Where the streets bear their names
As debates continue over changing the names of some Toronto streets, we look at the racist history behind a few of them — and the people whose stories have been long overlooked
When Rick Hill finds himself on Jarvis Street, the Rolodex in his mind flips back to the 1840s, when the man who lived in this part of town, Samuel Peters Jarvis, was the superintendent of Indian Affairs in the province.
Hill is an Indigenous historian and a member of the Beaver Clan of the Tuscarora Nation of the Haudenosaunee at Grand River. He is well versed in Jarvis’s activities of 180 years ago, and how they continue to ripple across time. In the 1840s, tensions were high between white squatters and the Six Nations community, and Jarvis pitched a solution: they should sell their land to the Crown in exchange for reserve land, and a growing fund from land sales. It would be a surrender, Jarvis said, “for the benefit of the Indians, and to relieve the present embarrassed state of their affairs.”
When Hill, an Indigenous innovation specialist at Mohawk College, drives by the old Victorian mansions and highrise buildings of Jarvis Street, he thinks about the mess that followed, the years of petitions, the land claims still unresolved. He thinks about how he struggles to grow corn on the land they wound up with. How money went missing under Jarvis.
“You know the old phrase, to the victor go the spoils,” he says. “The colonization of Canada created many opportunities, in which the socially, politically and economically elite people could leave a legacy for themselves.” Around the world, there is a growing movement to highlight systemic racism and systems of oppression. As part of this, people are also taking a critical look at the symbols of the modern street — tearing down statues and pushing for names that better reflect society.
Last month, a petition to change the name of Dundas Street, which honours the British official who “actively participated in obstructing the abolition of slavery,” caught Toronto’s attention. The petition has more than 14,000 signatures, and calls for a rethinking of other symbols “no longer worthy of our honour or respect.”
Hayden King, the executive director of the Yellowhead Institute, says many monuments and place names across the country have long stood as “hallmarks of civilization” with limited critical thought. “It’s this invisible work that settler colonialism does to replicate itself,” he says. “It’s only when you really scratch beneath the surface do you really see what kind of villains they were.”
Canadian institutions have long been selective in the stories they tell, and the people they celebrate, says Josh Dyer of Myseum Toronto. “We’ve washed away the sins of some of these people that we want to celebrate,” he says, “so we’ll tell the story but only a part of it.”
If a street reflects an oppressive history, we have to ask ourselves how the name was acquired and why we celebrate it, George Dei says.
“People think that rewriting history means you are negating the past,” says Dei, a professor of social justice education at OISE. “It’s correcting the wrongs and presenting complete accounts of our histories." There are around 9,500 streets in Toronto. These are just a few of their complicated stories.
In 1793, the government of Upper Canada passed an act to limit slavery — but it was filled with loopholes. As Natasha Henry, president of the Ontario Black History Society, has pointed out in her extensive writing on the subject, a significant number of government officials in the province “enslaved Africans or had family members who held slaves.” The new law was a compromise.
The law banned the import of slaves to the colony, but people who already held slaves were allowed to keep them, and the children of those enslaved would be free when they turned 25.
There was no outright abolition or emancipation. Slaveowners did not suddenly free the people serving their meals, washing their clothes and doing the hard work on their farms. There was a push against the change in 1798, when a bill to reverse the earlier law passed three readings. As Henry writes, it never made it into law.
Slavery continued and the Upper Canada Gazette continued to feature ads for human beings — advertising age, skills, dispositions, health and strength. People of African descent continued to be viewed as sources of free labour, Henry says. There was no stigma to being a slaveowner, she says, noting that in 1817, one man bequeathed six of his slaves, their children, and future children not yet in existence to his own children.
Canadian judge and historian William Riddell was one of the first people to focus on slavery in Ontario, Henry says. Around 1920, he estimated that about 500 Black people were enslaved in the province from the 1770s to the 1830s. (Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1834.)
“Here we are 100 years later and no one has really pursued this,” she says. She has spent years digging through archival sources to pick up the thread, and better understand the lives of those enslaved for her nearly finished dissertation, “One Too Many.”
Toronto, then known as York, became the capital of Upper Canada in 1796.
A grid of streets took shape over a landscape that had long been a home to Indigenous people. Trees were sawed to the ground, houses and farms were built, and the outpost grew. According to censuses of this time period, there were13 Black people enslaved in York, Henry says — all owned by people with roles in the colonial government.
Jarvis Street
After the law to limit slavery passed in 1793, William Jarvis’s wife, Hannah, wrote to her father that Lt.-Gov. Simcoe “has by a piece of chicanery freed all the negroes.” That was not the case, as her family’s continued slave ownership showed.
According to Henry’s research, Jarvis enslaved six people in York around the turn of the 18th century: Moses, Phoebe, Sussex, Kitty, Prince and a woman whose name has been lost to history.
Jarvis was provincial secretary and one of the esteemed pewholders in St. James’ church. The family lived in a two-acre property in the old town. In 1811, Jarvis took two of his slaves to court because they had “stolen gold and silver out of his desk and escaped from their said master,” one account notes. Prison sentences were a common way to punish enslaved people, Henry says.
Jarvis also owned a 100-acre park lot at the eastern edge of the city, but a series of swaps resulted in his owning a lot that surrounds modern Jarvis Street.
After he died, his son Samuel Peters Jarvis eventually built a house called Hazel Burn on that park lot. From 1837 to 1845, Samuel was chief superintendent of Indian Affairs. In 1841, he pitched the Six Nations community on selling their land to the Crown. A handful of people agreed, but the community quickly petitioned the government that these men had acted independently, and the whole matter had been rushed and confused. It is contested to this day.
As historian Susan Hill relays in “The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River,” Samuel Jarvis invested money from the community trust without their consent into the Grand River Navigation Co., a doomed canal venture he was involved in. Jarvis combined his money with “Indian funds,” she writes, and “despite the fact that Jarvis could not account for funds taken … he was never prosecuted.”
“That was one of our complaints since that time to anyone who would listen,” says
Rick Monture, a professor in McMaster University’s Indigenous studies program and a member of the Mohawk nation, Turtle clan, from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory.
“We were never compensated for that and still haven’t been.”
According to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, an 1844 Royal Commission found a chaotic mess in the Department of Indian Affairs with at least £4,000 missing under an “incompetent and possibly dishonest” Jarvis. (It’s not clear if this relates to the canal boondoggle or a separate matter.) He retired “in disgrace,” and with ongoing debts, hired surveyor John Howard to subdivide a portion of his family’s lot around 1850, creating a series of new streets — including Jarvis Street. According to city records, the street was named for Samuel Peters Jarvis, not his father.
Monture says that local historians and people who work in land claims know all about Jarvis, but the story is not well known beyond that.
“He wasn’t the only guy doing this to native people ... there were probably 200 Samuel Jarvises across this country, and they’re often the ones who get celebrated,” he says.
“It was perfectly acceptable in their day — I’m sure it was — and that’s problematic, but that’s how the country got built.”
Russell Street, Peter Street, Russell Hill Drive, Russell Hill Road
Peter Russell was a high-ranking government official and he was also a slaveowner. Like William Jarvis, he lived in the bustling old town with his sister and several slaves in one of the city’s finest houses. He also had a farm near Spadina Avenue.
According to Henry’s research, Russell owned four slaves, including Peggy and her children Jupiter, Amy and Milly.
“Russell did not come here with slaves, and so it’s likely he procured them through one of his Loyalist channels,” she says. The Russells also employed two free men, including Peggy’s husband, Pompadour, who Henry says likely earned his freedom as a Loyalist fighting in the American Revolution — while his wife and children continued to be enslaved.
One of the Russell employees kept a diary that sometimes mentions Peggy and her children, keeping watch of the farm and looking out for wolves, Henry notes.
While records show that Russell once paid for a short period of schooling for Jupiter, the diary also records that Jupiter was tied up in a storehouse as a punishment, and that Peggy and Jupiter were jailed at different times, Henry says.
“(Peggy) shows a disposition at Times to be very troublesome, which may perhaps compel me to commit her again to Prison. I shall be glad that you would either take her away immediately,” Russell wrote to a friend in 1801 who he hoped would broker a sale to “get rid of” Peggy.
In 1803, he advertised that Peggy was missing, and “anyone harbouring her” would be dealt with “as the law directs.”
In 1806, he placed another ad, trying to sell Peggy and Jupiter at a deep discount for people who could pay up front:“To be sold, a black woman named Peggy, aged 40 years, and a black boy, her son, named Jupiter, aged about 15 years, both of them the property of the subscriber. The woman is a tolerable cook and washerwoman, and perfectly understands making soap and candles. The boy is tall and strong for his age and has been employed in the country business, but brought up principally as a house servant. They are each of them servants for life. The price of the woman is $150. For the boy $200, payable in three years with interest from the day of sale, to be secured by bond. But one-fourth less will be taken for ready money.”
Russell’s sister kept a diary. In 1806, she describes meandering afternoon teas with roasted apples, and complains about Peggy and her daughter Milly. Amy, at the farm, is “wild and fond of rambling … addicted to pilfering and lying.”
Jupiter, she writes, behaves “so ill” that he is to remain at his father’s house until he is sold. Elizabeth Russell would later present Amy to Mrs. Captain Denison as a gift. Peter Street is named for Petersfield, the farm Russell once owned, and the other Russell roadways were named for Russell and his sister, according to “Toronto Street Names.”
Baby Point Crescent, Baby Point Road, Baby Point Terrace
The Baby family lived and worked in the Detroit and Windsor area during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, where they were slaveowners, as detailed in historian Marcel Trudel's dictionary of slaves and their owners in French Canada.
The family was French, but
He wasn’t the only guy doing this to native people ... there were probably 200 Samuel Jarvises across this country, and they’re often the ones who get celebrated. Rick Monture, a professor in McMaster University’s Indigenous studies program
loyal to the British, and in 1792, Lt.-Gov. John Graves Simcoe appointed one of the family’s adult sons, Jacques “James” Baby, to the legislative council of the new province. In October 1793, James purchased a Black “boy named Franke, aged 12 years” for $532.50 (U.S.) at a Detroit auction, according to a presentation on slavery to the Detroit Pioneer Society, recorded in their annals in 1872.
The speaker at the society explained there were rules against slavery but “Our ancestors paid but little attention to it.”
“Everyone lived in Arcadian simplicity and contentment,” he continued. “The negro was satisfied with his position, and rendered valuable services to his master, and was ever ready to help him against the treacherous Indians.”
These paternalistic views were common and “absolutely racist,” Henry says. Narratives like this aim to justify the brutal institution of slavery by assuming that white people are superior, and that Black people were OK with having their labour controlled through coercion, she says.
Baby moved to York around 1815, when he was appointed inspector general of Upper Canada. He lived downtown but later purchased land above the banks of the Humber River, at the site of a former Haudenosaunee village, Teiaiagon.
Trudel’s dictionary notes that one of two women Baby enslaved was emancipated in 1803, but does not mention Franke. Baby died in 1833, but his descendants continued to live in the area. By 1910, developer Robert Home Smith purchased the site, and shortly after, the present subdivision was laid out and named.
Brant Street
While the majority of slaveowners in Ontario were upwardly mobile white settlers, military records show that Indigenous warriors and allies played a role in the trafficking of enslaved Africans from the United States into Canada, and in some instances a few warriors kept slaves, Natasha Henry says.
Records don’t give a sense of how many did this. “It’s always complicated because there were also Indigenous people in colonial settlements who were enslaved,” she says.
Mohawk leader, loyalist and warrior Joseph Brant, known as Thayendanegea, had slaves. He purchased Sophia Pooley, a young girl born into slavery, in the Niagara region, and brought her to his home in Six Nations territory.
As a free woman later in life, she told American abolitionist Benjamin Drew about the experience. (Pooley’s account is one of two first-hand accounts from an enslaved person in Ontario, Henry says.)
Pooley said Brant also kept “two colored men.” She described hunting with his children, being beaten by Brant’s wife, and how Brant chastised his wife, saying that he had “adopted (Sophia) as one of the family.” Brant later sold Pooley for $100.
Brant was a respected but controversial figure. Although angry with the British about land loss and disappointed in racism he saw, he aspired to certain aspects of the colonial lifestyle, historian Rick Monture says. Slavery wasn’t part of Six Nations society, he says. There were ways to replace people who had been lost to warfare and disease, by taking prisoners, but they were “adopted into families … not treated as slaves or servants or any lesser than your real kin,” he explains. “There’s a symbolic adoption process where you become the person that was lost.” According to city records, Brant Street was named in 1855.
Ryerson Avenue, Ryerson University
Egerton Ryerson was instrumental in building public education in Ontario, but he also played a role in conceptualizing Canada’s residential schools, a devastating system of cultural genocide with lasting intergenerational impacts, as acknowledged by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
In 1847, Ryerson, then superintendent of education for Canada West, was asked by the government for his thoughts on industrial schools for Indigenous children, and he advised that “the North American Indian cannot be civilized or preserved in a state of civilization (including habits of industry and sobriety) except in connection with, if not by the influence of, not only religious instruction and sentiment but of religious feelings.”
He said he would be ready to “promote” industrial schools, and while not involved in their launch, “he contributed to the blue print of them,” a Ryerson University statement noted in 2010. A statue on campus, and the school’s name, have long been an issue.
“As an Indigenous student, walking into a university that’s named after the founding father of my ancestors’ demise does not feel good,” says Phyllis McKenna, a member of M’Chigeeng First Nation who graduated this year.
McKenna, former chairperson of the National Circle of First Nations, Métis and Inuit students for the Canadian Federation of Students, belonged to Ryerson’s Indigenous Student Rising Collective, which along with Black Liberation Collective pressed for the statue to come down and the name of the school changed. In 2018, a plaque was added to the statue with context about Ryerson’s role in residential schools, where tens of thousands of children suffered “unthinkable abuse and neglect.”
McKenna says more is needed. “They’re reaching out to marginalized and racialized folks to attend these institutions, and if they really want to empower and uplift these student voices, they need to listen to the demands.”
A university spokesperson said no decisions have been made on the statue or renaming.
Sometimes street names change to avoid confusion and repetiton, and sometimes, there is geopolitical reckoning.
During the First World War, the residents of Bismarck Avenue petitioned Toronto to change the name honouring the first German chancellor. By August 1915, the civic street naming committee rubberstamped the change to Asquith Avenue. The city also erased eight other German streets that day.
Naming rights for streets have long been held by landowners, says Wayne Reeves, the chief curator for the city’s museums and heritage services. “Typically and right up until today, streets were named as part of a subdivision process,” he says, adding it’s only in rare instances where the city creates new public streets and names them.
Adam Bunch, who has written several books about Toronto history, including the upcoming “Toronto Book of Love,” says that streets and monuments are “stark evidence” that for a very long time in Toronto, and in Canada, white men have been building institutions and systems largely for themselves.
“Some of them were truly horrible people — slaveowners and open racists. Some of them were very well-intentioned people who believed in making Canada a more multicultural place,” he says. “But even those people were still white men who had blind spots.”
City staff now assess proposed street names for practical and symbolic considerations — to make sure a name portrays a “strong positive image” and reflects “historical, cultural, Aboriginal or social significance or contributions to the community.” Staff consult the local councillor, and if necessary, community council.
To change a name, 75 per cent of the property owners on the street must agree — a daunting task on a major artery like Dundas Street, with more than 7,000 properties. In light of the Dundas petition, Mayor John Tory has asked senior city staff, including the Confronting Anti-Black Racism Unit and the Indigenous Affairs Office, to form a working group to examine policies around street names. Their report is expected mid-July.
Natasha Henry has stood in old Toronto many times, trying to erase condos from her view to imagine what life was like for Moses, Phoebe, Peggy, Jupiter and the other people who were enslaved here.
The lack of information “motivates me even more to ensure the research I’m doing helps to honour their existence and their humanity.”
It is a “touchy” thing to quantify those who were enslaved — another form of commodification, she says — so she is striking a balance in her research, being mindful of their humanity and personal stories. She says the old estimate of 500 Black people enslaved in Ontario between the 1770s and1 830s is not far off.
“Of the few hundred who were enslaved — we do not have a few hundred deaths recorded. So what happened to these people?”
Henry thinks street names or memorials that are relics of a violent colonial past should be rethought.
The history has always been there, Hayden King says, but people protesting systemic racism have forced media and politicians to put this on the agenda.
Canada is a country of inquiries and studies, he says, where disagreements are addressed, but little else is done. “We have a prime minister and head of the RCMP that are reluctantly recognizing that structural racism exists and that’s sort of the end of the story,” he says. Renaming a street can be powerful, but it is the “lowest threshold for change.”
Even if a street has a benign name, it has overwritten Indigenous place and presence, he says. For the past few years in Toronto, the Ogimaa Mikana Project has been replacing official signage with Anishinaabe versions. “All street names in Canada have to be questioned,” King says. “It’s not just about the individuals that they represent but it’s about the institution.”
George Dei says we need to be thoughtful about how we move forward.
“For some of us, what we’re talking about is our pain and our suffering, and we don’t want to counterbalance that with white fears and anxieties,” he says.
No street goes on forever. Whenever he finds himself on Jarvis Street, Rick Hill eventually turns on to another road, and another story. “Part of me has to laugh, because despite Jarvis, we’re still here,” he says. “Despite the taking of our land, we’re still here.”
Of the few hundred who were enslaved — we do not have a few hundred deaths recorded. So what happened to these people? Natasha Henry, the president of the Ontario Black History Society