The Town of York 1793-1815 [&] 1815-1834: A Collection of Documents of Early Toronto ~ Edith G Firth ~ History Upper Canada/Ontario [2 vols]

Title:
The Town of York 1793-1815: A Collection of Documents of Early Toronto [&]
The Town of York 1815-1834: A Further Collection of Documents of Early Toronto

Author: Edited with an Introduction by Edith G. Firth

Description: Matching limited, numbered editions, being copy numbers 382/650 and 382/725. Published in 1962 and 1966, respectively. Red cloth boards with gilt stamped spine. The first volume is bound in a slightly paler red cloth. Clean and unmarked. Note: leaves unopened. pp. xxvii, 368, [2] + lxxxvii, 381, [3].

''The Town of York is a collection of documents on the early history of Toronto.... Modern Toronto began in the summer of 1793 when the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe, with the assistance of the Queen's Rangers, started the nucleus of a town called York that was to replace Niagara as capital of the province in 1796. At a crossroads of two great routes into the interior, the St. Lawrence Great Lakes and the American Hudson-Mohawk River system, York soon won commercial ascendancy over its older rival, Kingston, a triumphant development that was abruptly halted in 1813 by the arrival of a
conquering American flotilla in April, 1813. Miss Firth, who is head of the Canadian history and manuscripts section of the Toronto Public Library, has taken infinite pains to assemble the minutiae of daily existence, social, religious, governmental and business; she has successfully brought to life the story of a pioneer community from its rude log cabin foundations to the coming of peace at the end of the War of 1812, when the wild duck returned again to Toronto Bay.'' - G. S. Graham, King's College, London - History, Vol. 48, No. 162 (1963).

In the second volume, Firth ''demonstrates quite convincingly that in the generation before it graduated to city status York exhibited the first faint but unmistakable signs of its metropolitan promise. The town's strategic location on Lake Ontario, its respectable and productive hinterland, its role as the seat of government of Upper Canada, and not least the vigor and enterprise of its merchants, all contributed to ensuring its rapid progress... In tracing York's rise to eminence, Miss Firth deals with the whole gamut of urban affairs — education, politics, commerce, health and welfare (or the lack thereof in some cases) and presents a picture of what life must have been like in an early Victorian metropolis in British North America. Paraded before the reader, too, are the many well-known personalities who dominated the town — and, in many instances, the entire colony — after the War of 1812.'' - Charles M. Johnston, McMaster University, The Historian, Vol. 30, No. 1 (November 1967).


Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Near Fine

Publisher: The Champlain Society
Place: Toronto
Year: 1962 [&] 1966

Keywords: history, Toronto, Upper Canada, Ontario, Canada,