Dramatic times make for thrilling stories. So, when Ruth Patterson's grandfather was repairing the floorboards on a house on Asquith Ave. and came across a hidden knife, the family wondered about the story behind it and thought back to one of the most exciting times in Toronto history – the Rebellion of 1837.
That's when William Lyon Mackenzie, the former mayor, led a group of patriots bearing muskets and pikes down Yonge St., intent on overthrowing their colonial masters. The rebellion fizzled and the story of the escape and eventual arrest of reformers became part of the lore of many Ontario families.
The Sunday Star has asked its readers to tell us about artifacts they own that might find a place in a museum of Toronto history. Toronto has no single museum dedicated to its past, though a number of sites have been proposed, most recently the silos at the foot of Bathurst St.
Patterson, a retired Wellesley Hospital nurse, wrote to us about her family's knife. The story that's delighted the family for generations is that the knife could have been concealed by rebel fugitives, who hid in the semi-detached, stucco house that her grandparents rented in the early 1900s.
Patterson, who later lived with her parents in another house on Asquith Ave. just east of Yonge St., where the Toronto reference library now stands, likes to think of the knife more as a pike. It's known that Samuel Lount, a leader of the rebellion who was later hanged, was a blacksmith and one of several who forged pikes for the rebels who had no muskets.
The original owner of her grandparents' house was said to be sympathetic to the reformers. "The story is well known," Patterson says. "On that terrible night, Thomas Anderson and Michael and Thomas Shepard (sometimes spelled Sheppard) sought refuge and were hidden at the back of the shelves of the larder behind the winter's supply of food, crocks and sacks."
As for the knife: "It looks to have begun life as a file, the handle broken off. Could it be one of Samuel Lount's pikes, so safely hidden all those 70-odd years?"
Patterson's story has not been verified, but most agree it's a good story. "I think it's a wonderful example of the intersection of memory and hope, of family and community history, of folklore and known fact," says historian Chris Raible, who has studied and written about Mackenzie extensively.
The men in the Shepard family were known across the country as reformers, Thomas Shepard recalled in his story of the 1837 rebellion as recorded in Landmarks of Toronto by John Ross Robertson.
The night of the rebellion, Shepard wrote, "Mackenzie ordered us to march down Yonge Street and away we went. He led us. I was in the front rank, along with Thomas Anderson and his brother John."
Sheriff William Jarvis and other "Tories" fired shots. "...if our fellows had only been steady we would have taken the city that night. I don't know what started our men running, but most of them made off up Yonge Street as fast as the other fellows did down to the town. For a while some of us at the front stood our ground, and I was firing away among the last of them."
Shepard, who was intent on escaping to the United States, spent the night of the rebellion at a Kingston Rd. tavern. It's not clear why he backtracked, but after taking a trail through the woods with Anderson and his brother Michael, he recalled, "that night we slept at the house of a friend east of Yonge St."
Shepard and the others were eventually arrested but never tried. They were sent to Fort Henry at Kingston and, fearing they would be taken to Australia, they escaped. They fled to New York state and after three years were pardoned, returning to the family farmlands in North York where they were prosperous landowners, remembered in the name Sheppard Ave.
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