The Early 19th Century Land Market on Toronto’s Rural Fringe (or six months of work)

It’s been awhile since I provided an update. I keep finding different threads to pull and getting lost in the Land Registry while wrestling with how I turn the results into maps. It’s not always clear what piece of land is being referred to before subdivisions were formalized. I did say in my last update going through the registry could be time-consuming! I under-estimated it.

But it’s an important step to building out the picture of how Brockton evolved into a village. There isn’t a lot of information about landownership or settlement patterns outside Toronto’s city limits, which extended only to Dufferin Street until the 1885. The two best cartographic sources are the 1851 Map of the the Township of York, which shows early subdivisions, and the 1878 Illustrated Historical Atlas of the County of York, which provides more details on subdivision and ownership, but nearly 40 years later.

To get a richer view of settlement patterns in the decades before 1851, I went through the Land Registry Books to examine a broader geography then just Brockton, transcribing all the transactions for the area between the Humber and Bathurst Street, south of St. Clair Avenue.

So what does nearly fifty years of land transactions looks like?

Overall, I recorded 176 transactions between 1791 and 1840, with a total value of about £29,000. Prices ranged from £0.18 to £2,000 acre, with the median falling at £6.00 over the period.

The data tells the story of two land markets. The first two decades of settlement, land was still being distributed through Crown patents. As a result, the primary means of acquiring land near Toronto was obtaining it from the government. Land did changes hands, but values were low, reflecting the reality there was still plenty of land remained available.

After the war of 1812, the secondary land market began to open up, with those who emerged from the war with capital investing it in land. Two of the dominant west end landowners, the Denison and Crookshank families entered the market in this period, buying up park lots.

The 1820s, saw modest price growth and the first subdivisions along Queen, but the market really takes off in the 1830s. That acceleration set the stage for the emergence of west Toronto’s first rural villages, Lambton, Seaton, Davenport, and of course Brockton, in the 1840s.

I’m pulling this data together to build a map of landownership in 1840 (and maybe 1820 and 1830), examining how it played out spatially and exploring some of the personalities behind it.

Period	# of Patents	# of Transactions	Total £	Median £/acre	Average Parcel Size	Smallest Lot
1791-1800	19	7	–	–	126 acres	30 acres
1801-1810	10	11	£180	£0.85	120 acres	50 acres
1811-1820	5	23	£4,974	£2.04	87 acres	25 acres
1821-1830	0	29	£5,517	£4.50	61 acres	0.25 acres
1831-1840	7	65	£18,098	£18.33	57 acres	0.13 acres
Total (1791-1840)	41	135	£28,769	£6.00	79 acres	–

Now that we have a pretty good handle on the land records to 1840 and a comprehensive dataset on the land market (it only took me six months!), I’ll continue to interpret the data along with looking into primary sources that can bring some of these dry numbers to life.