Toronto Local History 3-Book Bundle. Scott Kennedy

      The much-admired home of Joseph Shepard, built circa 1835 on what is today’s Burndale Avenue, is shown here as it appeared in 1968.

       Photo by Lorna Gardner, North York Historical Society, NYHS 1286.

      The storey-and-a-half clapboard structure delivers all of the elegance and symmetry that its mix of late-Georgian and neo-classical Loyalist styles could only suggest. Simple, genteel, and dignified, the house offers a glimpse of a style not often seen in Toronto, where Loyalist flourishes are rare.[2] Appearing small from the outside, the centre hall layout provides an interior of surprising accommodation. Throughout the home, attention to detail elevates the simple to the sublime.

      The front door case, easily the most striking feature of the house, is a complicated piece of work that at first glance appears quite wide for the overall size of the house. And yet, the meticulous attention to detail and proportion somehow manages to merge the grand and the humble in such a way that both seem completely satisfied. The recessed, six-panel door is bracketed by wide sidelights with six-over-four sliding sash windows. Four fluted Doric-style pilasters surround the door and sidelights, which originally stood alone without a transom or fanlight. Alterations by subsequent owners have added a pediment, dentils, and other embellishments, which might charitably be described as “gilding the lily.”

      The quality of the woodwork is almost certainly attributable to the Shepards’ sawmills, which were now able to produce the type of millwork that Joseph and Catherine may only have dreamed of when they built their log cabin. Similarly, the many panes of glass that graced their new home would have been unobtainable thirty years earlier when the stump-riddled roads made transportation of glass an unlikely prospect. Interior decoration, while simple and unpretentious, continued to demonstrate fastidious attention to detail. Formal doorframes were decorated with hand-carved rosettes. Sensuous, well-figured newel posts almost dared you not to touch them, while reverse cyma curves seamlessly connected the tread of one stair to the next.

      The house would remain in the family until 1912 when the farm began to be subdivided. Fortunately, both the years and subsequent owners have been kind, and the house has been able to absorb modern additions such as hydro, a furnace, and a washroom without losing its integrity. Located at 90 Burndale Avenue, the house defiantly faces east to Yonge Street, while its modern neighbours all face north or south.

      Joseph would only enjoy his new house for a couple of years. He died on May 3, 1837, at the age of seventy-one. He had worked hard and achieved much since he first laid eyes on the virgin forests of Upper Canada more than fifty years earlier. Now it was up to the rest of the family to carry on without him. They were about to live through the most dangerous year of their lives.

      In 1837, Joseph’s good friend, William Lyon Mackenzie, set the wheels in motion that would lead to the Upper Canada Rebellion. More will be said about the rebellion and these early farmers, as will be seen in later chapters, but here the focus is on the considerable involvement by the Shepard family.

      All four sons were Reformers. They offered the relative isolation of the corners of their farms, which were sheltered in the valley of the West Don River, as a training ground for the Reform soldiers, and space in their mills for the manufacture of ammunition. When the time came to actually confront the government troops in early December, all the brothers were on the front lines. Their mother, Catherine, also played a major role on more than one occasion.

      On December 4, approximately fifty Reformers from the north stopped in at the Shepards’ house for a little warmth and nourishment on their way down Yonge Street to engage the government troops. Catherine was only too happy to provide them with what she could. When the fateful day of December 7 came, Jacob and Joseph II were at Montgomery’s Tavern where they fought alongside the woefully inept William Lyon Mackenzie. Their rag-tag group of rebels was quickly routed by the better-equipped government troops in a battle that lasted less than an hour. Jacob and Joseph were captured and imprisoned in the Toronto jail.

      The rebel leader William Lyon Mackenzie was so inept that he left his carpet bag behind when he fled Montgomery’s Tavern — his bag that contained a list of the names and addresses of every single one of his supporters. Discovered by the government troops before they burned the tavern to the ground, the bag made their next few days a whole lot easier.

      Michael and Thomas Shepard led the government troops on a much merrier chase than their brothers. On the morning of December 7, they were far from Montgomery’s Tavern with a group of several hundred well-armed rebels. Commanded by Colonel Peter Matthews, they had been charged with the capture of the bridge over the Don River at King Street from the defending government troops. In this instance, it was the rebels who nearly carried the day, but, while they were able to set fire to the bridge, they did not destroy it. When news reached them that the tavern had fallen and the rebellion was lost, Michael and Thomas made it as far as the Humber River before they were captured and imprisoned in the same jail that already held their brothers. While there, they witnessed the executions of Colonel Matthews and Samuel Lount, one of the rebels who had stopped at Catherine’s house on December 4. Both men were hanged.

      Catherine was again forced into action on the night of the rebellion when government troops burst into her house looking for rebels. The troops went from room to room, slashing quilts and pillows, and stabbing beds with their swords. As they left each bedroom, they set the mattresses on fire. Catherine followed frantically, dousing the blazes as best she could, trying to save her barely two-year-old home.

      Despite Catherine’s best efforts, one rebel commander was captured there that night. Colonel Anthony Van Egmond, the commander from the Huron Tract, who had opened the Huron Road for the Canada Company in 1828, had fled on horseback, heading north up Yonge Street along with rebel leader William Lyon Mackenzie after the battle at Montgomery’s Tavern. Once they reached The Golden Lion Hotel, at today’s Yonge and Sheppard, with government troops hot on their heels, the two men split up. Mackenzie exchanged his horse for a fresh one at the hotel and headed west to the farms of Thomas and Jacob Shepard at Bathurst Street. Colonel Egmond, a much older man, was by now completely exhausted from the battle and pursuit and sought shelter at the much closer home of Catherine Shepard. He was captured there by government troops and imprisoned in the Toronto jail, where he contracted pneumonia and died the following January.

      What a cold, hellish night it must have been, as soldiers set fire to surveyor David Gibson’s house on the lot directly to the north of the Shepard farm, and other homes in the area as well. (The current Gibson House was built in the 1850s to replace this one that was burned by the troops.) When the sun came up on December 8, Catherine could actually count herself among the lucky ones, as she still had a roof over her head, although apparently there are still charred rafters in the house as mute testimony to what happened that night.

      In the days following the rebellion, government troops scoured the back roads on horseback, burning farmhouses to smoke out any remaining rebels, no doubt aided in their search by William Lyon Mackenzie’s little black book. In addition to the government troops, local farmers had to fear roving gangs of civilian, vigilante Loyalists who, with full government support, fanned out across North York, looting and burning buildings and assaulting or capturing any of their neighbours they suspected of being sympathetic to the rebel cause. In the aftermath of this all-out assault, the four Shepard boys suffered disparate fates.

      Jacob and Joseph II were held in custody until May 12, 1838, when they were released and allowed to return home. Thomas and Michael were not so lucky. Six months after they were captured, they still hadn’t been brought to trial. Nonetheless, they were sent to Kingston to await banishment to Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania). Realizing that they would never