Unpacking a home with links to Eatons,
Property has been in family for three generations, and now it’s time to clean house
Steve Adams doesn’t believe in ghosts.
But he felt a flutter after his mother died, when he went back to the old family home to sift through three generations’ worth of built-up belongings. Here, the French metronome his mother used to learn piano. There, the dusty jacket that draped grandpa’s shoulders.
It was like the echo of their lives still bounced between the walls.
“There was an eerie feeling, like they were looking down on me saying, ‘How are you going to handle this?’ ” Adams said.
“I was torn. There was stuff I wanted to keep. What am I going to do with it? It’s sentimental. It’s just, it’s really hard. I don’t know how many people, when they go through this, it’s one generation, dealing with your mom or dad’s stuff and that’s it, whereas I was dealing with two or three generations’ worth of stuff.”
Overwhelmed by the task, Adams and his wife hired a business called Transition Squad, which specializes in tabulating and pricing a home’s contents and then staging an estate sale from inside the house. The Adams family sale is scheduled for Saturday morning, but Adams isn’t sure he’s ready to say goodbye to 505 Davenport Rd. The home, modest and filled with reminders of another time, has been the centre of his family’s life since his great-grandfather Teddy bought it early last century.
According to family lore, Teddy was the trusted electrician and handyman who worked for the Eatons, the department store scions who profited enormously from the tide of 20th-century consumerism partly responsible for filling the Adams home with so much stuff. And the home on Davenport Rd. was just a short walk from the eloquent Ardwold estate built for Eaton’s president and philanthropist, Sir John Craig Eaton and his wife, Lady Eaton.
“I’m just going from tales that I heard from my family growing up,” said Adams. “Whenever they had work to do, Teddy would be the one to do it.”
Teddy’s house is small like a cottage and contains the musty odour of an aged place. Three small rooms sprout from a narrow hallway on the second storey, and if you stand in the front entrance at the foot of the stairs, it is possible to scan the living room, dining area and kitchen without moving.
One can imagine the home’s humble stature being underscored by its orientation beneath the leafy hillock of the escarpment, where the majesty of Casa Loma still lords over an area once populated by the grand mansions of old Toronto’s richest caste — including the Eatons.
Adams, now 51, was the only child to his mother, Carol, and grew up spending much of his time in the Davenport house with his grandparents, Fred and Thelma Ally. Thelma was Teddy’s daughter, and she inherited the house in the1940s, according to property records. Carol was a single mom, and when Adams, was a boy she would attend school full time every summer at Wilfrid Laurier University, leaving her son in the care of Fred and Thelma. She would return though, and the family would be together at the house.
Adams’ memory of that time comes in snippets. His grandfather once carried a six-foot ladder down to Du- pont St. so young Adams could sit on the top step and watch the Santa Claus parade (fittingly, the city’s first Santa Claus parades were funded by the Eaton’s chain). He would also sneak onto the landing at the top of the stairs after bedtime, so he could peek down at the television while his grandparents’ muffled speech drifted from the first floor.
But some of the most fun was had at the dinner table, where the four of them would play euchre for hours, always Adams and his grandma versus Fred and Carol.
“For me, my family consisted of ba- sically my grandparents and my mom,” Adams said. “It was just us.”
Now that the house is being emptied out, the connection with Eaton’s is evident. After Teddy’s involvement with the famous family, his daughter Thelma went on to work for them, too — in the glove department at the now-closed Eaton’s Annex store just north of Old City Hall.
In the Davenport home’s basement, where Fred was often at work with his array of old tools at a work bench scattered with sawdust, weathered wooden crates are piled in the corner.
Stencilled on the side of each are the words: “Property of the T. Eaton Co. Limited.” Upstairs, there’s also a cedar “Eatonia” chest, as well as a collection of fur coats and capes made by the company.
They’re the signs of Adams’ personal history and how the story of his family briefly intersected with the wider, more celebrated story of wealthy Toronto.
But the huge Ardwold mansion was demolished decades ago, the Eaton’s empire dissolved in bankruptcy. Old Teddy’s home is still there, waiting to be filled with life anew.