"3 Cheers, Bullies For Old Pier Head": Schooner Days MCCIX (1209)

by C. H. J. Snider

WE cannot leave the last willow of the old Queen's Wharf without showing what the wharf itself was like at the beginning of this century.

This is possible through the skill and courtesy of Noble P. Wilson, an old Queen's Wharf graduate still doing very well, thank you, on Manning ave.

As a boy he made this sketch - really two sketches. Half is the west end of the western channel, when it was cribbed along the south side, opposite the Queen's Wharf. The remainder is the white light at the west end of the northern cribwork on the north side of the channel, which was he Queen's Wharf and is continuation.

This white light was in existence a hundred years ago, and continued until the old western channel was filled in after 1920. Lined up with the red backlight northeast of it, the white light was a safe guide in from the lake, bringing vessels clear of the end of the south pier and of the sandbar forever creeping north and west from Toronto Island.

The white lighthouse was torn down when the new harbor was completed. The red one was moved westward to the north of the Lake Shore boulevard. Where it is now stands lightless was deep water in the middle of a large bath when the red light was shining.

This bay extended to the ramparts of Fort York, now so far inland, because half a mile of filling has been done. The sewer which trapped Garrison Creek, once a lovely salmon stream winding around Fort York, entered the bay mentioned through a large stone arch or culvert. Two wharves jutted into this vanished bay one for the garrison, the other Gzowski & Co's.

After curving around the fort, Garrison Creek had crept into Toronto harbor east of the fort, at Bathurst st. There was a bridge across the east bank.

From this a road led to the first garrison cemetery, part of which now forms a jaded city park at the foot of Portland st. Here were buried Governor Simcoe's little daughter Katharine, and Governor Colborne three-year-old son, and Sir John Colborne's suicide secretary, Lieutenant Zachary Mudge, and Benjamin Hallowell, father of Admiral Sir Benjamin Hallowell, KCB, one of Nelson's captains.

Admiral Hallowell commanded the Swiftsure at the battle of the Nile, and presented his great chief with the coffin, made from the mainmast of the captured French flagship, in which he was ultimately buried in St. Paul's.

Mr. Hallowell, the admiral's father, was one of the first owners of a park lot on the road to the old French Fort Rouille. He was a near relative of Chief Justice Elmsley. He died in his house in his 75th year, March 28, 1799, and was buried with pomp in the garrison cemetery five days later.

Getting back to the lighthouses, the red one was the older of the two. It is seen near the end of the old Queen's Wharf in Gleason's Pictorial, 1853, which shows the Toronto Boat Club coming into the harbor. The white lighthouse, which gave the channel range, does not appear. But Commodore Hodder's harbor chart of 1857 shows both lighthouses, white and red, in operation.