Toronto Local History 3-Book Bundle. Scott Kennedy
house still standing at Yonge and Sheppard in 1955, and his brother’s house and barn stubbornly ensconced at the corner of Yonge and the 401 in 1959. The former would not last long, and the latter farm, down to one acre when the photos were taken in 1959, would be sold by the family in 1960. As riveting as these photos are, it would be the accomplishments of two of the men who were born in these houses that would outshine the pioneer family’s farming history. One of these men was the aforementioned Earl Bales, of Earl Bales Park fame.
Oliver Douglas Bales’s twin sons, Earl and Allen, were born in 1896. Earl joined the army to serve in the field artillery in 1915. After returning from the First World War he married Ruth Bick. Together, they would raise two daughters, Barbara and Mary. In 1931, Earl followed in his father’s footsteps when he was elected as a North York councillor. In 1933, he was elected deputy reeve and in 1934 became the youngest reeve in North York history at the age of thirty-eight. When he took over as reeve from George Elliot, whose farm is also featured in these pages, he landed squarely in the middle of the fiscal nightmare of the Great Depression.
In 1933, North York had defaulted on payments to its bond holders, a situation shared by virtually every other municipality in the province. In 1935, shortly after Earl had taken power, North York was put under provincial supervision by Queen’s Park. This meant that any financial transactions made by North York would have to be approved by the provincial government. Under Earl’s leadership, North York performed admirably, and, by the end of 1937, they had paid off all of their bond holders. Earl Bales would remain as reeve until 1940. In 1941, North York was released from the supervision of the provincial government, one of only a handful of municipalities in the entire province to have achieved this goal. During these years Earl was also a member of the York County Council.
After his days as an elected official were over, Earl Bales returned to private life for a while before finding a new home on the North York Planning Board. He served on the board for twenty-six years, from 1946 to 1972, and was the chairman for seventeen of those years. His tenure encompassed the greatest population boom in the history of North York. Earl was particularly well suited to this challenge, for despite his pioneer roots and farming background, he was overwhelmingly pro-development. When the fields, farms, and orchards of his youth began to be replaced by housing, he wasn’t mournful or bitter. Rather, he embraced the change, and, in fact, facilitated the rapid urbanization by sanctioning new zoning bylaws, which allowed for the construction of high-rise apartment buildings.
It seems that he viewed the loss of the farms as inevitable and wanted to retain some degree of control as to how the bulldozers rolled. In an interview with Sheila White, published in the Willowdale Mirror on January 9, 1985, Earl recalled that: “After World War II the boom started from the Humber River right over to Victoria Park Avenue. We wanted to create proper development which would be a benefit to North York, not a burden. We always looked forward to developing this area.”
Earl would live out the latter part of his life in one of these new developments, at Bayview Village on the former Kingsdale Farm property, after selling and vacating the last acre of the family farm at Yonge Street and Highway 401 in 1960. True to his farm roots, he looked after his ravine property on Forest Grove Drive as long as his health would allow, continuing to take care of the gardening and snow shovelling until he was nearly ninety. He died there suddenly on July 31, 1992. He was ninety-five. His cousin and best friend, Dalton Bales, would climb even higher on the political ladder but would meet a much more bizarre and premature end.
The message of this book is aptly summarized in this 1955 photograph by Ted Chirnside. This is the corner of Yonge and Sheppard on a sweltering summer afternoon, as seen from beneath the protective overhang of the Dempsey Brothers’ store. Looking to the southeast: from left to right, a new branch of the Bank of Toronto; Joseph Christie Bales’s farmhouse, abandoned and soon to be demolished for a plaza; a billboard for the now-vanquished Simpson’s department stores; and an honour box belonging to the Globe and Mail — a photograph more eloquent than words.
Courtesy of Toronto Public Library, TC 24A.
The modern world takes over as the McLean-Hunter building, built on former Bales farmland in 1949, lurks behind the barn on Oliver Douglas Bales’s farm on the northeast corner of Yonge Street and Highway 401 in 1959.The massive printing facility, one of North York’s earliest industries, was demolished in 1995 for condominium towers.
Photo by J.V. Salmon, Toronto Public Library, S 1-3149C.
Joseph Christie Bales’s son Dalton was born in 1920. He grew up on his parents’ farm at the corner of Yonge and Sheppard. After graduating from high school he decided to pursue a career in law. He eventually became a partner in the Toronto firm of McLaughlin, Soward, a firm he joined as a student in 1946. Three years later, he was called to the bar. His political career began in 1959 when he was elected to the North York Township council, where his father, uncle, and cousin Earl had served in previous decades. He would remain a councillor until 1962, in addition to serving as chairman of the North York Board of Health from 1960 to 1965, yet he had ambitions beyond the confines of municipal politics.
In 1963, Dalton was elected to the Ontario Legislature as the member from the riding of York Mills, a riding he would represent for twelve years. In 1966, he was appointed minister of labour by then-Premier John Robarts. He was later appointed provincial attorney general, a position he held from 1972 until 1974, while simultaneously serving as the minister of municipal affairs. He suffered a heart attack in 1974 and quit politics the following year, citing obvious concerns for his health. He then retired to his home near Bayview and York Mills.
On the evening of October 30, 1979, one night before Hallowe’en, Dalton Bales was attempting to cross Bayview Avenue about a block south of York Mills Road when he was struck and killed by a car in the northbound passing lane. He was fifty-nine.
So what remains as the family’s legacy? Well, first of all, there is that magnificent park — one of the few places left in North York where you can still stand on open land where cattle once grazed and crops once grew. The existence of the park has also assured the survival of the family’s original farmhouse and even parts of their barns, which now serve as maintenance sheds for park staff. The house is currently used as an Ontario Early Years Centre for parents and children.
The park is also home to the Earl Bales Community Centre, the Holocaust Education and Memorial Centre of Toronto and the previously mentioned ski centre. Other than that, there is not much left of the farms, except for the tiny Bales Avenue, a two-block road to nowhere, east of Yonge Street and south of Sheppard, which is currently little more than a shortcut for construction vehicles. Near the southern end of Bales Avenue, on Harrison Garden Boulevard, stands the front half of the Elihu Pease house that Joseph Christie Bales cut in half and moved to Avondale Avenue in 1921. The house was moved to its current location in 2002.
But it’s the most obscure piece of the Bales’ family legacy that may be the most charming. In 1921, when Joseph Christie Bales moved Elihu Pease’s farmhouse from Yonge and Sheppard to make room for his own house, he also dismantled an old shed on the property that had once been the original St. John’s Anglican Church, built in 1817, high on a hill overlooking Hogg’s Hollow. When the current stone church was built on the site in 1844, Elihu bought the old church, dismantled it, and moved it to his farm, where it was rebuilt to serve as a shed. In 1921, the timbers of the former church/shed were stored in the Bales’ barn, where they remained until 1948. That year, St. John’s began building an addition that would include a new chancel and memorial chapel. When the Bales family heard of the new construction, they donated the timbers of the original wooden church to be used in the ceiling of the new chancel and chapel. The adze marks made by the men who squared these primeval timbers nearly two hundred years ago, are still clearly visible today
{Chapter Five}
The Risebroughs: Robert I, Robert II,
Robert III, Roy, and William
When