Map of the Week: Riverdale's First World War dead

Updated Nov. 10 - see note below.

Maps:

Small (1000x540)

Medium (1200x800)

Large (1600x900)

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This week's map is an exercise in recovering lost urban memory.

I have identified almost 200 individual homes in Riverdale and the neighbourhood immediately north of the Danforth where the worst fears of the householder -­ wife, parent or sibling of a Canadian soldier overseas during the First World War - were realized a boy came to their front step with a dreaded telegram, instead of the man whose return they hoped for. For some, the news was final; for others, a long hospital vigil ended when a young man lost a painful struggle with the damage from shrapnel or gas.

The map gives an idea of the extent of cultural trauma which led to the Remembrance Day rituals, by looking at how the war scarred one neighbourhood. A large-scale disaster can sometimes seem incomprehensible; it is often only by looking at particular cases that we start to grasp a sense of what happened.

The war harrowed Riverdale on a mercilessly intimate scale:

In a row of five houses near Fulton and Carlaw, three lost sons in a six-week period in 1918 near Arras.

One-block Fenwick Avenue lost four men, as did one-block Garnock Avenue and one-block Wardell St.

One long block of Eaton Ave., east of Pape, lost six.

It is possible to stand at the corner of Garnock and Hampton and see five houses, including two pairs of next-door neighbours, who lost a son or husband.

Two homes, one on Riverdale Ave. and one on Hogarth, lost two sons. In the Riverdale Ave. case, one of them lied about his age to enlist.

For every actual death, there were many more families which lived with their dread, silently or otherwise. What it was like to live in the neighbourhood by the fall of 1918 is hard to imagine at this point; our only really good tool would be fiction.

The map was prepared from the excellent database at the Canadian Great War Project site. The search process was very cumbersome, and it wasn't possible to search for soldiers from First Ave., south of Gerrard between Logan and Broadview, or Strathcona Ave., off Pape south of the Danforth. 

I have added several streets north of Riverdale’s traditional boundary at the Danforth.

Every marker links to up to three documents: the Commonwealth War Graves Commission page for the soldier, the Department of Veterans Affairs page, which often links to other resources such as press clippings, and images of the soldier's attestation papers, prepared when he enlisted. Not all markers have all three links. The address on attestation papers is not always the address of next of kin at death, which is what the map is based on.

If you live in Riverdale and the area a few blocks north of the Danforth (pictured at left), you may want to consider the following:

The older a house is, the more of the texture of everyday life has flowed through it - birth, death, joy, tragedy. Some people who live in old houses enjoy the traces of people who lived there before, like coal grates and worn floorboards, and others carefully erase them all.

It’s rooted in personal things: our attitude to home, history and culture play a part.

A home pinpointed on the map may be where you now live. Whether you want to know this is for you to decide.

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Update, November 10:

Thanks to commenter John McLean for pointing out two soldiers from Eastmount Ave., north of the Danforth, who belonged on the map – when I looked into it more closely, I ended up adding four from Eastmount and three from Muriel Ave., near Pape and Danforth.

I’d place Private Russell Devall (http://ow.ly/B7Ni) on the on the map if I had a street address – we know his parents lived on Muriel, but not exactly where. His attestation papers aren’t on line.

Map of the Week: Elmbank

I've been getting around to this since spacing.ca's excellent post on Elmbank, the rural community that once existed on the Pearson airport site. After its expropriation in the 1930s, visible signs of the village (south of the present-day control tower ) vanished, though archaeologists removed a 622-grave cemetery from the airport grounds in the fall of 2000. (link, link, link, link (.pdf).)

The archaeologists reported:

The observation of disease and traumatic injuries on skeletal remains provides insight into the overall health status and occupational hazards of the population. By recording the frequency of individuals manifesting certain disease markers, as well as fractures and dislocations, it is possible to reconstruct the everyday struggle endured by the nineteenth-century pioneers buried at Elmbank cemetery.

Specific conditions and diseases, such as osteoporosis, arthritis, tuberculosis, periostitis, and various forms of cancer were observed on a number of adult remains. Some adults, and especially the remains of children, exhibited non-specific signs of chronic disease and/or nutritional stress that cannot be attributed to one specific disease or episode of disease. These findings of chronic disease in adults and children are not unusual in populations that pre-date modern Western medicine with antibiotic treatment and knowledge of basic hygiene, sanitation, and balanced nutrition.

Numerous instances of fractured bones, arthritis, and spinal column disorders, as well as the robust appearance of the skeletal muscle attachments in many males and females, all indicate a life of hard work for both sexes. This finding mirrors observations of other historic Ontario populations.

Just under half of the analyzable crania showed evidence of a pathology of the eye socket indicating malnutrition. The presence of this pathology decreased with the age of the individuals and it was seen more frequently among females than among males. No severe cases of this pathology were seen among the wealthy.

The overlay is an 1878 sheet which covers roughly the north half of modern Mississauga. It came from this project.

The file will open in Google Earth, Google Maps’ three-dimensional cousin, which can be downloaded here. The map overlay is contained in this .kmz file, which you can right-click to download.

Map(s) of the week: Toronto in 1878

This week's maps are quite different from the previous ones: two detailed 1878 atlas sheets of the east and west ends of Toronto, presented as a translucent overlay over the modern city. Adjust the transparency with the buttons at the top of the map.

The most striking change is to the city’s shoreline, especially downtown and in the east end – the 1878 maps were drawn before the growing city found ways to expand southward into the shallow water just south of Front St.

Rural Ontario begins just above Bloor – St. Clair is also listed as the Third Concession, and still mostly is a rural concession road. The city is surrounded by market gardens and orchards, run by small farmers selling produce for sale at city markets. 

In the countryside are now-forgotten villages like Carlton, at the crossroads of St. Clair Ave. W. and Old Weston Rd., Norway, at Kingston Rd. and Woodbine, and Coleman, at Dawes Rd. and the Danforth. Yorkville is a distinct community in its own right, though the city is about to absorb it.

Toll gates block many major roads. Wagons headed into the city from Leslieville would have had to pass one at Queen and Broadview.

The Union Station on the map is the second Union Station, built in 1873. (The one we know today is the third station, built in 1927.)

Just north of the Don Jail (the ‘New Gaol,’ finished 13 years before) we see the House of Industry, or workhouse. The walls must have cast a long shadow over the workhouse inmates, as was perhaps intended.

Nerd box

The overlay maps were prepared by rotating them counter-clockwise and changing the vertical and horizontal dimensions until the major streets matched. The process at one point involved holding a ruler up to the screen, which looks ridiculous but actually works pretty well as a way of calculating the corrections.

Just as an old house has no right angles and no parallel lines, the 1878 maps (produced decades before aerial photography could be used in mapping) don't align perfectly to the modern one. In the west-end map, for example, Yonge lines up with Keele and Ossington but not Dufferin. On the north-south axis, Bloor lines up with St. Clair but not Queen as precisely as I’d like. On the east-end map, Queen and the Danforth aren’t exactly parallel on the overlay.

The fit here is the best possible one, as far as I can tell. Readers will have to use their imagination to a certain extent.

The maps themselves came from the McGill library’s online collection.