Relatively few British North Americans lived in cities and towns before 1840—urban dwellers accounted for no more than one in every six residents along the St. Lawrence in 1760, and for approximately 10 per cent of British North America’s population in 1840. But however small in size, these places and their satellite communities were important centres of colonial life. They were the pivots by which the New World was most firmly attached to the Old. Ideas, immigrants, and commodities passed through them. Colonial officials concentrated in them. From commerce and government they derived wealth and status. Lines of trade and authority made them the core of their hinterlands. Their newspapers carried news of Britain and the Empire into the back country. To contemporaries they were, like Toronto in 1842, places where “all is in a whirl and a fizz, and one must be in the fashion.”
The urban network of British North America grew substantially in size and complexity between 1760 and 1840. Early in the period, only Quebec, Montreal, and Elalifax had more than three thousand inhabitants. By 1840 there were at least ten places of that size, and the number of smaller centres had grown even faster. By 1821, Quebec, with fifteen thousand residents, had ceded numerical and commercial superiority on the St. Lawrence to Montreal. By 1832 York, soon to be incorporated as the City of Toronto, had outgrown Kingston to become the largest urban community in Upper Canada with thirteen thousand souls. In the 1830s Saint John challenged Halifax in the eastern provinces. And by 1840, Montreal was the pre-eminent city of British North America with forty thousand residents—slightly fewer than the modern-day cities of Fredericton, Sorel and Welland, and only a trifle more populous than Belleville, Penticton or Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.
In settings where so much was new, settlers quickly recognized the importance of forwarding their interests. Growth was a universal ambition. Leading citizens of countless towns sought administrative functions and transport improvements in the hope of inducing the expansion of their centre. Small places competed with one another for the role of county seat or district town—both implied a quickening of town life by virtue of the official business conducted there. By 1840 judges, sheriffs, clerks of the peace, customs collectors. Crown land agents, district clerks, school superintendents, and licence inspectors might be numbered among the residents of important district centres. In the 1830s Kingstonians anticipated prosperity from the enlarged hinterland provided by construction of the Rideau and Trent canal systems, and early in the next decade they were enjoined to avoid the mistakes of New York, where Broadway, eighty feet wide and “originally deemed ample,” was now crowded with traffic. Their “AVENUE ought to be a hundred feet wide; and straight as an arrow, should proceed onward to the Priest’s Field—there, to terminate in a CIRCUS or SQUARE,—including the ancient pines, to remain as sacred memorials of the primeval forest.”
The potent combination of vision and energy spawned imposing new buildings and impressive plans that ran streets through vacant land. Where mill-sites or other natural advantages added impetus to expansion, firm foundations for growth might be laid down. New names appeared on maps as crossroads settlements developed into villages and as villages grew into towns. City charters marked the rise of conspicuously successful places. In the end, though, trade set the urban pattern. The leading cities were commercial centres, located on sea lanes, and each served an extensive back country. For Montreal, at the head of navigation on the St. Lawrence, this hinterland encompassed Upper Canada until transport improvements such as the Erie Canal, canals on the St. Lawrence, and eventually the railroad quickened the rise of Toronto. But in the main each colony had its own principal commercial port. Although the French-language newspapers of Montreal maintained an interest in news from France, each of these major centres looked first and foremost to Britain. There were strikingly few links between the cities. In the 1840s very, very little of the commercial information appearing in the newspapers of Halifax, Saint John, and St. John’s related to the Canadas. Such little Halifax information as appeared in the newspapers of Quebec and Montreal was generally ten days to two weeks old.
Spring and fall, the most active shipping seasons, were busy times. In Montreal and Saint John, the scene differed only in detail from that described in Halifax by the opinionated young army engineer Captain William Moorsom in the 1820s:
Signals are constantly flying at the citadel for vessels coming in; merchants are running about, in anticipation of their freights; officers of the garrison are seen striding down with a determined pace to welcome a detachment from the depot, or a pipe of Sneyd’s claret for the mess; and ladies, tripping along on the tiptoe of expectation flock into two or three soi disant bazaars for the latest d-la-mode bonnets.
Beyond these major towns lay those of a lower order. Smaller in population, and in the volume of their trade, they served district markets with goods shipped from the regional centres, and, in some cases, with direct consignments from Britain and The West Indies. Each had its commercial district, whose shops—if neither very numerous nor very capacious by metropolitan standards—were generally “well filled, and some of them very neatly arranged.”
Farther inland, storekeepers extended the trading network into even more remote locations. Clustered together with a blacksmith, a carriage works, a tavern, and a mill, general stores were integral parts of the “rising villages” scattered across the settled countryside. On their shelves, wrote the poet Oliver Goldsmith (Canadian grandnephew of his more accomplished Irish namesake) in The Rising Village, stood “all useful things and many more.” Here “nails and blankets,” there “horses collars and a large tureen”:
Buttons and tumblers, fish hooks, spoons and knives.
Shawls for young damsels, flannel for old wives;
Woolcards and stockings, hats for men and boys.
Mill-saws and fenders, silks, and children’s toys.
Collectors of country produce, providers of credit to neighbouring families, and suppliers of exotic necessities as well as occasional luxuries from abroad, storekeepers were the nuclei of rural communities. They were also the distant branches of a diffuse commercial and financial system whose roots led back, eventually, to the factories, banks, and trading houses of Britain.
In 1840 even the largest towns were strikingly different from the cities we know. In contrast to the sprawling urban spaces of our day, Montreal, Toronto, Quebec, Halifax, and Saint John were tight little centres. Each had its wharf and warehouse district, its retail area, and its fashionable streets, but they were small and few. If rich and poor, merchant and labourer, occupied different streets, they did so in most parts of the city. The juxtapositions were often striking. Imposing and gracious as Toronto’s King Street appeared in the 1830s, oxen pulled carts along it; barely a block away there was an active lakeside fish market. In the old town site to the east, the splendid mansions of prosperous merchants were surrounded by dilapidated little cottages of immigrants and labourers that filled the back lanes of the district. To the west, public and private buildings in Georgian and early Gothic revival styles distinguished the lakefront but gave way to much humbler homes a short distance inland.
In Montreal, the commercial heart of the city was five blocks deep. Walking back from the waterfront a visitor saw, in sequence, relatively distinct concentrations of warehouses, boarding-houses, and taverns; the offices of brokers and lawyers; retail
A fine example of early nineteenth-century military cartography, revealing much of the character of this village of perhaps one thousand people. Most houses and shops were within the original town; Yonge Street ran into forest half a mile from the lakeshore; other roads quickly diminished to paths. Plan of York (1818), by Lieutenant George Phillpotts.
Stores, banks, and insurance companies; and light industry. Within these zones there was considerable diversity. Since important merchants, shippers, and commercial agents had offices amid the warehouses and hotels of the waterfront, some of them also lived on the upper floors of the three - and four-storey buildings in the area. Architects and other professionals were scattered through the central streets of the district. Brass foundries, carriageworks, candlemakers, and the shops of other artisans marked its inner edge. Large foundries and factories bounded it to west and east. Beyond, the southern slopes of Mount Royal remained in country estates laid out early in the century by some of those who had prospered from the fur trade: James McGill, Simon McTavish, and William McGillivray
In Montreal and Quebec, ethnic areas began to divide the cities. In both places English-speakers were concentrated in disproportionate numbers in the central commercial section. Those areas in which most artisans, labourers, and small shopkeepers lived were predominantly French Canadian. These patterns clearly reflected the distribution of wealth and power. Although French-Canadian investors held significant concentrations of property in Montreal and Quebec, banking, insurance, and wholesale activities were almost exclusively in English hands. Banks, mansions, and official buildings (such as Customs Houses) proclaimed their British
Described as “a second Montreal in point of commercial and mercantile importance” early in the 1830s, York grew significantly over the next few decades. The court house, jail, and church added distinction to King Street. But the waterfront was the hub of the city. By 1838, Toronto’s wharfs were accommodating heavy schooner traffic; hotels and warehouses lined Front Street, daily stagecoaches left the triangular “Coffin Block” for Holland’s Landing, and a fish market added to the bustle. King St. E., Yonge to Church Sts., looking e. from Toronto St: lithograph after a drawing by Thomas Young, published by Nathaniel Currier (New York, 1835). The Fish Market, Below Front Street, Toronto: sepia copy by an unknown artist after an engraving in Canadian Scenery (1842), illustrated by W. H. Bartlett.
Domination by echoing metropolitan taste in their Georgian and classical architecture. So too, the Anglican cathedrals in both cities bore a close resemblance to the London church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.
Smaller towns lacked the dense cluster of buildings that marked the central blocks of larger cities, and were even less distinctly set off from the surrounding countryside. Income, status, and religion set families and individuals apart, and people appreciated every nuance of these distinctions, but in such small places all faces were familiar and most residents felt themselves part of the community. Often this identification flowered into local pride. It was reflected in various ways in the newspapers, town halls, street improvements, and debating societies that sprang up in these places, the effect of which was to impart a vigorous localism to life. Lord Durham found this a particularly striking facet of Upper Canada. “The Province,” he wrote in 1839, “has no great centre with which all the separate parts are connected, and which they are accustomed to follow in sentiment and action: nor is there that habitual intercourse between the inhabitants of different parts of the country, which... makes a people one and
United____Instead of this, there are many petty local centres, the sentiments and the
Interests... of which, are distinct and perhaps opposed.”
Cobourg, on Lake Ontario, well exemplifies the progressive character of such “petty local centres.” Little more than a village in the 1820s, the town emerged during the 1830s as the commercial focus of a hinterland that extended beyond the bounds of Hamilton Township. By 1833 a steamboat linked the north shore of Rice Lake with the head of the stage line from Cobourg. Stagecoaches linked Cobourg to York and Kingston. At the end of the decade, packet steamers of the Royal Mail line connected the town to Rochester and other lake ports. In 1837 Cobourg was incorporated. Five years later it had grist and sawmills, fourteen general merchants, ten hotels and taverns, four carriage factories, and a cluster of tailors, tanners, cabinetmakers, and bakers. Five lawyers and four doctors practised alongside Cobourg’s hairdresser and druggist. Agents of two banks and an insurance company had offices in the town. Because Cobourg was the administrative centre of Northumberland County, its population included several county officials. It also had a provincial postmaster and a collector of Customs. In a settlement of clapboarded frame houses, most of which were simple storey-and-a-half structures, Victoria College, built by the Methodist church, occupied a large and striking stone building back from the lake. A few prosperous commercial men built large houses; some of them were of brick and many were known by name; “New Lodge,” “Beech Grove,” “The Hill.” One
The Launching of the ROYAL WILLIAM, Quebec, Apr. 29, 1831. Well-dressed crowds line the waterfront and look on from the cliff as the steamer leaves the floating dock at John S. Campbell’s shipyard in Quebec. In 1833 she became the first Canadian vessel to cross the Atlantic under steam alone. Watercolour (1831) by J. P. Cockburn.
Typical example, offered for sale in 1843, was a “delightfully situated cottage Residence” with five bedrooms, dining and drawing rooms, and a china closet; with garden lawn, stable yard, barn, and “three stable cowhouse,” the whole comprised some two acres and commanded “a beautiful view of Lake and Harbour.” In 1842 the Diocesan Theological Institute of the Church of England was established in Cobourg in association with St. Peter’s Church. The town had a Mechanics Institute and a Loyal Orange Lodge. Yet its population barely exceeded one thousand.
As the towns grew into cities in the first half of the nineteenth century, they became crucibles of social change. Urban society became more complex, and the demand for goods and services rose. New crafts, trades, and occupations—such as furniture - and carriage-makers, carters, porters, butchers, and shoemakers—found their place in the urban fabric. Extremes of wealth and poverty were more noticeable, and society became more clearly divided. The concentration of people also threw ethnic and religious differences among them into sharper relief. Tensions rose as Protestants and Catholics, English, Irish, and French Canadians sensed their distinctiveness and competed to secure their own interests; they sometimes spilled over into
Imposing Victoria College set Cobourg apart from a score of other rising towns whose buildings huddled around a wharf or landing. Note the Customs House flying the white ensign, a reminder of the trade across Lake Ontario. Engraving after a watercolour by W. H. Bartlett in Canadian Scenery (London, 1842).
Violence. Limbs were bruised and heads broken when Protestant Orangemen celebrating the victory of William of Orange over Irish Catholic forces at the Battle of the Boyne on July 12, 1690, dashed with “Green” Catholics in and around the Irish districts of several cities in the 1830s and 1840s. So too, Irish immigrants and French Canadians, who competed for jobs in the Ottawa valley timber trade, terrorized Bytown (Ottawa) with their brawling, drinking, springtime skirmishes.
Almost always, the frictions behind such ferment precipitated adjustment and accommodation. Older, intimate forms of urban administration which had integrated many people into the life of the community by distributing part-time jobs (in road work, the constabulary, and so on) among them gradually gave way to a more centralized and professional urban government. Responding to changing circumstances, and reflecting the rise of a new middle class drawn from expanding evangelical congregations, several reform groups sought remedies to the “problems” of these growing cities of strangers. Movements for the improvement of education
Developed momentum. Citizens sought better policing and improvements in such public utilities as sewers, water supplies, and street-lighting, as problems of waste and water contamination increased. There were also campaigns against theatres and tippling houses. From its beginnings in Montreal in the late 1820s, the temperance movement gained support across British North America. Orators proclaimed the virtues of the cause at noisy public meetings. Those who took the pledge forswore ardent spirits such as whisky or rum, or committed themselves to total abstinence. Sabbatarianism also took root during these years, as British North Americans were enjoined to put aside work and the “idle ramhlings of recreation” each Sunday in favour of Bible study and worship. To be sure, most Anglicans and Roman Catholics preferred “the holy hilarity of the Lord’s Day” to strict severity. Others regarded the “Damned Cold Water Drinking Societies” as potentially dangerous organizations, calculated to “impose upon and delude the simple and unwary.” But pamphlets and newspapers such as The Canada Temperance Advocate and the Christian Guardian spread the reform message and eventually left their mark. Notorious for drinking and drunkenness in the 1840s, by 1890 the chief city of Ontario took pride in the evangelical righteousness celebrated in its reputation as “Toronto the Good.”
World History
