Toronto Armstrongs

by Jackson Armstrong

In my father's study in the basement of our Toronto house hangs a portrait.
The subject has a dominant nose, blue eyes, a firm brow and a lengthy but neat Victorian hairstyle. This is a photographic reproduction of the original, which belongs to another branch of our family - my father had our copy made years ago.

Playing in that room as a child, or later searching through dad's library, I have always had those blue eyes looking down at me. Dad's stories about the man they belong to, my great-great-great-grandfather, Philip Armstrong, have made me wonder about him and where he came from. Philip was born somewhere in Cumberland, England, between March 1809 and March 1810. The IGI provides only two possible matches, with baptisms 5 and 7 years after this date, one in Carlisle and the other in Penrith.

Regardless, family legend tells us that either he or his father left Cumberland and worked as a clerk for the Bishop of Winchester at Farnham Castle in Surrey. Sometime around his 20th birthday, about 1830, Philip left England altogether to seek out a new life and new opportunity in Upper Canada. He headed for York, a muddy town with a new university and a population of 10,000, situated between the Don and Humber Rivers on Lake Ontario.

Philip bought a 100-acre plot of farmland north of town, near a quiet country road that would one day become a main thoroughfare of Toronto traffic. He occupied himself as a farmer and butcher, and by his first marriage to Miss Calvert, he had three children. Two daughters died with his wife in a cholera epidemic in 1832/33, but one daughter, Anne, lived and was married in 1848. Philip took a second wife, Mary, in 1837. By 1838 York was incorporated as the City of Toronto and Philip and Mary had a son, Thomas.

Making almost daily trips to the open market in town down the rough road that is now Yonge St. (the longest street in the world - turning into highway and reaching nearly to Manitoba), Philip would sell his produce of fruit, vegetables and feed grain, and his livestock of poultry, cattle and sheep. At home, Mary would churn butter, bake, wash clothing and linen, and cook for her family and four hired men. Philip and Mary kept a garden by the roadside, and on the second Dominion Day, July 1, 1869, she marked in her diary: "As I write this, I hear endless exclamations of delight too, from the holiday folks passing as they catch the first view of our pretty garden; a group all standing up in their carriage crying out simultaneously: 'Isn't it lovely; did you ever see anything like that, look at the roses.'"

Philip became an early Justice of the Peace for the County of York, a member of the county community council, the art association and the Agricultural and Horticultural Society. The latter commissioned the portrait of him, which records his blue eyes and their relaxed gaze into my father's study. Philip played a role in establishing the Toronto Industrial Fair, the forerunner of the Canadian National Exhibition. Philip and Mary's son Thomas went to the Toronto School of Medicine from 1858-1862, and after graduation Married Fidelia Jane.

He practiced in Whitby until Confederation (1867) when he returned to Toronto. He and Fidelia lived on Yorkville Ave but later moved north to his father's farm just below modern-day St. Clair Ave. They moved even further still, well north of the city to the community of Hogg's Hollow, today still well within the borders of Toronto. In the late 19th Century Thomas made house calls by horse-drawn carriage in roughly the same area that my father now makes house calls by car for his more elderly patients. By the turn of the century, Philip and Mary had passed on, and Thomas, along with many other Toronto property-owners began selling chunks of his father's farm. Eventually divided in 200 lots (not all sold out of the Armstrong family till 1994), the city put a road through the land in the 1890s, joining Avenue Rd. and Yonge St. Thomas was asked to name the road, and he chose Farnham Ave, to honour his father and where he had come from.

My own father grew up on Farnham Ave with cousins and uncles living only a few doors away from him. In my father's study, under the portrait of Philip Armstrong, sits the red-painted wooden sleigh that Thomas would take his 8 children tobogganing on in snowy Toronto winters. My favourite tobogganing hill as a child is in a park in Hogg's Hollow, not far from where Thomas's house stood. I didn't realise it then, but there is a good chance that my brother, sister, and I rode down the same hill that my great-great-grandfather did a hundred years before us.