout, who had already served as sergeant-at-arms to the House of the Assembly and clerk of the peace for the Home District.

To some, Joseph Shepard was an unlikely reformer since he was a supporter of the Church of England (Anglican), an allegiance usually accompanied by Loyalist tendencies, and, in fact, he did fight with the British troops in the War of 1812 as a forty-seven-year-old private in the 3rd York Militia. He was seriously wounded at the Battle of York in April 1813 when the powder magazine at Fork York was intentionally blown up to prevent it from falling into the hands of the American invaders. Catherine found him the next morning, unconscious and lying in his own dried blood. His injuries, including broken ribs and a mangled left thigh, were serious enough to warrant a lifetime pension. In addition, he was given one hundred acres in Tecumseth Township in Simcoe County in appreciation for his service.

Meanwhile, back on the farm, the Shepards’ four hundred acres were becoming more productive every year. As more land was cleared, more crops were planted, more livestock was introduced, and orchards began to bear fruit. The farm was becoming quite a profitable enterprise. By all accounts, Joseph was a man with a social conscience who believed in sharing any good fortune that might come his way, a trait he may well have absorbed from the Natives he travelled with in his youth, who believed in re-paying kindness with kindness. In keeping with Joseph’s values, he and Catherine gifted the community with a parcel of land that continues to benefit local residents to this day when they bought two-and-three-quarters acres of tableland on the east side of Yonge Street, half-a-mile north of York Mills, and donated the land for the construction of the new St. John’s Anglican Church. Joseph himself worked alongside other members of the congregation, felling the virgin timber on site and squaring the logs with axe and adze.

In the 1820s, Joseph built a sawmill and a gristmill on the West Don River that ran through the western portion of his farm near Bathurst Street, in an area that came to be known as Chuckle Hollow. The mills were run by his sons, and, like most mills in pioneer North York, they were very profitable enterprises. Joseph remained committed to the reform movement and especially to its leader, William Lyon Mackenzie, whom he had supported in Upper Canada’s election of 1832. Two years later, the Town of York reverted to its original First Nations’ name of “Toronto,” and Mackenzie was elected the town’s first mayor. This was also the year that the Shepards would really start to spread their wings.

In 1834, Joseph and Catherine’s two eldest sons bought farms of their own in the second concession west of Yonge Street. Thomas, now thirty years old, bought Lot 18-2W, which ran east from Bathurst Street to Dufferin Street, about halfway between Sheppard and Finch. The eastern portion of his farm included the majestic sweep of the West Don Valley where the Holocaust Education and Memorial Centre of Toronto stand today, just north of Bathurst and Sheppard. Jacob, a couple of years younger than Thomas, bought Lot 19-2W, directly to the north of his brother’s farm. Both sons built new mills on the West Don River and got down to the serious business of building their own farms. Back on the original farm at Yonge and Sheppard, Joseph and Catherine were about to start construction of a house to replace their log cabin — a house that is still a home today, on its original foundation, over 175 years later.

Joseph was now nearly seventy years old, but he still had his eye on the future when he decided to embark on the daunting task of constructing a new farmhouse for his family. He did a fabulous job, since even now the home is one of North York’s real treasures. Anne M. de Fort-Menares, former architectural historian to the City of North York, described the house as one of a group of “Small frame houses of exceptional finesse....” in the January 1985 edition of the Canadian Collector.[1] Though surrounded today by the more pedestrian dwellings that were erected on its former farmland, the Shepard house still manages to charm.

The much-admired home of Joseph Shepard, built circa 1835 on what is today’s Burndale Avenue, is shown here as it appeared in 1968.

Photo by Lorna Gardner, North York Historical Society, NYHS 1286.

The storey-and-a-half clapboard structure delivers all of the elegance and symmetry that its mix of late-Georgian and neo-classical Loyalist styles could only suggest. Simple, genteel, and dignified, the house offers a glimpse of a style not often seen in Toronto, where Loyalist flourishes are rare.[2] Appearing small from the outside, the centre hall layout provides an interior of surprising accommodation. Throughout the home, attention to detail elevates the simple to the sublime.

The front door case, easily the most striking feature of the house, is a complicated piece of work that at first glance appears quite wide for the overall size of the house. And yet, the meticulous attention to detail and proportion somehow manages to merge the grand and the humble in such a way that both seem completely satisfied. The recessed, six-panel door is bracketed by wide sidelights with six-over-four sliding sash windows. Four fluted Doric-style pilasters surround the door and sidelights, which originally stood alone without a transom or fanlight. Alterations by subsequent owners have added a pediment, dentils, and other embellishments, which might charitably be described as “gilding the lily.”

The quality of the woodwork is almost certainly attributable to the Shepards’ sawmills, which were now able to produce the type of millwork that Joseph and Catherine may only have dreamed of when they built their log cabin. Similarly, the many panes of glass that graced their new home would have been unobtainable thirty years earlier when the stump-riddled roads made transportation of glass an unlikely prospect. Interior decoration, while simple and unpretentious, continued to demonstrate fastidious attention to detail. Formal doorframes were decorated with hand-carved rosettes. Sensuous, well-figured newel posts almost dared you not to touch them, while reverse cyma curves seamlessly connected the tread of one stair to the next.

The house would remain in the family until 1912 when the farm began to be subdivided. Fortunately, both the years and subsequent owners have been kind, and the house has been able to absorb modern additions such as hydro, a furnace, and a washroom without losing its integrity. Located at 90 Burndale Avenue, the house defiantly faces east to Yonge Street, while its modern neighbours all face north or south.

Joseph would only enjoy his new house for a couple of years. He died on May 3, 1837, at the age of seventy-one. He had worked hard and achieved much since he first laid eyes on the virgin forests of Upper Canada more than fifty years earlier. Now it was up to the rest of the family to carry on without him. They were about to live through the most dangerous year of their lives.

In 1837, Joseph’s good friend, William Lyon Mackenzie, set the wheels in motion that would lead to the Upper Canada Rebellion. More will be said about the rebellion and these early farmers, as will be seen in later chapters, but here the focus is on the considerable involvement by the Shepard family.

All four sons were Reformers. They offered the relative isolation of the corners of their farms, which were sheltered in the valley of the West Don River, as a training ground for the Reform soldiers, and space in their mills for the manufacture of ammunition. When the time came to actually confront the government troops in early December, all the brothers were on the front lines. Their mother, Catherine, also played a major role on more than one occasion.

On December 4, approximately fifty Reformers from the north stopped in at the Shepards’ house for a little warmth and nourishment on their way down Yonge Street to engage the government troops. Catherine was only too happy to provide them with what she could. When the fateful day of December 7 came, Jacob and Joseph II were at Montgomery’s Tavern where they fought alongside the woefully inept William Lyon Mackenzie. Their rag-tag group of rebels was quickly routed by the better-equipped government troops in a battle that lasted less than an hour. Jacob and Joseph were captured and imprisoned in the Toronto jail.

The rebel leader William Lyon Mackenzie was so inept that he left his carpet bag behind when he fled Montgomery’s Tavern — his bag that contained a list of the names and addresses of every single one of his supporters. Discovered by the government troops before they burned the tavern to the ground, the bag made their next few days a whole lot easier.

Michael and Thomas Shepard led the government troops on a much merrier chase than their brothers. On the morning of December 7, they were far from Montgomery’s Tavern with a group of several hundred well-armed rebels. Commanded by Colonel Peter Matthews, they had been charged with the capture of the bridge over the Don River at King Street from the defending government troops. In this instance, it was the rebels who nearly carried the day, but, while they were able to set fire to the bridge, they did not destroy it. When news reached them that the tavern had fallen and the rebellion was lost, Michael and Thomas made it as far as the Humber River before they were captured and imprisoned in the same jail that already held their brothers. While there, they witnessed the executions of Colonel Matthews and Samuel Lount, one of the rebels who had stopped at Catherine’s house on December 4. Both men were hanged.

Catherine was again forced into action on the night of the rebellion when government troops burst into her house looking for rebels. The troops went from room to room, slashing quilts and pillows, and stabbing beds with their swords. As they left each bedroom, they set the mattresses on fire. Catherine followed frantically, dousing the blazes as best she could, trying to save her barely two-year-old home.

Despite Catherine’s best efforts, one rebel commander was captured there that night. Colonel Anthony Van Egmond, the commander from the Huron Tract, who had opened the Huron Road for the Canada Company in 1828, had fled on horseback, heading north up Yonge Street along with rebel leader William Lyon Mackenzie after the battle at Montgomery’s Tavern. Once they reached The Golden Lion Hotel, at today’s Yonge and Sheppard, with government troops hot on their heels, the two men split up. Mackenzie exchanged his horse for a fresh one at the hotel and headed west to the farms of Thomas and Jacob Shepard at Bathurst Street. Colonel Egmond, a much older man, was by now completely exhausted from the battle and pursuit and sought shelter at the much closer home of Catherine Shepard. He was captured there by government troops and imprisoned in the Toronto jail, where he contracted pneumonia and died the following January.

What a cold, hellish night it must have been, as soldiers set fire to surveyor David Gibson’s house on the lot directly to the north of the Shepard farm, and other homes in the area as well. (The current Gibson House was built in the 1850s to replace this one that was burned by the troops.) When the sun came up on December 8, Catherine could actually count herself among the lucky ones, as she still had a roof over her head, although apparently there are still charred rafters in the house as mute testimony to what happened that night.

In the days following the rebellion, government troops scoured the back roads on horseback, burning farmhouses to smoke out any remaining rebels, no doubt aided in their search by William Lyon Mackenzie’s little black book. In addition to the government troops, local farmers had to fear roving gangs of civilian, vigilante Loyalists who, with full government support, fanned out across North York, looting and burning buildings and assaulting or capturing any of their neighbours they suspected of being sympathetic to the rebel cause. In the aftermath of this all-out assault, the four Shepard boys suffered disparate fates.

Jacob and Joseph II were held in custody until May 12, 1838, when they were released and allowed to return home. Thomas and Michael were not so lucky. Six months after they were captured, they still hadn’t been brought to trial. Nonetheless, they were sent to Kingston to await banishment to Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania). Realizing that they would never see Upper Canada again if sent into exile, they escaped from custody, using the cover of a massive nighttime thunderstorm to mask their escape. They kneeled and prayed in the pouring rain before splitting up and running for their lives. Miraculously, they both found themselves in the United States a little over a week later, where they were welcomed as heroes for fighting the British troops. Their families crossed Lake Ontario to visit them in Lewiston for what they thought might have been one last time. The brothers then set out to find work while their families returned to North York. Three years later, word reached Thomas and Michael that they had been pardoned and were now free to return to Upper Canada. They didn’t have to be told a second time.

Thomas returned to the farm he had purchased in 1834, while Michael returned to the farm he had inherited from his father in 1837. It seems that Joseph was fair to the end. Realizing that his two eldest sons were now successfully farming and milling on their own properties, he left his own two farms to his two youngest sons, Michael and Joseph II. Joseph II inherited the farm where his mother Catherine still lived while Michael inherited Lot 17-1W, directly to the north. Joseph II and his family moved into Catherine’s farmhouse where they remained until 1860.

Thomas’s farm and mills were extremely productive. The farmland produced livestock and grain, as well as fruit from three acres of excellent orchards. His steam-powered sawmill was capable of cutting 4,000 feet of lumber per day and the flour he produced was sold as far away as Montreal, but his farm had one serious flaw. It seems that the hills into the valley where his mills stood were so steep that the roads became virtually impassable when rain or snow turned them to mud. At times like these, not even a team of oxen could haul a wagonload out of the valley, so Thomas would carry the one-hundred-pound bags of flour up the hill on his shoulders, one at a time, in order to satisfy his customers and get his product to market. In 1847, he offered the farm for sale but found no takers and went back to work. The Shepard brothers’ next series of land transactions would make a drunken game of musical chairs seem organized.

In 1849, Joseph II was granted thirty-eight acres of Lot 15-3E on the southeast corner of today’s Leslie and Sheppard where George S. Henry’s Oriole Lodge Farm would one day stand. In 1852, he sold the parcel to his brother Michael, who bought thirty-three acres of Lot 14-3E directly to the south at the same time, and built a sawmill on the East Don River that ran through his new holdings. The operation was a profitable enterprise, processing over 50,000 feet of lumber a month and employing two people. In 1856, Thomas was finally able to sell the farm with the steep hills. The buyer was none other than his younger brother, Joseph II, who had just sold his property at Leslie and Sheppard to Michael. Thomas then turned around and bought Michael’s farm and sawmill in Oriole. Michael then returned to Yonge and Sheppard to farm the lot his father had left him in 1837. Thomas soon added a gristmill to Michael’s former property that proved every bit as successful as the existing sawmill. Thomas ran the mills in Oriole until they were both destroyed by fire in 1869, and he retired at the age of sixty-five. Michael’s return to Lansing would soon provide us with another beautiful farmhouse that survives to this day.

In 1859, Michael completed the red brick farmhouse that still stands near the eastern entrance to the York Cemetery. Much grander than his parents’ frame house on Burndale Avenue, Michael’s late Georgian style farmhouse owes a stylistic debt to the house that his friend, David Gibson, had built just around the corner at today’s Yonge and Park Home Avenue, after he too was pardoned and allowed to return to North York. Thought by some to be a little too nice for a farmer at the time, Michael’s house outlived the raised eyebrows and graces us still with its beauty. Michael lived and farmed on this lot that reached all the way from Yonge Street to Bathurst Street until his death in 1876.

Michael Shepard’s late-Georgian-style house, which was built in 1859 with a three-bay façade, appears as a small-scale version of David Gibson’s five-bay Georgian house built several years earlier, and still standing less than a quarter of a mile north of Michael’s house. The house is shown here as it looked on November 20, 2009.

Photo by Scott Kennedy.

After Michael’s death, the farm remained intact until 1916 when the land was purchased by the Toronto General Burying Grounds as the site of a future cemetery. Michael’s house, still in fine shape, was used as a private residence until the York Cemetery opened in 1948, at which time the house assumed the dual role of cemetery office and living quarters for the cemetery manager. Although now strictly given over to office space and the pallid, near-invisible throb of fluorescent lights, Michael Shepard’s house still offers clear evidence of the enormous success of this family.

The year after Michael moved into his new farmhouse, his brother Joseph created one of the most memorable buildings in the history of North York. The combination store and living quarters he built on the northwest corner of Yonge and Sheppard would stand there for nearly 140 years as a landmark and lifeline for generations of North York families. The two-storey brick building with attic and full basement was constructed in the late Georgian style of the day, meaning simply that it exhibited the simplicity and symmetry consistent with Georgian architecture, augmented by a few details and flourishes of the neo-classical or Greek style. The building has no ninety-degree corners. It is, in fact, trapezoidal rather than square or rectangular, a situation that likely drove more than one of the bricklayers or carpenters across the street to the Golden Lion Tavern. There was a very practical reason for this somewhat bizarre construction, as shall be seen. The red and yellow bricks were said to have been hauled up from Yorkville by oxen. The wood used in the construction was produced at the Shepards’ own sawmills.

Though commonly thought of as just a store, the building actually housed commodious living quarters as well. The store occupied the southeast corner of the building. It was a big store, graced with the usual pot-bellied stove in the centre, surrounded by long counters of dry goods on one side and foodstuffs on the other. The dry goods section featured bolts of cotton, flannel, woollens, denim, calico, and gingham. There were few ready-made clothes available in North York at the time, although such items as hats, gloves, and handkerchiefs were part of the store’s regular stock.

The dry goods section also included a dizzying array of hardware, including tools, farm implements, saws, harnesses, rope, axes, nails, gunpowder, candles, kerosene lamps, and crockery. The food counters tempted customers with drawers full of salt, tea, oats, flour, coffee, dry mustard, chocolate, and sugar. Barrels of pickles and crackers complimented enormous, one-hundred-pound wheels of cheese just waiting to be cut to order. The barter system was still a normal way for farmers to exchange their products for the manufactured goods that they needed. This allowed the store to stock farm-fresh items such as butter, milk, eggs, fruits, and vegetables. The store kept long hours, from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., Monday to Saturday. In addition, a wagon was loaded up once a week to make deliveries to farmers who were unable to do their buying in person.

The residential accommodations were equally impressive. To the north of the store, on the main floor, were the parlour and dining room, with a huge kitchen to the rear. At the very back was the summer kitchen, where meals could be prepared in warm weather without heating up the rest of the house. Temperature extremes were a fact of life then as now, and while the summer kitchen did an admirable job of keeping the place cooler in summer, the six large bedrooms on the second floor were always cold in winter, to the point that a glass of water carried up at bedtime would be frozen solid by morning. There was no central heating of any kind — no indoor plumbing and no electricity.

A deep well out back provided water for drinking and cooking, while a soft-water pump made bathing a little more pleasant. Also located to the rear of the house was a drive shed where the sleigh, buggy, and wagons were stored, as well as a barn with horse stalls, feed bins, tools, and a hay mow that offered endless hours of amusement for the children. To the north of the store stood the busy wagon and carriage shop of Cornelius van Nostrand III, whose family had been among the first pioneer farmers in York Mills, directly to the south. In later years, the wagon works would become the first home of the R.S. Kane Funeral Home, still serving the community today on Yonge Street, just south of Steeles Avenue.

The Shepard store was built as a trapezoid so it would fit exactly into the intersection, which was not square. The importance of this shape becomes clear when it is noted that the exterior of the store was as useful to the community as the interior. Shortly after the building was completed, a porch was added that offered shelter on the east and south sides of the building. The porch was built to shelter passengers who boarded stagecoaches and later, radial cars and buses on Yonge Street. The combination of the porch and the precise fit of the building to the intersection served to keep customers dry in bad weather, an important consideration since the store also functioned as a waiting room and ticket agent for the various types of transport down through the years. Local dairy farmers also used the porch when shipping pails of their milk. They would drop them off in the morning to be conveyed into the city for sale, then pick up the empty pails in the afternoon, or in the case of the early days of the stagecoaches, whenever they could make it back through the treacherous depths of Hogg’s Hollow.

In 1866, the Shepards added another feature to the store when they were granted the rights to operate a post office. The name Lansing was suggested by Joseph’s daughter, Saida, and was soon adopted by the entire area around the crossroads. The store was popular from the outset and before long it was the focal point of the community. In 1870, Joseph E. Shepard (Joseph III) took over the operation of the store from his father. He also assumed responsibility for the operation of the family’s mills over by Bathurst Street, making his father, who had been born in 1815, an early exponent of “freedom fifty-five.” Joseph Shepard II had many good years of retirement to look forward to, although one wonders if men like Joseph ever really retired. He died on April 24, 1899, at the age of eighty-four.

In 1888, Benjamin Brown took over the operation of the store on a rental basis. He changed the business from a general store to a hardware store to better serve the needs of the rapidly growing community. It was a prescient move. The store would remain a successful hardware store for the next 101 years. In 1899, Mary Jane Shepard, daughter of Joseph Shepard II, acquired the property for “$1.00 and natural love and affection,” according to the deed, clearly a close family. In 1904, Benjamin Brown bought the property from Mary Jane and enlarged the former van Nostrand facilities to the north where a 1914 Model T Ford would soon be parked alongside the buggies, cutters, and wagons. In 1923, Benjamin sold the property to George and William Dempsey, whose family name would become as familiar to several generations of North Yorkers as the name Shepard.

By now the building had been modernized with the addition of indoor plumbing, central heating, and electricity. The Dempsey brothers, plumbers by trade, renamed the store the Dempsey Brothers’ Hardware Store. In the 1930s, the second floor was extensively renovated to create two separate apartments for George and William’s families. Dormer windows were added to the attic around the same time and the attic converted to a communal rec room that could be accessed from either of the apartments below.

The Shepard/Dempsey store as it looked in 1955. The car in front of the store is a 1939 Ford. The car to the right appears to be a 1953 Oldsmobile.

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

In the 1960s, the store was taken over by George’s sons, Bob and Jim. By the time they took over, the store had some local competition from such upstarts as the Kitchen family’s Lansing Building Supply at Willowdale and Sheppard Avenues, and York Mills Hardware, operated by Msrs. Bannister and Jenkins at the corner of Bayview and York Mills. Nonetheless, Dempseys’ remained the place to go for your hardware needs. Likely everyone living in North York back then has a Dempsey Brothers story or two.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a Saturday morning trip to Dempseys’ was like a ritual. Many of the Second World War vets who now populated the area were pretty handy with a hammer and saw and much of the interior finishing work on the post-war houses that were covering the farms of North York was done by the owners. If the job was too complex for one person, neighbours could always be counted on to lend a hand, much like the barn-raisings of a not-too-distant past. Whether the job called for ten thousand nails or just one, Dempseys’ could help, and the staff all knew just what kind of nail would do the job. The floors sagged and creaked underfoot. The bins behind the counter groaned under the weight of a seemingly endless array of screws, nails, nuts, bolts, and washers. Anything that might fall under the heading of “hardware” was in there somewhere. Maybe it was hanging from the ceiling or in a little drawer behind the counter or out back with the bags of fertilizer and cement or stashed upstairs or hidden in the basement, but if anyone in the whole city had it, it was probably the Dempsey brothers. Bob Dempsey liked to joke that he could fill a customer’s order before the customer could get his wallet onto the counter.

By the end of the 1980s, the next mutation of North York was well underway. Mayor Mel Lastman’s dream of a new downtown took root, as the high-rise wind tunnel endured today blew down precious history and replaced it with what many perceive to be an ill-conceived attempt to be something North York never was. In 1989, the Dempsey Brothers’ Hardware Store was sold to the Canderel Development Corporation and the Prudential Assurance Company Limited. The new owners thought so much of their new acquisition that they turned it into a dollar store. A visit to the new store only emphasized the soullessness of the place. In place of the complex inventory of sturdy, essential items was a haphazard array of flimsy imported trinkets. In place of a caring, knowledgeable staff were bored, dismissive, and detached clock-watchers. The indignity continued for several years until the developers, finally devoid of ideas, gave the place to North York to avoid the cost of tearing it down.

North York wasted little time in devising a rescue strategy and soon a plan was in place that would see the old store moved out of harm’s way. Building-moving specialists Charles Matthews Limited stabilized the structure and prepared for the half-mile move to the store’s new home in a little park at the north end of Beecroft Road. On February 18, 1996, hundreds of people gathered in bone-chilling weather to witness a 463-ton building lifted off its foundations and driven down Beecroft Road. Supported by 128 wheels on nineteen dollies, the store began its laborious journey, taking nearly twelve hours to travel the half-mile distance. Once at the new location, the building was carefully placed on its new foundation.

The building was then restored under the supervision of the architectural firm Philip Goldsmith and Company Limited. The exterior of the building was restored to appear as it was in the Shepards’ time. This meant the removal of the third-floor dormer windows and the re-creation of the original porch. The interior was completely re-imagined to serve an altogether new purpose as the new home of the North York Archives. Students, researchers, and members of the general public all looked forward to utilizing this precious resource. The architects were particularly proud of their accomplishment. A special publication called “The Dempsey Archivist” was published by the North York Mirror on Saturday, September 13, 1997, to mark the opening of the new archives. In it, architect Philip Goldsmith said:

Archives and archive storage facilities generally are the toughest uses to put into a historic building. Archives, by their very nature, are for the long term storage of fragile material. We needed to create the maximum storage capacity in our work. We created a separate zone in the basement that was column free and high enough to maximize storage. In essence, we created a small building in a building. Also, we designed and incorporated our own vapour-barrier system to contain and control the humidity factor primarily in this space.

All in all, it was an expensive and time-consuming task that was extremely well done. Then something went terribly wrong.

In 1998, the provincial government, under then-premier Mike Harris, shocked the citizens of North York, East York, Scarborough, Etobicoke, York, and the City of Toronto by forcibly amalgamating these six separate entities into one unmanageable blob under the banner of “Toronto,” despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of residents had voted against the amalgamation. The subsequent years have proven the residents right and the premier wrong as infrastructure and services have deteriorated to the point where few citizens ever expect to see a return to the modest efficiencies of pre-amalgamation. The casualties could fill a separate book, but the one that concerns us here is the fate of the North York Archives. On January 1, 1998, North York ceased to exist. It was now just a corner of Toronto. Shortly after, the archives that had been so proudly installed in the newly-renovated Shepard store were removed and amalgamated — some say “dumped,” into the Toronto Archives on Spadina Road. The Shepards’ store was abandoned once again.

Today, the building is home to the Beecroft Education Centre, named after Beecroft Road, where it now stands. The doors are all locked and there isn’t so much as a plaque to tell passers-by this incredible story that embraces 150 years of our history. The northwest corner of Yonge and Sheppard was finally built upon in 2012, over fifteen years after the store was rolled away. It is now home to a 7-Eleven and a McDonald’s. Perhaps that is all we need to know about the current state of land-use planning and respect for Canadian history in the new city of Toronto — but what about that extra “p” in Sheppard Avenue?

It seems that there was another family in Lansing at the time, known as “Sheppard,” “Shepherd,” and “Shephard.” Record-keeping and literacy were a little rough-hewn in those days and such discrepancies were by no means uncommon. Most sources use “Sheppard” for the “other” family, as shown here. No one knows for sure which family the avenue was named after, and the prevailing opinion seems to be that it could be either/or.

In 1824, Thomas Sheppard bought the eastern 150 acres of Lot 15-1W, on the southwest corner of today’s Yonge and Sheppard. That same year he built the Golden Lion Hotel, also referred to as the Golden Lion Inn, right on the southwest corner of the intersection. The Golden Lion was a large, square, two-storey frame structure with covered verandahs on both floors. There were large stables and barns to the south of the hotel and drive sheds to the north that could accommodate a dozen horses and horse-drawn vehicles. Upstairs were accommodations for twenty guests. Downstairs was a mud-brick kitchen at the back, and a tavern on the main floor. Thomas Sheppard’s brother, Paul, was a noted wood carver, who carved the wooden spires of St. Paul’s Anglican Church in L’Amoreaux (at the corner of Warden and Finch Avenues in Scarborough) and the original St. James’s in the town of York. He created a spectacular mascot for his brother’s new hotel when he carved a life-sized lion from a single pine stump.

The golden-coloured lion seemed to have a mind of its own, since some pictures show it on the second-floor balcony while others show it on the main floor, outside the front door. After many years of loyal service, it was replaced by another golden lion carved by Paul Sheppard around 1840, this time from oak with a flowing mane sculpted in plaster. (Dates given for this second statue range from 1833 to 1845.) The Golden Lion Hotel was an extremely important part of the community, hosting all sorts of events, from political meetings to dances, where Thomas and his sons, all accomplished musicians, provided the music in a dance hall that was built over the drive sheds. The dances would attract people from as far away as the town of York, some eight miles to the south, when a trip of that distance could have taken the better part of a day. Travellers of all stripes made frequent use of the Golden Lion and the other hotels up and down Yonge Street as a welcome respite from the gruelling road conditions. A common lament sung by farmers of the day went something like this:

“Here I am

On my way to Zion

I find my sons

In the Golden Lion.”[3]

The Golden Lion Hotel as it appeared in the early 1900s, with the second Golden Lion statue guarding the front door.

Photographer unknown, North York Historical Society, NYHS, 1080.

Thomas retired as proprietor in 1851. A John Meek took over as proprietor and ran the hotel until Thomas Sheppard’s death in 1857. Thomas’s son Charles inherited the farm and ran the hotel until 1869, at which point his sister Fanny and her husband, Cornelius van Nostrand II, took the hotel over and served as proprietors until 1870. That was the year that Charles sold the farm and hotel, keeping only the house he had built on present-day Sheppard Avenue in 1865.

In 1875, Charles sold the house to Mrs. Ann Carruthers. The storey-and-a-half clapboard house with the lovely bargeboard trim stood at 25 Sheppard Avenue West — a familiar and welcome sight to local residents making their way home on the TTC, since the house stood directly opposite the bus terminal where it offered a tantalizing glimpse into our past until it was destroyed by fire in 1988.

The Golden Lion Hotel continued to operate into the early twentieth century when it was purchased by the Reverend Thomas Webster Pickett and converted to a residence. The reverend converted the tavern into a meeting room where a Methodist Sunday School would meet and the roots of the Lansing United Church took hold. In 1902, the reverend’s daughter, Anna-Keitha, married George S. Henry of Oriole Lodge Farm near Leslie and Sheppard. After the Picketts left the building, it served as the first municipal offices for the new municipality of North York, which was created in 1922. Six years later, the venerable old building was dismantled. Anna was given the golden lion, which lived on the verandah of Oriole Lodge until it was donated to the Sharon Temple Museum, just north of Newmarket, in 1953.

When the North York Historical Society was formed in 1960, the lion was returned to North York and can currently be found prowling the sixth floor of the North York Public Library.