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    Inside the Museum — Fort York National Historic Site
    Inside the Museum — Fort York National Historic Site
    Inside the Museum — Fort York National Historic Site
    Ebook47 pages31 minutes

    Inside the Museum — Fort York National Historic Site

    By John Goddard

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    About this ebook

    Inside the Museums views Toronto’s heritage museums for the first time as a single community — linked by events, personalities, and function. In this special excerpt we visit one of the jewels in Toronto’s historical crown: Fort York. This fort was the famous site of the Battle of York in 1813 and was founded in 1793 as a military outpost; it served as a barracks as recently as the First World War and is one of the city’s leading tourist attractions. John Goddard takes us on a detailed tour, providing fascinating historical background and insight.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDundurn
    Release dateJun 11, 2014
    ISBN9781459730052
    Inside the Museum — Fort York National Historic Site
    Author

    John Goddard

    John Goddard is an author, magazine writer, and former Toronto Star reporter. His books include Inside the Museums: Toronto’s Heritage Sites and Their Most Prized Objects and Rock and Roll Toronto, with pop critic Richard Crouse. John lives in Toronto.

    Read more from John Goddard

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      Book preview

      Inside the Museum — Fort York National Historic Site - John Goddard

      Copyright

      Preface and

      Acknowledgements

      Photo by John Goddard

      Thousands of subway riders glimpse it absently every day. A portrait of William Lyon Mackenzie peers from the platform mural at Queen Station, his face as round and orange as a wheel of cheese, his expression as knotted as when he first encountered Upper Canada’s stifling elite. Mackenzie served as Toronto’s first mayor and led the star-crossed Rebellion of Upper Canada. He was the grandfather of William Lyon Mackenzie King — Canada’s tenth prime minister, whose own orange-pink visage graces the Canadian fifty-dollar bill — and died three blocks from his subway-wall portrait, at a house that the city preserves as a museum.

      One day I decided to visit the house. Like many people, I knew of Toronto’s heritage museums, and had been meaning to get around to seeing them. Mackenzie House, as it is called, proved a revelation. I discovered something called a Rebellion Box, one of hundreds of small wooden boxes tenderly carved for mothers and sweethearts by accused rebels awaiting trial in Toronto’s cold, damp jail. Upstairs, I saw the bedroom where Isabel Grace Mackenzie, nicknamed Bell, slept during her adolescence and young adulthood, before becoming Mrs. Isabel King and mother to a future prime minister. In a back room, I briefly operated an 1845 Washington rolling flatbed press, of the kind Mackenzie used late in his career to foment against official self-interest and hypocrisy.

      I also learned something else. The city’s heritage museums are interconnected. The builder of what is now the Spadina House Museum once worked as a teenage apprentice in Mackenzie’s print shop. The home of David Gibson, one of Mackenzie’s fellow rebels, survives as the Gibson House Museum on Yonge Street, at North York Centre. The builder of Colborne Lodge in High Park led a military detail against Mackenzie, Gibson, and the rebel uprising.

      Beyond the Mackenzie link, I saw that the city’s heritage-house museums complement each other in many ways. The properties include a townhouse, a stately home, a country inn, an industrial site, a schoolhouse, and a military fort. Ken Purvis, coordinator at Montgomery’s Inn, pointed out that the museums, if taken together, begin to form a coherent community, like a lost colonial village reunited.

      They also form a single museum institution. In Toronto, people talk of the need for a city history museum, rarely recognizing that the Economic Development and Culture Division already runs a sprawling heritage-museum network. Under a single administration, the division incorporates eight museums in fifty-five buildings and outbuildings on ten

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