Hundreds of spectator from as far as Albany and Montreal gathered near a tavern east of Hamilton, Canada West, to witness a dogfight when the mayor and 20 police dashed up on sleighs to put a stop to things, as reported in the Hamilton Spectator, February 2, 1857. It had been rumoured for a long […]
Category: Unfamiliar History
Militia officers may be laughed at
Service in the militia of Upper Canada in September 1853 was compulsory, but the law had become a mockery, according to this account, reprinted from the Guelph Advertiser. Galt has long been a place of notoriety in the petty annals of the neighborhood, and when nothing else has been available, even a court martial to […]
Dead horses, cats, dogs, manure in Toronto’s drinking water
A call to supply York, soon to be Toronto, with clean, safe water is issued by the Canadian Freeman, April 5, 1832. York Bay. It is really astonishing how the magistrates can allow the horrible nuisance which now appears on the face of this Bay. All the filth of the town—dead horses, dogs, cats, manure, […]
A tavern in the backwoods
Towns, villages and farms hugged ocean, river and lake from St. John to Niagara Falls in the 1830s while settlers were pouring into Upper Canada to hack out the forests and establish farms farther inland. In taverns and their own first rough shelters, new arrivals faced grim accommodation. Newly arrived settler, naturalist and author Catharine […]
20,000 Irish die here in 1847 famine
A 46-foot granite Celtic Cross, the Irish Memorial Historic Site at Grosse Île, commemorates the Irish famine refugees who died in Canada during the Great Potato Famine. Erected by the Ancient Order of the Hibernians in America, 1909. Pandemics 1832-1847 From my book, About Canada, Toronto, Civil Sector Press, 2012. Ireland lost a quarter of […]
Killer cholera enters North America
Pandemics 1832-1847 From my book, About Canada, Toronto, Civil Sector Press, 2012. Some 52,000 immigrants, mostly destitute Irish, arrived at Quebec in 1832, carrying with them the cholera pandemic to first reach North America. An estimated 9,000 people died of cholera in Lower and Upper Canada in the first pandemic. By 1872, an estimated 20,000 […]
Sodom and Gomorrah
Canadian Freeman, York (Toronto), Upper Canada rails against the town’s countless whore houses, one in a house controlled by a police magistrate, in this item published May 26, 1831. “And the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Lord out of heaven. And he destroyed these cities, and all the country about, […]
Perils of immoral theatre
Excerpts: That lewd insinuations, immodest words, and more immodest action, are admitted upon the stage;—that scenes are exhibited shocking to female delicacy, and pestiferous to the minds of youth; and that these things too often form the zest of entertainment, and the glory of the performance, is as notorious as that the sun shines at […]
Mississauga Indians ask protection from drunk, wicked white men
In 1826, a group of Christian Mississauga First Nation people settled on a Methodist Church mission on the banks of the Credit River, in what is now Canada’s sixth largest city. Their Credit Indian Village thrived for a dozen years, with as many as 50 homes, a school, hospital, church, board sidewalks, “two public […]
Teetotallers curb booze
Booze 1829 — 1920 From my book, About Canada, Toronto, Civil Sector Press, 2012. Curbed by a holy war waged by temperance advocates and teetotalers, Canada’s nineteenth century booze pandemic peaked in the 1820 and 1830s. Hundreds of temperance societies sprang up within a few years. They were led mostly by Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians […]