historical walking tour of - Toronto Public Library

Yonge Street looking north from St.Clair Avenue, 1912
DEER PARK: AN OVERVIEW HISTORY
Boundaries
eer Park is a Toronto neighbourhood
Dflanking Yonge Street from the
Canadian Pacific Railway tracks in the south
to the old Toronto Belt Line Railway Bridge
at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in the north.
St. Clair Avenue between the Rosedale
Ravine (Vale of Avoca) and the Nordheimer
Ravine is the main east·west artery.!
Traversing Deer Park is the Davenport
Ridge, as the escarpment south of St. Clair
Avenue is sometimes known. It was once
the steep shoreline of a much larger ancient
glacial lake, Lake Iroquois. This predecessor
of Lake Ontario was formed after the last ice
age began its northern recession thousands
of years ago. The hill divides Deer Park in
two, the upper plain north of St. Clair and
the lower plain south of Summerhill
Avenue. In earlier times, the grade of this
steep hill, particularly around Summerhill,
presented an obstacle to those who had tol
climb it or drive on it with horse and
wagon.
Land surveys and building Yonge Street
When John Graves Simcoe was appointed
the first lieutenant·governor of Upper
4
Canada in 1791, he saw the need for a mil·
itary and colonization road north from Lake
Ontario to Lake Simcoe and beyond, made
imperative once the Town of York (Toronto)
was established as the provincial capital in
1793. The deputy provincial surveyor,
Augustus Jones, began to survey the road on
February 26, 1794. With the help of the sol·
diers of the Queen's Rangers, the road was
opened to Holland Landing in 1796.
Simcoe called the road Yonge Street in
honour of his friend, Sir George Yonge, then
the Secretary of State for War in the British
Parliament. Generally, Yonge Street fol·
lowed a straight north·south line, but occa·
sionally the road builders had to deviate its
course around natural barriers, as historian
Henry Scadding described in 1873:
Just after Deer Park, to avoid a long
ravine which lay in the line of the
direct route northward, the road
swerved to the left and then
descended, passing over an embank·
ment. .. the apex of the long triangle
(known as the Gore Lot) of no man's
land that for a great while lay deso·
late between the original and subse·
quent lines of Yonge Street. 2
During the surveying, lots were laid out
on either side of Yonge Street, all rectangu·