Toronto of Old: Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of OntarioScadding, Henry
History
Toronto of Old: Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of Ontario
Scadding, Henry
Toronto (Ont.) -- Description and travel; Toronto (Ont.) -- History
When the families of Mr. Gooderham and Mr. Worts crossed the Atlantic,
on the occasion of their emigration from England, the party, all in one
vessel, comprised, as we are informed, so many as fifty-four persons
more or less connected by blood or marriage.
We have been told by Mr. James Beaty that when out duck shooting, now
nearly forty years since, he was surprised by falling in with Mr. Worts,
senior, rambling apparently without purpose in the bush at the mouth of
the Little Don: all the surrounding locality was then in a state of
nature, and frequented only by the sportsman or trapper. On entering
into conversation with Mr. Worts, Mr. Beaty found that he was there
prospecting for an object; that, in fact, somewhere near the spot where
they were standing, he thought of putting up a wind-mill! The project at
the time seemed sufficiently Quixotic. But posterity beholds the large
practical outcome of the idea then brooding in Mr. Worts's brain. In
their day of small things the pioneers of new settlements may take
courage from this instance of progress in one generation, from the rough
to the most advanced condition. For a century to come, there will be
bits of this continent as unpromising, at the first glance, as the mouth
of the Little Don, forty years ago, yet as capable of being reclaimed by
the energy and ingenuity of man, and being put to divinely-intended and
legitimate uses.--Returning now from the wind-mill, once more to the
"road to Quebec," in common language, the Kingston road, we passed, at
the corner, the abode of one of the many early settlers in these parts
who bore German names--the tenement of Peter Ernst, or Ernest as the
appellation afterwards became.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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