Snippets of History

08/24/2026

August 24, 2026: On this day, 112 years ago, Canadian soldier and veterinarian Harry Colebourn bought an orphaned bear cub from a hunter on the platform of the train station in White River, Ontario.

He named her Winnipeg, Winnie for short, after his hometown in Manitoba. Harry cared for her through their training in Valcartier, Quebec and as they travelled overseas to England. On the Salisbury Plains she became the unofficial mascot of the 2nd Infantry Brigade.

My great-great uncle Alfred Lightwood was at both Valcartier and the Salisbury Plains camp at times that overlap with Harry Colebourn. He was not part of the same unit but a little part of me wonders if Alf ever encountered Winnie.

When Colebourn’s brigade were called to action in France in December 1914, Harry left Winnie in the care of the London Zoo. He intended to collect her after the war and return home to Canada with her but seeing how settled she was, he officially gifted her to the zoo in 1919.

Winnie was a favourite at the London Zoo, in part because she had been hand raised from such a young age that she was very gentle with guests, including children.

One of those children was Christopher Robin Milne, who soon named his favourite teddy bear Winnie. 🧸 His father, A.A. Milne then wrote the stories about “Winnie” (adding in “the Pooh” for good measure) which still wildly popular today.

Winnie herself, the Canadian black bear from White River, never actually had “the Pooh” officially added to her name, but over time the reality and legend have merged. Winnie lived to the age of 20 and died on 12 May 1934 at the London Zoo.

When I sent an inquiry to the Zoo in 2010 they responded that they had no information about her burial location but that the zoo had several statues and plaques to commemorate her. I had thought there might be a location on site at the Zoo where such remains were laid to rest; that does not seem to be the case.

However, by 2015 the Royal College of Surgeons had conducted a review of their collections and learned that they had Winnie’s skull. It has since been displayed on occasion at their Hunterian Museum in London. She had lost all her teeth, possibly because she had been a big fan of sweetened condensed milk!

Today in White River there is a statue of the modern Disneyfied Winnie the Pooh, reminding visitors of the fictional bear’s very real and humble origins. The train station is long gone; in its place stands a replacement from 1957.

Thank you Harry Colebourn for spending $20 on that little bear 112 years ago. Not only did your generous act of kindness save that one beautiful life, it inspired a legacy. 💕

08/08/2026

Headed out to Oshawa today and the site of the old Windfields Farm. Now part of the Ontario Tech University campus it is not publicly accessible BUT has been somewhat preserved.

The site includes four of the old farm buildings, the restored Windfields sign, the stone gateway pillars that originally framed the farm and the Northern Dancer cemetery, where 11 horses, including Windfields Farm’s most famous sire, Northern Dancer, are buried. For anyone unfamiliar, in 1964 he was the first Canadian-born horse to win the Kentucky Derby.

The 1927 farm was originally established as Parkwood Stables by Col. R.S. McLaughlin, President of General Motors, where it was home to both show horses and racehorses. In 1950 the farm was sold to business magnate E. P. Taylor and from the late-1960s to mid-1980s Windfields became world famous for its thoroughbred stallions.

Somewhere on the property, I believe down a walking trail, is another cemetery known as the Trillium Horse Cemetery; here lie the remains of several more Windfields horses, including Lady Angela who, as Northern Dancer’s grandmother, is seen as the matriarch of this dynasty. I was unable to see this today but it’s my understanding that it is a fenced area in the woods, with a small plaque outside, and the grounds are completely overgrown.

Nearby, as you pass through streets with names associated with horse racing, is the Windfields Stone House. Built in the 1850s as a Gothic revival home for the Shand family it was acquired by Col. McLaughlin in 1928 from another owner, William Jewell. In 1952, once acquired by E.P. Taylor, there were significant alterations turning it into a Colonial Revival estate house. Today, like the farm, the building belongs to Ontario Tech University. However, unlike the farm which was fenced off and patrolled by security, I could go right up to this building and look inside the front windows.

🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎

07/14/2026

“From 1839 to the late 1860s, a military blockhouse stood at the intersection of Bloor and Sherbourne Streets. This small, two-storey fort served a defensive purpose. Constructed of square logs, it could house up to 20 soldiers on the top floor and 24 on the ground floor, where stoves were used for cooking and warmth. The upper level sat diagonally to the lower one, allowing for easier surveillance and for better defense.

The Sherbourne blockhouse was one of three built after the Rebellion of 1837, when insurgents led by William Lyon Mackenzie marched south on Yonge Street demanding the establishment of responsible government in Upper Canada. While Toronto's defenses had traditionally focused on protecting the city from naval attack, the blockhouses were built to guard against rebel raids from the north.

The military use of the blockhouses declined rapidly as new weaponry made them difficult to defend and as threats to Toronto decreased. By the 1850s, discharged soldiers were living in the Sherbourne blockhouse, windows having been cut in the log walls to make the building more hospitable. Artists appreciated the romantic and nostalgic aspect of the remaining structure and frequently depicted it in their work. Sam Blake, the last owner, had the Sherbourne blockhouse demolished in the late 1860s.”

07/01/2026

What am I doing this Canada Day? 🇨🇦 Researching the tragedy of “Canada’s Titanic”, the wreck of the Empress of Ireland on 29 May 1914 in the St. Lawrence River. 🚢

Just two years after the Titanic and two months before the start of World War One, the story of the Empress of Ireland is often overlooked. However, with the deaths of 1,012 passengers and crew as the ship sank in just 14 minutes after being pierced by another ship, it is Canada’s worst peacetime maritime disaster. Only 217 passengers and 248 crew survived.

Toronto has a significant connection at Mount Pleasant Cemetery with family memorials such as the Cullen stone and a large Salvation Army memorial dedicated to the 167 members on board (though only 22 are buried here) who perished while en route to a conference.

Prior to the disaster, the Empress of Ireland was a significant immigration ship, bringing over 117,000 settlers to Canada on ninety-six voyages between 1906 and 1914. My great-grandmother Dorothy Harvey, her younger brother Henry Cowley Harvey and her mother, my grgr-grandmother, Naomi Barrett Harvey, arrived in Canada on 10 May 1907 having travelled Second Class from England on the Empress of Ireland to meet my grgr-grandfather Thomas Watts Harvey who was already established in Canada.

05/25/2026

Many people wonder about the relationship in Toronto between the old Don Jail and Bridgepoint Health Hospital (formerly Riverview Hospital). Why were a jail and a hospital sharing a site?!

In fact, the history of these two institutions dates back to the mid-1800s when Toronto was becoming aware that it needed to provide social supports for many of its marginalized citizens. And so came about the plans for both a “reform jail” that would help rehabilitate, rather than punish, criminals who convicted relatively minor crimes, and a House of Refuge for, in the words of the time, “the vagrant, the dissolute, and idiots”. At this time in Toronto social supports were not managed by the government, but rather provided by individuals and charitable organizations - often with a religious affiliation; the idea that the city should have some responsibility for these citizens was a relatively new concept.

In 1856 Toronto paid £10,000 to purchase 119 acres on the east side the Don River from the Scadding Estate to be used for the two facilities and farmland that would be worked by the prisoners and help make the two institutions self-sufficient. It is hard to imagine today, but when the site was purchased the Don River was clean, and this was an almost idyllic location far away from the polluted and crime-ridden city.

The House of Refuge opened in 1860 and the Don Jail opened in 1864. However it was quickly apparent that many of those sent to the jail were, in fact, people experiencing homelessness, mental illness, and/or alcohol addiction and would be better supported by the House of Refuge. Right from the beginning there were deep ties between the hospital and the jail.

Unfortunately for the city’s poor and struggling, just shy of 10 years after it was built, the 100-bed House of Refuge was converted into a hospital to deal with the 1869 smallpox epidemic. When that crisis passed the site never reverted back to a refuge. It now operated as the Riverdale Isolation Hospital focusing on infectious diseases including diphtheria, polio, measles and scarlet fever, as well as continuing to manage smallpox outbreaks. The original House of Refuge was torn down in 1894. Various buildings and different wings were added to the site over time, each dedicated to a specific illness, with the main buildings erected around 1904. Over time, with vaccinations and the reduction in epidemics, the hospital's focus shifted to long-term care and rehabilitation. To reflect these changes, in 1957 the hospital dropped the word Isolation and simply became The Riverdale Hospital. It was renamed again in 2002, becoming Bridgepoint, a hospital that specializes in rehabilitation.

The 1963 modernist Riverdale Hospital structure was torn down in 2013-2014 to make way for the modern facility that is on site today. At that time, Bridgepoint also took over the old Don Jail, a heritage designated building which had been sitting vacant since 1977, converting most of the building into office space for the hospital while also preserving much of the heritage. The east wing of the Don Jail that had been constructed in 1958 and operated until 2013 was also demolished at this time.

And so, the two sites that once began as a tandem social welfare project for Toronto, are not only historically connected through their shared ideologically beginnings but they are now physically fused together. Perhaps a jail and a hospital on the same site is not as strange as it might first seem…

05/18/2026

At the busy intersection of Dufferin and Steeles, spanning the Toronto and Vaughan borders, there was once the small rural community of Fisherville.

Named, unsurprisingly, after the Pennsylvanian German Fisher family who settled in the area in 1797, there are very few reminders or surviving pieces of heritage near the hub of the old community but bits of Fisherville have been preserved - if you know where to look.

There is a street nearby named Fisherville Road and a TDSB school, Fisherville Senior Public School, that help keep the name relevant. And if you can manage to catch a glance north while speeding along Steeles, just east of Dufferin, you might see a battered old blue plaque that was erected in 1975 communicating that this was Fisherville.

Tucked in behind that, on the rise of a hill and heading back into the valley that leads to a branch of the West Don River, are the remains of the Fisherville United Church, previously the Fisherville Presbyterian Church, cemetery. In 1967 the surviving stones were gathered into an interesting shaped cairn and have been somewhat preserved. Behind that, heading into the brush that made me feel like I was back in Scarborough at the expansive rear section of my grandparent's property overlooking Highland Creek, there are the remains of at least 7 headstone bases which may be a more accurate indication of where some of these early settlers are buried. The cemetery is easily accessible as a pedestrian but although there are sidewalks the area is not exactly friendly for walkers; this is the domain of fast moving vehicles and we heard more than one expletive hurled out a car window.

Despite this being the only in-situ remainder of Fisherville, none of the actual Fisher family are buried here. Jacob Fisher's granddaughter Elizabeth, for example, married fellow Pennsylvanian German settler Daniel Stong and they built the buildings and farmed the land that Black Creek Pioneer Village (now The Village at Black Creek) was established around. A little bit to the west of Fisherville, at Steeles and Jane, the property became Elizabeth’s after the early deaths of her father John Fisher, who died before he could even clear the lot, and then her only brother who died during the War of 1812. Thus, in a way, BCPV actually owes its roots to the Fishers as well. Elizabeth and her husband are buried in the Kaiserville Townline Cemetery which, like their grain barn, first home and second home, is original to the site.

The Fisherville Presbyterian Church was started in 1832 by David Smellie and John Brock/Brack/Brach. The cemetery may have been in use as early as that date but the oldest surviving headstone dates from 1840, 17-year old Isabella, wife of William Watson. In 1856 the congregation built the church that still stands, albeit a little west. The stucco-covered wood framed building was saved from development in the area and moved to Black Creek Pioneer Village in 1960. It stands beside the cemetery mentioned above, in the original location of the Kaiserville Townline Church. The church is open for regular visitors to the site and is often used for modern weddings. Across the way is the Manse, built for yet another church but set-up in the village as if it were this church’s manse. I worked at BCPV for a few seasons, this was one of my favourite buildings to work in and when it was quiet, which it often was at this lonely end of the village, I would wander over to the church and cemetery. The Townline cemetery is visible and has, in the past, sometimes been accessible, but most often is simply viewed from the fence in the Village. (You can also catch glimpses of both the church and the cemetery if you quickly look south-east when forced by all the fast moving transport trucks to blast through the busy intersection of Jane and Steeles.)

What of church founders David Smellie and John Brack? Despite an inaccurate 1933 newspaper article stating that they were both buried in the church cemetery, David Smellie and his family actually rest at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto. The Smellie property was later used to house the Langstaff Industrial Jail Farm, which was developed to get prisoners, including women, away from places like the overcrowded Don Jail and working out in fresh air. As for John Brack, it seems he and several family members were all buried here but at some point, presumably after 1933, were all moved to Maple Cemetery. It is unknown if all the remains were moved or just the markers. One of the family monuments that contains many names, appears to have been completed for or after the move to Maple and I surmise it was engraved to include everyone who did not have a stone at Fisherville.

The names that do appear on markers that have been cut and fit into the stone and concrete cairn include Coleman, Conacher, Dunoon, Halls, Hord, Long, Maxwell, McCrackin, Smith, Troyer, Watson and Young.

Of these, Troyer is the name that may be familiar to anyone who grew up or passed by the Fisherville area, where North York met the Township of Vaughan, because the octagonal barn that was built for Samuel Troyer in the 1880s stood as a landmark in the area until late 1977. At that time it was dismantled, and despite some inaccurate reports that it was demolished, it too was moved west. But waaayyy further west than the Fisherville Church! The Troyer barn, later known as the Troyer-Fraser barn, was reassembled in Milton, Ontario at what was then the Ministry of Agriculture Museum. The site, now known as Country Heritage Park, proudly displays this other little piece of Fisherville history, and it is easily viewed as you pass in either direction along the 401 highway. (And if you are wondering about the addition of the name Fraser - the Troyer barn and property later came into the possession of prominent men's clothier, Jack Fraser, who used it to house his prize winning cattle.)

Fisherville's other claim to fame is its place in medical history. What is today the massive gated Sanofi Pasteur complex, on the south side of Steeles and just east of Dufferin, was once the site of Jacob Fisher's southern property where he built his saw and grist mills. On a remaining 58-acre portion of the land, which had been subdivided over time, the Connaught Antitoxin Laboratories and University Farm opened in 1917. Named after the Duke of Connaught and run by Dr. John Gerald "Gerry" Fitzgerald, the site housed labs and horse stables. It was here that, using horses as living antitoxin producers, massive amounts of tetanus and meningitis serums were produced. (A little west, running southwest from Steeles, you may take note of the street named Gerry Fitzgerald Drive and recognize its connection to the area.)

In 1923, Connaught Laboratories began a sixty-year run of supplying all of Canada with insulin, which had been pioneered by University of Toronto scientists Dr. Frederick Banting, Charles Best and Dr. James Collip, under lab director Prof. J.J. R. Macleod. With Connaught Labs able to mass produce insulin, the university’s Fisherville site became a leader in biomedical research. The site is also associated with, among others, polio and smallpox vaccines.

In 1972 the University of Toronto sold Connaught Laboratories to the Canadian Development Corporation and it became a for-profit organization that has developed into the current Sanofi Pasteur business, the largest company in the world dedicated only to vaccine production.

And so, while it may seem that Toronto and Vaughan's once rural community of Fisherville is lost, this is far from the truth. From the street and school names, the little pioneer cemetery that is still standing guard over the area, the moved and preserved church visited by museum-goers and wedding celebrants each year to the moved and preserved octagonal barn that is, at a minimum, seen by thousands on the highway each year, Fisherville lives on. And where the branch of the west Don River still flows south through Jacob Fisher’s 1797 land grant, life-saving vaccines that are used around the world are researched and produced daily.

P.S. On our way back to the car from the Fisherville cemetery, I spotted an old survey marker. I'm not sure of the date and despite a stint working at a museum about a provincial land surveyor, I don't know how exactly it is used. But it is another tiny piece of history linking back to a time, not that long ago, when the area was largely undeveloped.

04/25/2026