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The McBride Family Farms

A drive north on Bayview Avenue warrants a glance at the last house on the right, before arriving at Finch. It looks like an old house to be sure, but in these days of smoke and mirrors, appearances can sometimes be deceiving. Not here, however. Not this house — this house is over 150 years old, older than Canada itself, and built by a family who came to Upper Canada nearly 220 years ago. The McBrides were part of the very first wave of settlement in Upper Canada and they constructed a home that remains a private dwelling, well into the twenty-first century. The McBride family actually “bookend” the entire scope of European settlement in Upper Canada right up to the present day — defining them as a family with very few peers.

The house didn’t always stand on Bayview. It was moved there in the 1970s, from its original location to the southeast, to save it from demolition when Burbank Drive was extended north of Burleigh Heights Drive. A debt of gratitude is owed to the people who saved this house and also to those who have maintained it for the last forty years, for they have preserved a priceless piece of our heritage and tangible evidence of this family’s amazing journey.

Patriarch John McBride, his wife Hannah, and other family members left Ireland in the 1770s, bound for North America. They settled in Pennsylvania, a state often referred to as “a cradle of freedom,” but one that probably wasn’t the best choice for immigrants with Loyalist tendencies. When the American Revolutionary War broke out, the McBrides predictably fought with the British troops against the revolutionaries.

Little historical evidence exists to detail their efforts but the end result would become a common experience. Defeated Loyalists were clearly not welcome in the post-revolutionary United States of America, and, though many chose to move north of the border where they were welcomed with open arms, the McBrides returned to Ireland. There, John McBride was approached by John Graves Simcoe, his commander in the Revolutionary War, who had just been appointed the first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada. Simcoe enlisted him as a sergeant in the Queen’s Rangers and enticed him to emigrate to Upper Canada with the promise of generous land grants. John McBride would not be disappointed and he would not disappoint.

This house, built by David McBride in 1860, still stands on Bayview Avenue, where it was moved in the 1970s. Photo dated January 2013.

Photo by Scott Kennedy.

Upon arriving in Upper Canada in 1796, John was granted six hundred acres near the corner of present-day Bathurst and Lawrence, encompassing Lot 4-2W, Lot 5-2W, and Lot 4-3W, making him only the third landowner in what is now Downsview. Sergeant McBride, like many other military officers who received land grants, did not immediately set to clearing and fencing his land as required by Crown regulations. Rather, he served his adopted land in a more practical fashion by working with the Queen’s Rangers to clear the forest from the area that is now downtown Toronto, where he had also been granted a small lot on King Street. If the concept of virgin forest in the downtown core seems hard to grasp, just remember that there were less than three hundred people living in the town of York when the McBrides arrived. In addition to his duties as a Queen’s Ranger, John found it necessary to supplement his income in other ways and, once more, he and Hannah proved up to the task.

John and Hannah found employment almost immediately. He worked as a doorkeeper for both the Executive and Legislative Councils in the town of York, and, together with Hannah, provided catering services for the House of Assembly — a full workload indeed.

John died in 1801. It seems unlikely that he even had the chance to clear his land in Downsview. As was the reality of life then, early settlers didn’t have the luxury of taking time to grieve; they just kept their heads down, kept their faith, and depended on hard work and family to get them through the dark hours. After John was gone, Hannah used her catering skills to open a tavern. Thankfully, the tavern was a great success as many members of the Legislature respected the McBrides and became regular customers.

Hannah sold Lot 4-3W in Downsview in 1803. Records do not indicate whether the Crown’s requirements had been met, but rules were broken, of course. In this case, it seems possible that the Crown may have taken Hannah’s situation into consideration and allowed the sale on compassionate grounds. The family’s close relationship with Simcoe is some indication of how well-connected they were. Alternately, she may have paid someone else to do the work after John’s death. The remaining two Downsview lots were willed to son Hugh McBride, who sold them by 1829.

Son John McBride II was the next to be the recipient of a Crown land grant. In 1830, he was granted Lot 17-1E, a 195-acre lot, which runs from Yonge Street over to Bayview Avenue, a quarter-of-a-mile north of Sheppard Avenue. John II and his wife Eleanor had actually moved to this area sometime around 1806, buying fifteen acres of Lot 16-1E in 1814 and an additional forty-two acres of the lot in 1817. They were apparently not the most peaceful of settlers. In fact, they were summoned by the court to answer a charge of assault and battery brought by their neighbour Jacob Kummer (later Cummer), shortly after they had arrived. John McBride II was found innocent, but Eleanor was put on probation for a year and fined for her part in the misadventure. Members of the McBride family also competed in sanctioned fights, including the War of 1812, where they repaid the Crown’s generosity by laying their lives on the line for their new home. This time, at least, they were on the winning side.

Following the War of 1812, John travelled to Ireland on a government-sponsored mission to recruit new settlers for Upper Canada. He was in Ireland for over a year, in the company of three First Nations friends who were also part of the mission. By all accounts, their trip was a great success and resulted in many enthusiastic Irish settlers immigrating to Upper Canada. Still, the venture was overshadowed, in the minds of many, by the accomplishments of John McBride’s horses.

It seems that John and his three travelling companions had to drive a horse-drawn farm wagon from North York to New York City to book passage on a ship sailing for Ireland. Realizing that they would be gone for a long and undetermined length of time, John sold his two horses in New York before setting sail. Imagine John’s surprise then, when he returned to his farm near Yonge and Sheppard over a year later to find the team of horses waiting for him. They had broken free from their new owner in Manhattan and found their way home — all the way to Willowdale.[1] Manhattan is an island. Never underestimate the power of your fellow animals.

John McBride II’s farmhouse was moved from his original 1830 land grant to sit next to its more modern neighbours on Spring Garden Road, as shown here in 1964.

Photo by Patricia Hart, North York Historical Society, NYHS 905.

Townhouses now cover the spot where this house stood on Leslie Street until 1970, on the former farmland of John McBride III.

Photo by Dorothy Milne, North York Historical Society, NYHS 849.

John McBride III (1806–65) was born right around the time his parents moved to their farm on Yonge Street. By the time he was in his mid-twenties, however, the soil on the farm had become so light that when John III planted his potatoes, the wind would blow the topsoil right off the tops of the mounds. This was likely a result of the excessive removal of trees, the roots of which would normally anchor the soil. His solution was to buy the farm directly to the east on Lot 17-2E, which reached from Bayview east to Leslie and included the original site of the farmhouse that would be built by his son David in 1860. The house still stands on Bayview. John III built a house on the east edge of the lot, now on Leslie Street.

By all accounts, John III was a thrifty and industrious farmer. He also had a good head for business. When he died in 1865, he held the deeds to several different farms. He also gained some neighbourly brownie points when he joined Jacob Cummer’s Wesleyan Methodist Church, doing his part to erase the memory of that little dust-up between his parents and Jacob that had occurred around the time he was born.

Two of John’s sons also figure prominently in our history. Son Charles, born in 1832, clearly inherited his father’s business acumen. In 1858, he bought the second Montgomery’s Tavern, near today’s Yonge and Eglinton. The first tavern on this site, built by John Montgomery in the early 1830s, had been the site of the skirmish that ended the Upper Canada Rebellion, and was burned to the ground by government troops on the night of December 7, 1837. When John Montgomery was pardoned some years later, he returned to the site and built a new tavern in 1843. After a while, John rented the tavern to his son William and opened two more taverns in the city of Toronto to the south.

When Charles McBride bought the rebuilt tavern, he renamed it Prospect House. Other than one year, from 1863–64, when the tavern was rented to a John MiIler, Charles was the proprietor until 1870. In addition to functioning as a tavern and hotel, the structure also housed the York Township Council until 1871. In 1870, Charles sold the tavern to Thomas Beatty of Leslieville, who then sold it to one William Smith in 1873. It was William’s misfortune to still be the owner when the tavern was destroyed by fire on November 20, 1881.

It seems that Charles still had the hospitality business in his veins. In 1873, he bought the Finch Hotel from John Finch who had built his inn on the northeast corner of present-day Yonge and Finch in 1847. Charles dismantled the hotel and rebuilt it on his fifty-acre farm on the west side of Yonge Street, just south of today’s Fairlawn Avenue. The Bedford Park Hotel, as Charles renamed it, stood behind later storefront additions until the 1980s. In addition to his farming and inn-keeping, Charles also held the unpopular position of gate keeper at the Hogg’s Hollow toll gate from 1878–80.

In 1860, Charles McBride’s brother, David, built the house that stands today at 3167 Bayview Avenue. He was married to Angeline Mulholland, whose parents, Henry and Jane, had originally settled at today’s Leslie and Sheppard, before moving to the Bathurst and Lawrence area where they were neighbours of John and Hannah McBride. David McBride met one of the saddest and most bizarre ends imaginable. It seems that David and Angeline were walking along the shore of the East Don River on July 14, 1877, on their way to visit her brother William on his farm at present-day Leslie and Sheppard, when David lost his footing. He slipped, hit his head, and fell, unconscious, into the water where, despite Angeline’s best efforts to save him, he died.

The house that David built would continue to be home to subsequent generations of McBrides for nearly one hundred years after David’s untimely death — a commendable legacy. The fate of the other McBride houses is not something that would inspire pride.

Open farmland and towering elm trees stretch all the way to Bayview Avenue from behind Sarah and Robert McBride’s house at 5043 Yonge Street.

Photo by A.W. Galbraith, dated 1912, Toronto Public Library, TC 5004.

John McBride III’s house was demolished around 1970 for a rather non-descript cluster of townhouses. John McBride II’s second house, which had replaced the family’s original log cabin on Lot 17-1E around 1875, was moved from its original location at Yonge and Empress to 43 Spring Garden Road in the 1920s. It remained there as a single-family dwelling until the early 1980s when all of the houses on this part of Spring Garden were purchased by developers Bramalea Limited, who intended to build a twenty-three-storey condominium on the property.

Plans that Bramalea submitted to the North York Planning Department in September 1981 called for the demolition of the house. The house was abandoned and the main floor was boarded up to deter local vandals, who retaliated by smashing the second-floor windows. In spite of such indignities, the house remained in fine overall condition and serious attempts were made to save it. Even the developers came on board and offered to pay the estimated cost of $45,000 of moving the house to another location. Bickering local politicians seemed unable to agree on any type of rescue plan, however, and another irreplaceable piece of Upper Canada’s history was lost. A recent visit to the site, 43 Spring Garden Road, all commercial and industrial now, only served to re-emphasize the depressing result — not recommended for a viewing excursion.

Another McBride house, built on the same lot at a slightly later date, was the first brick house on this part of Yonge Street. In the early 1900s, it was the residence of Robert and Sarah McBride. By the early 1960s it was the residence and office of Dr. Ralph Johns. The house stood at 5043 Yonge Street, on the east side, just south of Hillcrest Avenue. Today, the site is occupied by the now-shuttered De Boers furniture store, sitting there awaiting redevelopment.