While great cities and highly complex urban life are outstanding features of present-day Canada, urban development runs far back into its past. One can trace town beginnings from the very establishment of successful European settlement on the St. Lawrence in the early days of New France. For what else was Champlain's post at Quebec, founded in 1608, but a town in essence, the embryo of the modern large city? It was a centre for trade, government, and defence, and soon for religious and social activity. In other words, like urban centres in general, it had special functions that marked it off from the surrounding country. It represented a concentration of population (if very small at the start) which performed commercial, political and other services for the territory about it, and in so doing displayed some of the basic characteristics of an urban place. While it is true that Quebec's first concern was to direct the fur trade, an enterprise that lived by and in the wilderness; nevertheless, European settlement in colonial America did focus on the little "towns" that brought in the supplies and sent out the products of the frontiers. These grew steadily into sizeable urban communities as settlement spread out around them, and economic activities enlarged.
In fact, the urbanizing process, begun at Quebec on the St. 0Lawrence frontier in the seventeenth century, simply moved onward when, in the late eighteenth century, pioneers advanced into the Great Lakes region that is now Ontario. It continued as lands were taken up all across central Canada in the earlier nineteenth century. The same process was going on in the Atlantic region; and it would happen in the West when the prairies and Pacific slopes were occupied. In short, urban development has been a basic theme throughout Canadian history. It was already well advanced by 1850 when the coming of the roilway brought on a whole new surge of town growth. And although this and later developments in the twentieth century might seem to dwarf what had been achieved in the first, pre-railway age of town-building in central Canada, we should recognize that our modern urban society has roots deep in this earlier age.
The Days of New France
Urban centres were slow to advance in the first decades of the struggling little French colony on the St. Lawrence, which was beset by English attack and Indian dangers and received but limited support from France. Trois-Rivieres was founded in 1634, Montreal in 1642. But these were only frontier outposts for some time; Montreal, especially, remained an outlying and exposed mission station. Nevertheless, Montreal's very exposure to Indian forays from the inland country, placed as it was at the junction of great water routes leading to the Ottawa, the Great Lakes, the Richelieu, and Lake Champlain, meant that it was also well located to become the gathering point of the expanding fur trade of the interior. Indeed, soon it was not just a post for bringing the Indians Christianity and hospital care under its devout founders, but a booming frontier market site where raucous fairs were held each year to trade in furs from the West. Montreal, in fact, was beginning to assume its enduring role as the focus of the commerce that came down to the St. Lawrence from the immense lands beyond - an excellent example of the importance of strategic location in urban growth.
Meanwhile, the renewed interest of the French state in the St. Lawrence colony in the 1660's and 70's brought a wave of new settlers and broader economic development, especially under the capable intendant, Jean Talon. Brewing, tanning, flour-milling, and timber-making were fostered. A shipyard was set up at Quebec, and iron deposits worked near Trois-RiviΦres. Furthermore, the spread of farm settlement, especially on seigneuries near Quebec, made the towns market places for agricultural produce and centres of supplies and services for the growing countryside. Consequently, storekeepers, craftsmen, labourers and dock workers came to swell urban activities and numbers. Despite the beginning of new Anglo-French wars toward the close of the century, urban life was well established, with about 1,500 inhabitants in Montreal by 1700 and some 2,000 in Quebec (as compared with perhaps 500 and 800 respectively in 1663). The former was no longer a frontier village but a thriving commercial town, largely laid out on a rectilinear or "grid" street plan spreading inland from the river. The latter was the colony's main port as well as the seat of government, with stone warehouses, fortifications, the intendant's palace and, on the heights above the shore, the governor's chateau and the steadily rising Upper Town. Both centres housed influential religious institutions, another frequently important feature in urban development particularly in a French Catholic community where the church entered widely into social and cultural life. Quebec was not only the site of the influential Jesuit College, but also seat of the colony's bishop and of the seminary (which later became Laval University) that educated its parish clergy. At Montreal, the Sulpician Order held seigneurial title to the Island of Montreal, and the imposing Sulpician Seminary that dated from 1685 (and still stands in modified form) testified to the significant religious factor in the urban development of New France.
When peace returned to that colony after 1713, there was further economic and population growth; the latter chiefly due to natural increase though there were brief revivals of French immigration. By the 1750's, on the eve of war once more, there were more than 50,000 inhabitants in New France, close to a quarter of them living in urban surroundings. This was a high proportion for any European society of the time, but especially for a colony too often thought of just in terms of habitant farmers or fur trade voyageurs. The fact is that as much of the characteristic life of New France was to be found in the towns as in the countryside. Here were the vital merchants and shippers of the St. Lawrence, as well as the skilled colonial artisans and the ruling powers of church and state. Though the Conquest of 1759-60 brought British garrisons and governors to the towns and sent French officials and larger merchants back to France, basic features of the French-speaking urban community were to remain: its religious structure, its educational and social institutions, and the traditional ways of life of its ordinary citizens. Thus urban as well as rural French Canada would figure in the preservation of French culture in the years ahead.
Quebec under British Rule
Two major influences on town growth in this period were the influx of English-speaking merchants after the Conquest into what was now the province of Quebec and the Loyalist movement following the American Revolution. The latter represented the first large-scale immigration of British colonists. The merchants, who brought new capital and business connections with British markets, concentrated chiefly in Quebec and Montreal which by 1765 had grown to 9,000 and 6,000 respectively. The Loyalists moved mainly into empty western areas and founded both rising settlements for Montreal's trade up the St. Lawrence and, in time, new urban centres in what would become Ontario.
The British merchants, though relatively limited in numbers, grew great in economic power, for they were the representatives on the St. Lawrence of what was already the world's leading trading nation. In the 1760's, shipping from overseas mounted on the river. A greater variety of imports generated exports of wheat, flour, potash and wood, the sale of which in turn, stimulated business life in the towns. Above all, the fur trade grew in volume and pushed even further westward, thanks to a fruitful combination of French knowledge of the interior and British resources in trade goods and markets. The final result was the proud North West Company, built up in Montreal in the 1770s and 80s, whose trading domain came to extend to the Arctic and the Pacific in the next twenty years. The fur barons' handsome stone mansions and counting houses in Montreal, the company warehouses upriver at Lachine from which the great brigades of canoes and voyageurs left every spring for the distant fur regions, and the festive banquets of the Beaver Club, in Montreal taverns celebrating the fortunes of the fur trade, all witnessed to its high prosperity.
In the capital, Quebec City, prospering commerce similarly produced massive ranges of stone business buildings, especially in Lower Town by the harbour. Indeed, many of these, now popularly assumed to go back to the French period, were really built in the new era of growth under British rule (much of the older Lower Town had been destroyed by bombardment during the British siege of Quebec in 1759). The town acquired in 1764, central Canada's first newspaper, the bilingual Quebec Gazette, which printed the news of trade as well as politics. There were demands, too, for improvement in the crowded roadways. It was complained, in 1767, that "the inhabitants pile Wood and Timber and leave their carts and trucks standing in the streets to the danger and annoyance of His Majesty's subjects in the dark, and that there are numbers of Hoggs running loose..." (H.A. lnnis, ed., Select Documents in Canadian History -1497-1783, p. 476).
The American Revolution put Quebec city to the test of war again when American invaders besieged it in the winter of 1775-6. But it held out with no great damage. In fact, the war that lasted till 1783 tended to stimulate trade, and thus the business life of the St. Lawrence towns boomed. Quebec, in particular, was a major British base, and competing trade from rebellious New England had been effectively cut off. Montreal benefitted too when American fur trade rivals were excluded in the West. After the war, the coming of the Loyalists to Canada meant more business, both in sending them supplies up-river and, soon, in bringing out their goods to market. In 1791, however, the very growth of the western Loyalist settlements led to the decison to divide the existing province of Quebec into two; the eastern, older and largely French- speaking half to be Lower Canada, the western, newer and mainly English-speaking half to be Upper Canada. And thus opened another era in the rise of towns.
The Early Years of the Canadas
In some respects, the forces affecting urban development went on unbroken. Montreal continued to grow with the expanding northwestern fur trade. Quebec's shipping empire and role as a British imperial stronghold brought prestige, power, and official salaries and military expenditure to help enrich the city. But wholly new were the urban places founded within the young province of Upper Canada. There, the first community to emerge was Kingston, settled by Loyalists where Lake Ontario entered the upper St. Lawrence. It served as a transshipment point between lake sailing vessels and the much smaller batteaux that had to make their way past rapids in the river down to Montreal. Because of its key position on the vital water route, Kingston also grew as a British naval and military base against renewed threats from the United States. At the other end of Lake Ontario, Niagara developed as a military base and transshipment point; for near here, one had to portage around Niagara Falls to reach Lake Erie and the upper lakes beyond.
Yet John Graves Simcoe, first governor of Upper Canada, chose neither of these in 1793 for the capital of the new province. Instead he decided on a site on Lake Ontario with a sheltered harbour further away from American attack. This was York, the future Toronto, which began as little more than a hamlet with government officials and a small garrison. But thanks to these, there was a ready market for food and supplies, and because York was the capital it attracted settlers and obtained roads into a fast-developing hinterland beyond.
Following the initial Loyalist wave, many non-Loyalist Americans came into Upper Canada to take up the fertile lands the Loyalists had uncovered, and so the province went on growing. So, consequently, did Kingston, York and Niagara; but when the War of 1812 broke out, these American settlers constituted a possibly serious danger. But because they had received good land with very light taxes they were more inclined to protect their new holdings than to join the invaders. York was raided twice and occupied briefly which left a lasting anti-American sentiment there.
The war which ended with no encroachment from the United States also promoted urban development. When British hard cash flowed into the towns to purchase war supplies, the beginnings of banking appeared in Kingston and, later, York. Quebec and Montreal also benefitted. The former remained the main British base and headquarters for carrying on the war in the Canadas, the latter was the chief commercial town from which the supplying and financing of Upper Canada went forward. It was a mark of Montreal's rising economic prominence that Canada's first great bank, the Bank of Montreal, was chartered there soon afterward in 1817.
No less important was the growth of the timber trade with Britain, first to meet British demands for ship-building during the Napoleonic Wars, and then to supply the needs of its swelling industrialism. Lumbering spread rapidly along the upper St. Lawrence, and up the Ottawa valley. Here Philemon Wright founded Hull opposite the future site of Ottawa and, in 1807, began rafting his squared timber down the river to Montreal and Quebec. Soon huge rafts were coming all the way to waiting lumber ships that thronged Quebec harbour. The city became a major lumber port and ship-building centre, its foreshore lined with noisy shipyards and with great baulks of wood massed in timber cove.
The busy St. Lawrence waterway saw still more development when John Molson, a leading Montreal brewer, introduced the steamboat to it in 1809. During the War of 1812, his steamers brought boatloads of British reinforcements from Quebec to Montreal, and after the war, steam transport spread up the rivers and lakes, bringing much faster, surer water transport to interior centres. Kingston merchants launched the first steamboat on Lake Ontario in 1819, and inland ports like York and Niagara all benefitted from the improved connections brought by the thrashing steamer. In fact, the very tempo of urban life was changing, and a further stage of growth was at hand.
Immigration and Commercial Growth
In the 1820's, a new tide of immigration mounted, this time from Great Britain. As settlers poured into the St. Lawrence, the towns gained both from the business of supplying and moving them onward, and from growth in population, since part of the incoming wave remained in urban centres. But their chief gain came, again, from the greater trade derived as the settled countryside expanded and needed more goods and services for which settlers in return produced more commodities for sale and export through the towns. On the other hand, some of the immigrants arrived impoverished, sick, and helpless. They raised problems of aid and shelter, of maintaining public health and order. By the 1830's, towns were sometimes severely strained by the burden of misery and disease literally dumped upon them. Cholera and other epidemics frequently swept the newly-crowded urban communities which, as yet, had few provisions for effective sanitation or mass hospital care. The hardest hit were usually the main ports of arrival, Quebec and Montreal. Still, the lasting gains outweighed the passing turmoil, through the capital and skills that many of the newcomers carried with them, the larger work force they created, the wider markets they provided, and the consequent greater social growth.
Most important, towns simply got bigger. In round figures, Montreal grew from about 18,000 in 1821 to 31,000 in 1833; Quebec from some 16,000 to around 27,000, and York from 1,200 in 1820 to over 9,000 in 1834, when it was incorporated as the city of Toronto. The year before, Montreal had become an incorporated city, and Quebec before that in 1832. The establishment of municipal institutions also occurred to a lesser degree in smaller centres; even so, the special needs and problems of urban life - for police, fire control, road and market regulations - required that towns be given administrative powers of their own. This early urban government was rather rudimentary. A few constables, a jail and a poor house, some limited efforts at providing water supply, sewers, and sidewalks (if few paved roadways) were the principal urban services furnished. The government of the new city of Toronto did, however, aspire to some sort of moral influence by trying to do away with "tippling houses" and billiard tables.
Boards of health were set up to deal with the repeated epidemics, and general hospitals backed by public subscription established. In the Lower Canadian centres, the hospitals supplemented religious foundations dating back to French times. And although the plentiful inns and taverns seemed to provide the main sources of recreation for the town population in general, theatres appeared in the larger places, along with mechanics institutes, literary societies, and musical groups. A trade union (printers) was organized at York in 1832. Beyond that, the increase in churches, schools, banks, and newspapers each, in their way, marked the growing complexity of urban centres.
Another major influence on urban development was the steady improvement in transport. Stage coach companies and the expanding road network (though terribly rough by later standards) opened ever-widening hinterlands. Steamboat and harbour development companies expanded commerce; but, above all, the building of canals fostered shipping and town growth along their routes. The Lachine Canal, the first step in overcoming the upper St. Lawrence rapids, was completed in 1825 and the Welland Canal, by-passing Niagara Falls, in 1829. Colonel John By of the Royal Engineers set about constructing a waterway from the Ottawa River to the harbour of Kingston on Lake Ontario, chiefly to serve as a military by-pass on the vulnerable St. Lawrence River route to Montreal. The communities of Bytown, Richmond Village, and Wright's Village (later Hull) flourished with canal construction. Attempts to complete the costly chain proposed along the upper St. Lawrence failed because of the expense, and bad feelings engendered in the effort were a factor leading to the Rebellions of 1837-8 in the Canadas.
Nevertheless, before the outbreak of the Rebellions halted a notable era of growth, town life spread even more widely through the provinces. As settlers pushed out the frontiers, back country hamlets sprang up like Peterborough, London, or Sherbrooke. Older villages such as Belleville or Hamilton grew towards real urban centres as they serviced the rising inland country and its rural stores. Not only, therefore, did older, larger places grow in this era of expanding settlement and commercial advance, but many smaller ones expanded as well.
The Flourishing Pre-Railway Town
The distress after the Rebellions and the severe world depression that accompanied them brought a lull in development that proved only temporary. Immigration, trade, and town growth had all revived by 1842. But, while one might say that the earlier development simply continued, there is reason to treat the years between the Rebellions and the railway era of the 1850's as a distinctive period. In particular, these years saw the pre-railway town reach its most flourishing stage before the coming revolution in land transport brought new potentialities and problems. In water transport, the long-sought mainline improvements were achieved with the completion of the St. Lawrence canals in 1848. This construction was largely accomplished through another major feature of the era, the Union of the two Canadas, effected in 1841. With restored and increasing overseas markets for lumber and grain, a united economic system promoting major public works, and with an immigrant flow rising to a peak in the late forties, it is no wonder that the towns thrived. Even another depression near the end of the decade brought only a short, if bitter, set-back, and by 1850 prosperity was spreading once more.
Accordingly, in the years before the mid-century, the cities and towns of central Canada achieved some degree of maturity before iron rails and smoke-belching locomotives disrupted them anew. But it would be wrong to romanticize the typical urban community of the time. It was dirty, untidy, and cluttered, with jammed-in or half-built streets, miserable shanties in back lanes, few gas lights or sewers, and much drunkeness and hardship. Nevertheless, it also had well-proportioned public buildings and private residences (usually stone in Quebec, Montreal, and Kingston: brick in Toronto and western centres), and there were gardens, fresh air, and few factories. Even the shanty-dweller was not yet hopelessly hemmed in, for the countryside was still within easy walking distance. While there were some slum areas and some wealthy residential districts, rich and poor still frequently lived side by side, and business and residential housing intermingled. There was not the marked class separation by location or the corresponding wide drab areas of tenements which were the later product of the much larger industrial city.
Still, factory industry was beginning, even before the age of rail and steel. The area along the Lachine Canal above Montreal was a rising industrial site; milling centres had emerged from Sherbrooke to Bytown, Brantford, and St. Catharines - wherever waterpower led mills to concentrate. There were boiler and engine works at Toronto and Montreal, a result of the growing use of steam-power. Nonetheless, manufacturing was, as yet, a minor component in urban life. It was still a commercial age, when the influential urban figures were the rich wholesalers of Toronto, the great forwarders (export-import merchants) of Montreal, or the powerful timber dealers of Quebec.They came to dominate city society at a time when the power of the old Tory official class had been broken and the challenge of the railway financiers and industrialists had not yet arisen.
Montreal, which had reached 57,000 by 1851, was plainly the ruling commercial metropolis of Canada. Roughly half of the population was English-speaking. Quebec had grown at a lesser rate, though its peak period as a lumber wooden shipbuilding port lay just ahead. It had roughly 45,000 inhabitants in 1851, about one-third of them English-speaking. Toronto was rising steadily as the largest market place in the West, and had grown from 14,000 in 1841 to 30,000 ten years later. Here the population was predominantly British-born. Among smaller western places, Hamilton and London had both become substantial towns by the close of the period, and the former was on the eve of much greater growth as a railway and industrial centre. Only Kingston seemed to be lagging (although it was the capital of Canada between 1841 and 1844), largely because it had no extensive back country to develop, hemmed in as it was by rugged lands to the north. Still, Kingston was a noteworthy military and educational centre, with Queen's University founded there in 1842. Other cities had budding education institutions, as well, which increased their importance. The University of Toronto got under way in the 1840's, McGill at Montreal grew beyond a medical school, and Laval received a charter. We may assuredly say, in conclusion, that the urban development so plain today in central Canada had been firmly established by the 1850's. The process that now holds over three-quarters of the Canadian population in urban communities had already moved well forward by then. And even though these earlier urban centres were small by present standards, they clearly were as much a focus of social, commercial, and political activity as their modern counterparts.
