Part 1 Beginnings
Chapter One
The Victorian Era (1837-1901)
Great events make me quiet and calm; it is only trifles that irritate my nerves.
Victoria Regina (1819 – 1901)
…in a letter to King Leopold of Belgium (April 4th, 1848)
William James Deadman achieved celebrity status after the Dick trial in 1946, but the 61 year old forensic pathologist was well-known and highly regarded in his field well before that. To fully understand the person that William Deadman became, we must look at the family background and the social, political and economic atmosphere of the late Victorian Era that shaped him. He was 12 at the time of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and 16 at the end of her reign in 1901. It was the apogee of the British Empire. Five decades later, the Empire was almost gone. As the new century opened, it was a time of great political, social and economic changes in Europe and North America. During those five decades, he participated in two world wars and a Great Depression. He had seen his profession of medicine evolve into a highly scientific endeavour and had done pioneering work in the new field of forensic pathology even before he was asked to examine the torso found on the mountainside.
He lived in interesting times. People sometimes muse that the rate of change in society, in science, in politics is faster now than it has ever been. But if one compares the changes of an age to their starting point, there is no question that the rate of change in the 19th century and early years of the 20th far surpassed anything before or since. When he was born in 1885, Canada was just sixteen and a half years old and most of the modern conveniences we take for granted did not exist. When he died in 1965, virtually all of the modern developments of today were present in his world, at least in nuclear form. Automobiles, aeroplanes, space satellites, radio, television, transistors and computers were all invented during his lifetime.
Canada – The Victorian Era – Pre 1837.
William Deadman was born at the peak of the British Empire’s power and influence in a part of Ontario that was not very far removed from the frontier and was very much influenced by it. To the modern reader, this period has a distant, almost unreal quality about it but it was very real to those who lived through it. In 1837, when the 18 year old Victoria ascended the throne of Great Britain, the colonies in British North America, (Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Lower and Upper Canada – known as ‘the Canadas’) had less than a century of history. Britain had acquired the Canadas from France in what became known as the Seven Years War (1754-1763)1. At that time Upper Canada (later Ontario) was Indian country with a few settlers of French extraction in the extreme eastern and western parts – around Windsor and Detroit and Kingston. They were also scattered along the voyageurs’ trade routes into the upper lakes, notably Sault Ste. Marie. Making this wilderness a British colony became a high priority for the government in London. This became even more urgent after the secession of the American colonies to the south in the American War of Independence (1775-1783). During that war a large number of British Empire Loyalists fled northward to the Canadas and incorporating them into the struggling colonies became a further priority.
Three decades later, Britain and the United States of America were at war again. In the War of 1812-1814, Britain was engaged in fighting Napoleon in Europe. But the small army of British regulars in the colonies had to rely on Indian warriors and the colonists themselves to fight the battles. The outcome of the war was largely a stalemate but in the new Canadian colonies the ragtag mix of aboriginal people, voyageurs, settlers of both French and British origin and the newly arrived American settlers, not all of them loyalists, were beginning to develop a sense of national identity. The basic institutions of civilized society began to develop in the towns but the settlers in rural areas were still struggling to survive from day to day. It was a far cry from the civilization known to most European settlers or even in the more settled colonies that made up the new United States of America.
In 1837, Victoria’s first year as Queen there were many further troubles both internal and external. Not only had the Americans continued to covet what they referred to as their fourteenth colony, but often heavy-handed attempts by colonial administrators to unite the colonies of Lower and Upper Canada led to rebellions in both. William Lyon Mackenzie led a rebellion in Upper Canada that was finally put down in January 1838. Mackenzie fled to the United States and was arrested and charged under the Neutrality Act. But the rebels continued to agitate for the overthrow of British rule until another decisive defeat at the battle of the Windmill, later in 1838.
In Lower Canada, the rebellion was more serious and at one point led to the declaration of martial law. The Parti patriote, led by James Stuart and Louis-Joseph Papineau had been challenging the rulings of the colonial administration (known as the Château Clique) for year before 1837 when it broke out into open warfare. After initial successes, the rebellion was finally put down by the British in November 1838.
Since the successful breakaway of the American 13 colonies in 1777 was still fresh in the minds of many people in Britain, these events were viewed very seriously. In 1838 Victoria appointed John George Lambton, Earl of Durham as Governor in Chief of the Canadas with special powers as Lord High Commissioner. His report on The Affairs of British North America recommended that the governments of Lower and Upper Canada be united into a single parliament modelled on Westminster. The report was not well received by French-Speaking Canadians because of the implied – even stated – long-term goal that the French would gradually be absorbed by the English. Lord Durham’s report of the next year, did not settle it and it was not until 1840 that the United Canada Act (Act of Union) was passed by the British Parliament.
The Mid-19th Century – Immigration and Expansion.
It was a time of rapid expansion. Settlers, mostly from the British Isles, flooded in seeking land and a chance to start anew. By the time that the Deadman family emigrated from England in the early 1850s, settlement in Upper Canada was firmly established along the northern shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie and was spreading north into the hinterlands.
It was a fluctuating mass of political, social and cultural streams, now combining, now separating. The mid-19th century population while largely either of British or French origin, contained also groups of Germans, Scandinavians and Dutch. Even the label ‘British’ hid a wide diversity of cultural groups, who did not consider themselves to be the same – the Scots, the Irish (some Protestant, some Catholic) and the English. To add to the mix, within each of these groups were small divisions – adventuresome aristocrats from England, middle class people looking for more freedom from class restrictions, or perhaps just lured by the chance of a more open market place.
There were Highland and Lowland Scots. Will’s mother was a Carruthers from the parish of Applegarth in Dumfriesshire. There were tenant farmers from Ulster, more prosperous and land-owning than the poor tenant farmers from the south of Ireland – both groups of which would come in even larger numbers after the potato famine years of the 1840s. Many came more often as a means to enter the United States more easily. Canada was to experience a net emigration until the very late years of the 19th century, that is, more people left Canada than arrived. Only natural increase provided by necessarily large farm or industrial working class families kept the overall population total rising slowly over these years. In 1896 17,000 individuals arrived in Canada and 37,000 left, compared to 1912, when 400,000 immigrants came to the country and 300,000 departed.i
Transiency was a common feature of life, whether rural or urban. For example, it is estimated that only a third to at most three fifths of the inhabitants of the city of Hamilton in the mid-19th century was comprised of permanent residents. Immigrants were much more common, for Hamilton at mid-century, only 9% of the work force were actually born in Canada.
In the early years of settlement, all land was legally held by the Crown, then ‘alienated’ into private hands by sale, outright grant, Loyalist grant and military grant – not forgetting the clergy reserves.2 No clear definition of who might fit in these categories was ever agreed upon, and the bulk of this land lay wild and unused until mid-century, acting mostly as an unwanted check on growth and development. Land was Canada’s chief commodity and revenue earner for the government of the colony as it was for settlers. It was viewed as the principle means by which a settled, orderly and loyal populace could be placed in the province. For people, land represented freedom, and self-sufficiency. Even a small, poor farm was often felt to be better than seasonal labour in the cities and towns of mid-century.
In 1826, the need for revenues and the fact that many of the grantees had either not improved their land, or had not even settled on it, forced the legislature to borrow the system used in New South Wales of selling lands at auction. The government set a reserve price for each lot prior to each auction – the bidding winner was allowed to pay in yearly instalments until 1837, when full cash at the time of the auction was required. The purchaser had to promise to erect a dwelling and cut a road on at least half the frontage of their land within three years. They had to prove all this by affidavit as well as proving they had settled on the land within six months of purchase.
But this did not solve the problem of all the land which remained unoccupied, although granted, in the years prior to 1837. It is estimated for example that in Peel County four fifths of the land granted to that date lay wild and unsettled, but unavailable for settlement.ii The situation was similar in Simcoe County where the Carruthers family had settled and where William Deadman grew up.3 Settlement was slowed, and even those with farms had uncertain ownership in many cases as these lawsuits continued.
Speculators were thus a problem and bar to open settlement in Ontario’s colonial days. David Gagan notes in his study of Peel County that this group represented 3% of land owners, but held at least 10% of the land – sometimes leaving it as bush, in other cases sub-dividing into small rural lots which were rented or leased out. Allan MacNab in Wentworth county and beyond dealt in land in this fashion also – buying and selling parcels throughout the province as he needed cash, or in barter transactions (hard cash being rare in the early years), or when he needed political favours or needed to grant them. It should be noted, that far from being a British style landed aristocrat – which was the hope of this class – these speculators usually lived on the edge of bankruptcy, then not mitigated by limited liability laws.
Ordinary settlers had to wait an average of 13 years to obtain the inspection report which would allow them to get a Crown deed to their land. Some who had not been able to improve their land lost it at auction despite the fact that senior government officials and land speculators held their land as long as they wished without improvement and without losing it. This may explain one reason why so many passed through Canada on their way to the United States.
Canada was overwhelmingly rural. The largest city, Montreal, had a population just over 100,000. Toronto was half that. Only 25% of the total population lived even in incorporated settlements. Hamilton, for example, incorporated as a town in 1833 with a population around 1300-1400, and by 1846, when it incorporated as a city it had a population just under 10,000. Not until the 1920s were more people to live in incorporated settlements in Canada than in rural areas, and even then, incorporation was possible for any place with a thousand people or more. The 19th century, however, was the golden age of rural Canada. Not only did most people live in rural areas, either as farmers, or farm workers, but they often lived in villages and small towns whose economies depended on agriculture. Even the growing cities such as Hamilton owed a good deal of their growth to the expansion of agriculture, in its more settled form in Ontario, and by the late 19th century, to service the settlement of the prairies. More importantly, Canada was rural in its mindset, even in the cities. The rhythms of agriculture and nature dominated daily life.
Technology
In terms of technology, like the rest of the world, the early 19th century was a time of wood, wind and sail, though from the 1830s, some sailing ships on the lakes were steam assisted. From the middle of the century on, steam power took over. Steamships now ‘sailed’ the Great Lakes, steam powered grist and saw mills continued to convert the remaining forests to lumber, and convert the dominant wheat crop into flour. In the new factories, steam operated the machinery in a world now turning away from crafts to unskilled labour. Steam carried produce from farms to cities on the new railroads. The rails also carried settlers to central points inland and farther, while perennially bad roads hampered local transportation.
Both the Deadman and Carruthers families came out about 1850. It is not recorded how they came but the conditions of travel then were very different from today. The first steam-assisted sailing ship crossed the Atlantic in 1833. Samuel Cunard submitted a bid in 1839 to the British government to carry mail across the Atlantic – his service began in 1840. The first trip took 12 days from Liverpool to Halifax. By the 1850s he was using iron ships, and by the 1860s had changed from paddle wheels to screw propellers. More successful in Canadian terms was Sir Hugh Allan. He founded a shipping company in 1819, which became the main rival to Cunard in the 1850s. Most ships out of Canada to Britain and return were Allan liners. He invested in banking and railroads after that becoming very rich indeed and one reason Montreal became Canada’s financial capital of the day. The telegraph was introduced in the late 1840s and transatlantic cables in the 1850s and 60s. The world was becoming a smaller place a century before Marshal McLuhan popularised the term ‘global village’.
Life as lived on the Ontario frontier in the 19th century
In the 19th century as today, an individual’s skill set determined life in its entirety. Back then most men were, or aspired to be, farmers owning their own land. William’s father was a farmer all his life and proud of it. He worked for others until 1891 when he was able to buy his own farm. Whether one would come to own land and farm it profitably, or at least wrest a living from it, was determined by a whole range of factors. Farmers, then as now, were jacks-of-all-trades – able to build and repair machinery, to plough and plant, to erect houses and barns, to keep books, to sell and market their produce and to adjust to changing technology and changing times.
We often think of the 19th century as some kind of unchanging world of simple verities floating in a golden haze, often because of that peculiar human trait of looking back to a golden age, but also bolstered by today’s pioneer villages which are themselves perhaps a product of this longing for a golden time. What these constructed memories leave out is the hardship of a life battling weather, climate, disease, injury, crop failure – all of which could be traumatically disastrous in an age without sound scientific medicine, without the modern array of fertilizers and agricultural technology, and without social services of all types.
Hard work and family were often the keys to success, but family less often than we might think. Many of the agricultural workers had come from other places, leaving family behind and attempted to make it without this support. Others were luckier, or perhaps more sensible, in that extended families came and settled close enough to one another to offer this form of communal assistance, as is the case of the Deadman family. Some were not even experienced in agriculture, but merely lusted after the estate of having one’s own estate. Again, the Deadman family were luckier, or perhaps more sensible than some in that they were experienced farmers.
Transiency was a regular part of this existence. Sometimes families moved on because they could not establish themselves in their first choice of residence – and in other cases they moved because all the good, affordable land was already taken – either by other farmers, or in the early days of settlement by non-resident land owners. But underneath all this, was a rational attempt by individuals and families to sustain themselves firstly, then to establish themselves and to gain some degree of social standing. Social standing is a factor often forgotten in bloodless analyses of history, yet it is one of the most important determinants of history. Farmers were the least transient group in 19th century society: some 50% stayed on their lands, once cleared and farmed. There was another kind of transiency also. Individuals and families moved easily among cities, towns and farms, and had a network of family and friends in both worlds.
Our modern predilection to divide urban from rural as two separate worlds did not reflect 19th century reality. Farmers were the single largest group of workers in 19th century Ontario, but could and did set their hands to other work in the forests, or in towns. In the 1860s, farmers made up somewhere between 33 and 37% of the male workforce, while industrial workers counted as only 12% at most.iii Occupations which we today consider to be middle class: clerks, professionals, business owners, and so on, made up only 5% of Ontario’s workforce.iv If farmer’s sons were included in this statistic, the percentage rose to 50, though some farmer’s sons did indeed leave farming for other town occupations, or left the area entirely.
Women are not usually counted in these reckonings, but farm women were a necessary and important part of the rural economy, and also functioned as the first line of health care within families. Women grew the herbs and roots used to prepare 19th century medicines. Women were more often than doctors, the ones who delivered babies, bandaged cuts, and even set broken bones. Even in the semi-rural cities, towns and villages of the era, women were essential to the family economy, taking in laundry, or working as de facto healers, or midwives and nurses, and often working at other factory jobs. Middle class women ran the household, controlling the accounts, raising money for good causes, and raising children. In the earliest years of settlement, when the forest had to be cleared first, there was a shared existence based on this back-breaking toil for both men and women.
Wheat was king in Ontario until the mid-19th century, when the early farming techniques which had been employed began to exhaust the land for wheat farming. Early settlers in Simcoe County, as in most frontier areas, planted wheat one season, then let the land lie fallow for one, and never used manure as fertilizer, despite these methods being commonly criticized by scientific farmers from elsewhere. They had good reason to employ these techniques in early days, however. Most of the land was laboriously cleared from forest, probably at best, five acres per year, and crops had to be planted quickly in order to live and wheat prices were high and brought in needed cash in a way no other produce did at that time. Farm animals were usually left to forage in the still encroaching forest and thus using their manure as fertilizer would have introduced weed seeds from the forest foraging.
Only immigrants who brought a large amount of capital with them were able to practice mixed farming. And even those few who did, found themselves undersold by Americans who imported cattle to market in Toronto. Those who attempted to sell in local markets, such as that in Barrie, were stymied by the lack of a good system of marketing their beef or produce. The best they could do was to attempt to sell their beef by going door-to-door. In all cases, freight rates were extremely high until the development of railroads in the later 1850s and 60s. By the mid-1850s, however, when the Deadmans and Carruthers had settled in Simcoe County, less than a quarter of the land was under wheat, and enough farmland was opened to employ modern techniques of mixed farming. By this time, a market in Simcoe County had developed for both livestock and crops other than wheat.
Yet, before this first great financial collapse, much of what was to become Ontario was set in place. The 1840s and 50s were a time of growth, growing prosperity and optimism. A thinly populated, almost subsistence economy was replaced in these years by commercial agriculture whose produce flowed through Ontario’s two commercial centres, Toronto and Hamilton. These places became the first industrial cities in the province also, largely by supplying the hard goods farmers wanted, and indeed needed, in order to pursue profitable commercial agriculture.
Surveys and Townships
Politically, Upper Canada was divided into townships and districts. The surveying of townships began under the first governor of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe who was also responsible for moving the Capitol of the colony from Newark (now Niagara-on-the-Lake) to York, a town on the north shore of Lake Ontario and therefore somewhat farther from the frontier with the new United States of America, which still made periodic rumblings about acquiring its fourteenth colony.
Unlike England, where the lots were very irregular and the properties had been there for many centuries, Upper Canada was mostly forest without settlement and the few squatters that were there could be easily displaced. Simcoe determined that all the land was to be surveyed in a square grid pattern before it was opened up to settlers. Surveyors were sent in and any squatters they encountered were forced to conform their holdings to the new grid system once the survey had been completed. This process continued from about 1785 right through the 19th century as new areas were opened up to settlement. Tecumseth Township was surveyed in the 1820s after the War of 1812-14 and when new settlers were flowing into Upper Canada at an ever increasing rate.
Counties were realities only for land registration until 1851, when counties became the principal sub-divisions of the province of Canada West. Simcoe County, named after the former Governor, was the first county to be surveyed in the northern part of the Home District. In its original form, it was enormous, extending from the existing York and Peel counties north to Georgian bay, East to Ontario County and west into the Indian lands, known as the ‘Queen’s Bush’ that were to became Dufferin and Grey Counties.
Picking names for the many townships that were being carved out of the bush must have been a challenge for legislators, cartographers and surveyors. This was usually left up to the surveyors who created them and by this time, most of the good names had been used, creating some amusing anomalies. It is noted that in Simcoe County, Gwillimbury honoured Governor Simcoe’s wife’s family name, Gwillim. Sir Peregrine Maitland, Governor at the time of this act, named Flos, Tiny and Tay after his wife, Sarah’s pet dogs. The names of several townships named in the act, Alba, Java, Merlin and Zero seem to have disappeared. They never appeared on the maps. Some names were changed. For example, Aurelia became Orillia on later maps.
The origins of Tosorontio are less clear but it would appear to be a variation on Toronto, a name already used several times. Tecumseth, where the Deadman family farm was located, was clearly named after the famous Indian chief but the unusual spelling may again be a variation on Tecumseh, a town in Essex County. To avoid confusion, Tecumseth Twp. in Simcoe County became known as ‘New Tecumseth.’
Around each concession was a road allowance one chain wide.4 Local landowners were responsible for clearing, building and maintaining the roads that abutted their property. This led to roads of highly varying condition. Many were totally impassable in the spring or extended wet periods. But William’s father was proud of the roads he maintained around his property at the 10th concession, 10th line. He built and maintained a log bridge over the creek on the 10th line. Over the years it was replaced several times, but the concrete bridge that now spans the creek has a brass plaque labelling it the Deadman Bridge.
The system of measures for land was based on the Imperial system of weights and measures and in those days every school child could recite it: 12 inches, 1 foot, 3 feet, 1 yard, 5½ yards, 1 rod, 320 rods, 1 mile, 160 square rods, 1 acre, 640 acres, 1 square mile. A standard surveyor’s chain was 4 rods long, so the road allowance between each concession was 66 feet. Surveyors were hired locally and many had very little training. They established an east-west base line to mark the southern edge of each township, but local topography might dictate where it was placed and the angle from the true east-west in which it ran. The lines between concessions were numbered, usually from the south and west but sometimes in a different way. North-south road allowances were called lines and east-west ones were called roads but again there was considerable variability. Further, the angles between the roads and lines in Tecumseth (and in many other townships) were not even right angles. They incline to the East about 10°. Sometimes townships were irregular geometric shapes. Narrow triangles were called gores – a term derived from seamstress work. This was probably true of Toronto Gore, a township in the Home District northwest of Toronto. However, the district at the head of Lake Ontario around Hamilton was called the Gore District to honour a former governor of Upper Canada.5
By the 1860s, most of the good land in the southern and western parts of the province was taken already. Children – daughters and younger sons of farmers – had either to choose a new, non-agricultural occupation, or move farther north and into the more sparsely settled interior, which is reflected in the Deadman story. Others became tenant farmers – the choice not only of young men who did not yet have the capital to start and own their own land, but of recent immigrants also. Sometimes a son might rent the family farm after the father decided to retire, but needed an income. In 1871, the average number of farms operated by tenants in Ontario was 16%, with a high of 30% in York County, and the lowest at 1% in relatively undeveloped counties such as Manitoulin. Simcoe county stood somewhere in the middle at just short of 15%, probably reflecting the developed state of the southern townships, and the still undeveloped state of much of the northern townships, such as Tecumseth.
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Ontario was still the centre of Canada’s agriculture in 1871, having 47% of all Canada’s farms, 51% of the total improved land, 57% of all horses on farms, 83% of all land that was in wheat, and 46% of all land in hay. By 1871 substantial changes were underway in Ontario’s agriculture. The old dominance of wheat production was giving way to the raising of livestock and later to dairy products such as butter and cheese. With livestock, the cultivation of fodder crops took the place of wheat. Ontario’s population changed gradually over the late 19th century. In 1871 53% of the population were under 20, by 1911, this figure had declined to 43%.
Even then, they had to somehow earn enough to buy their own land. For men, this meant work, sometimes years, as agricultural labourers – for girls it meant staying home until the right man came along, or working as domestics on farms, or in the towns and cities which were now growing with immigration from other lands, or from the farms. These were the fairly limited choices in this early period, choices dependent on the relative success of the first generation of settler.
Added to this, was the depressed state of the economy after the market collapse of 1857, and again in the 1870s. Grain was the principal product of Ontario, and its sale depended on international markets in both Britain and the United States. The economy was to recover by the 1860s, but decline again in the 1870s, this time for a much longer stretch. The financial crisis of 1857-60, a decline in wheat prices, crop failures, and a disruption in sales to the United States after the end of the Civil War constituted a perfect storm, damaging life and prospects for farmers and city dwellers alike. Life in Canada was always to be marked by these short bursts of prosperity and long stretches of stagnation, depending, of course, on one’s ability to move into a trade, or profession or practice which did well despite the general conditions. The band-aids of socialism were still far into the future, as were effective unions. The first task for most was to farm successfully, and to do that land was all.
Tecumseth Township.
Tecumseth Township was created by an act of the House of Assembly of Upper Canada on the 14th of April 1821. In this law, the new county of Simcoe, named after the earlier Lieutenant Governor, John Graves Simcoe was carved out of the northern part of the Home District and the Indian Lands near Lake Simcoe. Will was obviously interested in the district of his upbringing. he had travelled the dirt roads in his youth. He returned to Beeton on many occasions and in the rough notes for his autobiography, he makes reference to:
“Simcoe County – Yonge Street – Holland River, Holland Landing – Kempenfeldt Bay – Barrie – Orillia – Lake Couchiching – Indian Reserve – Severn River – Georgian Bay – Penetang – Wasaga Beach – The Nancy – The Collingwood – Blue Mountains – Nottawasaga River bed – Clay farm land in South – ”v
It is not clear why the name of the township was chosen. It clearly honours the great Chief of the Shawnee, Tecumseh who sided with the British in the War of 1812-1814, and died in the Battle of Moraviantown in 1813. The spelling of many Indian names was variable in those days and some spellings contained in the legislation to create the County of Simcoe had to be changed in later iterations. But the township named after Tecumseh remained as Tecumseth.
After the War of 1812, the soldiers, the Loyalists and many others had been given free land. In 1817, Lieutenant Governor, Francis Gore (after whom the Gore District was named) was determined to improve the problem. The government had no idea who was living where or even if many of them had taken up their free grants. Settlers were required to build on their land, and to build and maintain roads on the peripheries of their holdings. Gore instituted a tax on registered owners who had not done these things and raised considerable revenue. From this arose the requirement on settlers to build roads in lieu of taxes.
In 1819 a system of payment for the new lands was instituted. Poor settlers would get 50 acres free. 100 acres cost £12 and 200 acres cost £30. Land surveyors were given land in payment. Clergy reserves were a continuing problem as many remained undeveloped. This was a major criticism of Lord Durham in his report of 1839. The disputes continued but gradually, a more orderly system emerged. In 1831, most lots in the southern part of Tecumseth Township were taken up but only a few in the north. Even in 1850, about the time that WJDs ancestors were settling in Carrville, only about half of the concession roads in Tecumseth had been opened up.
Because of the rough and heavily forested terrain, the early surveys were notoriously inaccurate resulting in concession lines that did not meet and early settlers discovering that they had cleared land on plots that did not belong to them. It took some time to get all the concession lines and lots clearly marked and the roads cleared through. By the time WJDs father took up land in the 10th concession, 10th line, the township was more settled with a number of small hamlets at intersections. Alliston was at the extreme north-west corner, Cookstown at the extreme north-east corner. Bond Head, the birthplace of Sir William Osler, was on its eastern boundary at the 6th concession; Tottenham at the 3rd concession and 5th line and Beeton at the 8th concession, 10th line. Beeton was almost at the geographic centre.
It is noteworthy that some famous Canadians came from this same area. Sir William Osler, Sir William Mulock from Bond Head, Sir. Frederick Banting was from Barley Creek in that area. Kate Aitken, a CBC Radio personality from the 1950s and ’60s went to Beeton Public School, but as she always claimed, some years later than Bill.
Beeton.
Richard Rorke, (1805-1889) took up land in the new township in 1822. His journal, written during his 25 years in Tecumseth and later in Collingwood was salvaged by his great-great granddaughter, Phyllis Armstrong of Markdale and gives a good picture of life on the frontier in those days.vi He describes the cedar swamps infested with mosquitoes, flies and gnats, (black flies?) He describes encounters with marauding bears and wolves. It is an excellent description of pioneer life.
Although Richard Rorke and William Hammill had settled in this area as early as 1822, the settlement that was to become Beeton really started when Robert Clark purchased land and established a blacksmith shop in 1852. He also sold building lots to new settlers which were cleared to make way for the new village of Clarksville, named after him. A couple of decades later, the main Post Office for Tecumseth was moved into the village and for a time it was known as Tecumseth. At that time, Mr. D.A. Jones was postmaster. Jones had become known as “The Bee King” because he had introduced Italian bees to Canada and had set up a large bee and honey industry in Beeton which became famous all over the new Dominion. When in 1878 it was decided that the name should be changed again because it was too easily confused with Tecumseh Post Office in Essex County, it was called Beeton to honour the Bee King of Canada who was Tecumseth’s largest employer at the time.
“Beeton, in 1885, was a hustling village of some 800 souls, larger by a couple of hundred than it is today. It owed its name to its then outstanding citizen, Mr. D. A. Jones, who expanded his original apiary into one of the largest apiaries in the country at that time. Indeed, he was dubbed by some as the “Bee King of the World”. Indeed he travelled in pursuit of the interests of his business to many countries of the world and imported stock from various European countries. He also imported from Europe a type of thistle which flowered throughout most of the summer, furnishing nectar from his bees, but also furnishing seeds which the wind carried from the roadsides to neighbouring farmers’ fields, to the great annoyance of the farmers in spite of their pride in presence of the Bee King. His factory in the village for the manufacture of supplies for the bee business was one of the mainstays of the village’s industry.” vii
That would have been its heyday. The population of Tecumseth had been 546 in 1829 but had increased to 1410 in 1836 as more settlers flowed in. It was 2491 in 1842 and 3612 in 1850. It slowed somewhat but still reached 4546 in 1861, 4728 in 1871 and 5325 in 1881. By then most of the land was taken up and the depressions of the 1870s and the 1890s were taking their toll. Land had opened up in the Queen’s Bush, the present Grey and Bruce Counties which had attracted many in the 1880s, and when the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1885, many farmers left to take up free land on the great prairies of western Canada. This wave of emigration meant that in the 1891 census, Tecumseth’s population had dropped to 3865, in 1901 it was 3440 and in 1911 it was 2880. By 1937, in the later part of the Great Depression, it was 2639. It has continued to drop since so that in the 1950s the population was less than it had been in 1842.
The Coming of the Railway
The second half of the 19th century was the period in which railway lines were being built everywhere in the rapidly expanding hinterland of Canada West which at Confederation had become the Province of Ontario in the new Dominion of Canada. 1857 the first railroad system, the Great Western Railway, connected the province, not only internally but to markets in both New York State and Michigan. The Grand Trunk Railway, which was eventually to swallow the Great Western carried these rails east to Canada’s first metropolis, Montreal and beyond to Portland Maine and by ship to the imperial centre in England. Canada was politically still a colony, yet now a colony with a large degree of independence to decide how to direct investment and how to develop infrastructure as an added benefit.
Immigration, mainly from the British Isles came as a result of this growth. Among these immigrants were the Deadman family from England and the Carruthers family from Scotland. Their land must have been productive because they were not among the many that moved through British North America to settle in the United States, nor were they devastated by the regular economic problems which plagued Canada until the 1890s.
Hamilton and Toronto companies were in competition northwards into the new townships being opened for colonization. The railways were demanding subsidies from these counties, townships and communities to have the new lines come through their communities and Tecumseth was approached by both the Hamilton and Northwestern Railway and the newly formed South Simcoe Junction Railway, based in Toronto. Mabel Burkholder told it this way:
“At a historic meeting in Clarksville (Beeton) in August,1873, the Northern Railway loop line scheme (i.e. the South Simcoe Junction Railway) versus the Hamilton line was debated before an assembly of 200 people from various parts of the country and the resolutions endorsing the Hamilton line were carried – with a complete rout of the Toronto delegations, thus assuring the success of the Hamilton line.” viii
In the 1870s the Hamilton and North-Western Railway had emerged from the decline of the Great Western Railway(GWR). Both were based in Hamilton but the Great Western struggled to recover from the train disaster in 1857 when a bridge over the Desjardin Canal collapsed, plunging 59 passengers to their deaths.6 Hamilton and Toronto had always been in competition since the early 19th century for domination of the economic life of the colony and province. Eventually Toronto won out because of its larger size and the fact that the town of York had been selected as the provincial capital even before the War of 1812.
But Hamilton won this round and by 1878 the railway was snaking north. It went through Tottenham and Beeton and on to Allandale near Barrie. It continued north-east to Orillia. Another line to Collingwood branched off just north of Will’s childhood farm at Beeton Junction, originally called Allimil. The line ran through the family farm and was an important part of Bill’s childhood recollections. He says:ix
“I learned of Hamilton at an early age. The Hamilton and Allandale branch of the then Grand Trunk Railway ran through my father’s farm. This line of railway had been opened in 1877 as the Hamilton and Northwestern Railway. Passenger and mail trains ran north to Allandale, Collingwood and Meaford, passing through the farm at 10:00 o’clock every week day morning, returning each evening at 6:00 o’clock. The regularity of this schedule was of considerable advantage to those of us on the farm, chronologically speaking. The day of paved highways and automobiles was still to come. Freight trains were even more numerous than passenger trains as freight transportation was still largely in the hands of the railways. The freight trains running through my father’s farm carried the box cars and names of virtually every railway in North America, a feature which contributed very materially to our education in railway matters. Further information concerning Hamilton came annually with the issue of the Stanley Mills Department Store catalogue, and this and its fellow sent out by the T. Eaton Co. of Toronto provided interesting reading for the long winter evenings on the farm. By the time the new issues arrived, the old ones were dog-eared and worn. But even in retirement, they continued to serve a useful purpose.”7
But the Hamilton and North-Western had its own financial troubles due in part to its rapid expansion and the issuing of too many bonds to pay for it. Close to bankruptcy, it was absorbed by the Grand Trunk Railway in 1882.
The Mid-Late 19th Century – Political Visions.
Politically, British North Americans were firm believers in king and parliament as the best form of government yet devised by the human race. The rebellions in Europe of 1848, and the American civil war of the 1860s gave republican democracy an unsavoury reputation to British North American politicians and ordinary people alike. A separate parliament for Canada seemed sensible as long as it remained within the British Empire. True, there were dissidents to this model, especially those heirs of the rebellions of 1837 who dreamed of a U.S. style British North American constitution, but this was not to come until the 1980s. For now, and for more than a century, the dominant political ideology was that of monarchy, common law, parliament and the British connection, whether as empire, or Commonwealth.
A federal, rather than unitary system was chosen for practical reasons. Canadians had then and for a long time to come, a strong pragmatic streak in our national character. Where Britain had one parliament for all its diverse peoples, and the U.S. a federal system, which had resulted in a very bloody civil war, Canada combined the two approaches. There was a desire to emulate Britain exactly, but French Canada would not subsume itself into a centralized state, nor would the Atlantic colonies that did not have municipal government. In fact, in the first parliament of 1867, separatists held a goodly number of seats like today’s Bloc Quebecois – but at that time they were from Nova Scotia whose first provincial politicians after 1867 decided they wanted out of Confederation. So Canada became a federal state, with a central federal legislature and provincial legislatures and a constitutional form which devised a separation of powers.
From that time, Canadians had to become great negotiators and compromisers, devising on the fly as circumstances changed. The complex dance of relationships between provinces and federal parliament, between ethnic groups, between municipalities and provincial legislatures, and between Canada as a whole and the Empire and Commonwealth, the United States and other countries came to signify Canada. This was a dance which required an ability to learn new steps, and new rhythms which changed sometimes in mid dance. This political need was to permeate Canadian society at all levels, whether rural or urban.
In the years just before Bill Deadman’s birth, his country had come through a long drawn out baptism of fire, but one which, while not quite over, was drawing to a close. Sir John Alexander Macdonald, first prime minister and the chief architect of Canada, envisioned a nation state organized federally, but with the preponderance of power settled on Ottawa. He clearly saw the necessity of expansion across the lightly populated Prairies and Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, and that massive immigration was also necessary. Settlement did develop in the early years, but within a few short years of Confederation, a world-wide depression halted settlement and reduce the revenues of the country. The Conservatives under Macdonald lost power for a time to the fractious and cautious Liberal Party under Alexander Mackenzie, but even he saw the need for the railway, especially as it had been promised to British Columbia.
In these years the political philosophies of the two parties were almost exactly opposite to their modern views. The Conservatives were the champions of a high protective tariff barrier; they used public money to encourage purely Canadian projects The Liberals were free trade continentalists, seeing Canada as being a niche player in North America, whose transportation and trade routes should run north-south, rather than the Conservative dream of east-west. Mind you, they had not come to these positions directly. The Conservatives and the Liberals both shared a generally similar political and economic philosophy founded on the sound electoral principle of getting elected by discerning the will of the people. The Conservatives switched to protectionist mode with the advent of economic depression in the 1870s, but spurred on primarily by scandal followed by a defeat in the House of Commons and before the electorate in the ensuing election. The events of 1873/4 bear an uncanny and unpleasant resonance for us with the situation in 2008/9.
Macdonald and the Conservatives regained office in 1878, and had the added good luck of seeing a brief revival in the American economy, which already had an important impact on Canada, if not in the world at large. Canada enjoyed a brief respite from what one historian has called ‘the real Great Depression’ with capital flowing into the country to begin the CPR. The railway project was re-organised under competent managerial, financial and technical hands. Large guarantees of money and land were given to the CPR and construction began in earnest from both east and west.
Despite being re-elected in 1882 and 1887, the Conservatives in the 1880s worked in a very different climate. 1882 saw a large decline in stock markets, and depression resumed. In fact, this world-wide economic doldrum was not to lift until the second half of the 1890s. The railway continually ran out of money and could get none in New York because of the financial collapse, and none in London, because the Grand Trunk Railway moved to block them from gaining a share of scarce capital, having a large number of British investors and not wanting the competition the CPR threatened in the East.
The CPR, if not the economy, was rescued, ironically, by the Riel rebellion of 1885. The railway which had nearly reached the Red River moved Canadian forces so quickly and in such numbers to the rebellion that Macdonald was now able to push through its financing, allowing for its rapid completion. This final great infrastructure project of the 19th century brought a temporary degree of prosperity to Canada. But the execution of Riel set a new tone of French-English irritation, and the depression continued, alongside the hope which the opening of the West brought along.
This was a time in Canada when the country was in the tail-end of a long, agricultural depression. When the country was formed in 1867, there had been great hopes, which were dashed for a time by the depression in world agricultural prices. Canada was a land which relied on selling its farm produce, mainly to the imperial centre in Britain. The world economy in agricultural terms did not begin to revive until late in this century. The late 1870s and the 1880s were the era of Sir John A. Macdonald’s National Policy as leader of the Conservative party and Prime Minister. This policy imposed high tariffs on imports of manufactured goods in order to nurture and grow a local industrial economy. It coincided, fortunately, with a recovery in the world economy, a growing need for Canadian agricultural produce, and the first wave of mass immigration. Most of these people went to the West, especially as the new Canadian Pacific Railway opened the prairies to agriculture. The needs of these settlers began to be filled by the protected manufacturers of Ontario and Quebec.
Medicine on the Canadian Frontier.
The situation in scientific medicine in Canada in the period provides an example of this process. The 1880s saw Canada move very quickly to adopt and adapt the newest medical science developed in Europe, and to change the health care system overall to a new model of caring. New hospitals on new plans and improved medical schools aided and reflected this productivity, if such it may be called, in medicine. William Deadman’s training firstly in the sciences, then in medicine directly and his specialization in pathology at the best medical school in North America is as good an illustration as any of the booming world of Canada in this era – but a boom based on foundations laid in the doldrums of the first three decades of Canada’s existence.
These were heady times for scientific medicine. In the middle of the 19th century anaesthesia had changed surgery forever. In medicine, Louis Pasteur of France & Robert Koch of Germany led the way in elucidating the aetiology of disease. Prior to that, miasma (a kind of airborne poison emanating from rotting matter, or swamps) or contagion – that is, person to person contact, were most often thought to be the primary causes of disease.
Anaesthesia for surgery has a long history. Prior to the 19th century, alcohol or opiates were used but they were often ineffective. In 1846 Dr. Thomas Morton demonstrated the use of ether at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Chloroform had been discovered in 1836. Its use in surgery was advanced in Britain by several physicians because ether had many side-effects including its explosive potential.
Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician, discovered that the incidence of Puerperal fever in childbirth could be drastically reduced by simple hand sanitization during delivery. He had much resistance from surgeons and obstetricians who clung stubbornly to their traditional methods. Joseph Lister, a British surgeon, introduced antiseptic surgery and later aseptic surgery in 1851. He introduced the use of phenol to sterilize instruments and found that surgical infections were largely eliminated. Surgeons protested but later were forced to accept the changes when the results became known.
The refinement of the microscope in the 19th century was essential for the development of laboratory medicine, which included forensic work. This allowed the study of bacteria and cells. By the mid-19th century, the ‘germ theory’ as the cause of disease was well advanced. The study of pathology and bacteriology advanced rapidly after that but it was not until the 20th century that medicine to counter germs really developed. The one drug, the vaccination for small pox was developed in the late 18th century and was based less on science than on careful observation of folklore. Disease did recede in the 19th century, but due more to increased sanitation in cities and the gradual introduction of hand-washing by doctors, attributable to Semmelweis and Lister. Public health regulations were also introduced in the late 19th century, thus disease began to be understood before specific medical cures were invented.
The Zeiss firm in Germany, especially under its brilliant researcher Ernst Abbe, began to produce sophisticated microscopes in the 1870s. Germany, as a result, became the centre of laboratory work in medicine. It was generally accepted that the great advances in scientific medicine were coming from Europe, particularly in pathology. The earliest centre of training in pathology in North America was established on German models by William Henry Welch at Johns Hopkins. In Canada, Wyatt Galt Johnston in Montreal used the new techniques up to his death in 1902. By 1914, Montreal had Canada’s best equipped laboratory for pathology, and for forensic medicine. In Ontario, the scientific thrust was only beginning to be felt with the establishment of the Medical School at the University of Toronto in 1905, replacing a number of proprietary schools, some of them of dubious scientific merit.
Economic Uncertainty.
The period was plagued with economic uncertainty, especially for the predominant industry, agriculture. Farmers had land and food but usually very little money which limited their ability to enter into professional training or other things that could not be obtained without cash. Physicians seldom came from the countryside; most came from more urban settings in Europe or the British Isles. An increasing number came from the United States but there, the conditions for professional training were only slightly more advanced than in Canada. Canadian born physicians of that period, such as Osler faced an uphill battle to get training and advancement and to establish conditions necessary for good medical practice. Those with more ambition moved away from rural areas into larger cities or south of the border. Those who excelled usually did not return to the place of their origins.
Bill’s early life began when Canada was still mired in depression, but as he grew older, the land gradually became more prosperous. He completed primary school at the time of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. He completed secondary school just after the end of the Victorian Age and the Boer War. By the time he entered the University of Toronto in 1907 boom times were here. These good times lasted until the year he graduated in medicine in 1913, when another world economic collapse began.
1 The French and Indian War in American history.
2 In the survey of Upper Canada ordered by the first Governor, John Graves Simcoe, it was determined that one seventh of all the land in the province was reserved for the support of a ‘Protestant clergy’. This was in part to offset the predominantly Roman Catholic environment in Lower Canada. But the few clergy present were itinerant and so scattered that most of the land lay unused for years, forcing many new settlers to move ever farther out into the hinterland.
3 There the Simcoe district council attempted to tax non-resident lands which were undeveloped, but was blocked in the provincial legislature. A later By-law was allowed, but very difficult to enforce and was an ongoing problem from the 1850s. It flared again in the 1860s, when Samuel Street, the MLA for the Welland area brought suit against Simcoe County for taxes he claimed were illegal.
4 Most modern readers have no idea of these old measurements. Since Canada’s conversion to the EI System, they are only reminded of yards, feet and inches because the U.S. has not converted.
5 Major Francis Gore
6 The GWR was never as heavily capitalized as the Grand Trunk Railway (GTR) which was backed by Toronto and Montreal interests- and it made an early engineering mistake building in broad gauge and then was forced to alter this to standard gauge at great expense. The GWR was damaged by competition from the GTR and especially a line called the Canada Southern causing it to lose much of its most lucrative business – through traffic from New York State to Michigan.
7 Biographer’s Note: William’s offhand comment: “They served two purposes in the outhouse.”
i Stuart J. Wilson, “Canadian Economic Development and Factor Movements before the Great Depression” Prepared for the Canadian Economic History Conference, Kingston: Queens University, April 15-17, 2005.
ii David Gagan. “Genesis: Settling Peel County” in A.I. Silver, ed. An Introduction to Canadian History. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1991, p. 209.
iii Gordon Darroch, “Class in Nineteenth-Century, Central Ontario: A Reassessment of the Crisis and Demise of Small Producers During Early Industrialization, 1861-1871.” Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 13, no. 1/2 (1988): 57
iv ibid. page 55
v Rough notes from his memoirs for a proposed chapter “The Early Days”.
vi This journal was never published. It is quoted in the book: Tecumseth Township: The Unforgettable Past. pp. 24-36.
vii From “The Early Days” an incomplete handwritten chapter for his autobiography.
viii From Mabel Burkholder’s book Out of the Storied Past, as quoted in Tecumseth Township: The Unforgettable Past. p 155.
ix From “Memories of the Hamilton of the Teens and Twenties” unpublished. This was rewritten several times over the years from about 1950 to 1960 with revisions slightly before his death in 1965. The version here was set up as an address to an unnamed group but it became so long that it may never have been delivered.