Eglinton Park was once cornfields
[attach]7086[/attach]On any given night, it would have been easy to find hundreds of people gathered in Eglinton Park, possibly discussing a laborious day while eating fresh corn.
But this isn’t a modernday community gathering or a farmer’s market, like you might expect now.
This would have been day-to-day life for people of the Huron-Wendat Nation who called the area home hundreds of years ago.
The tribe was recently in the news when remains of 1,760 of their ancestors were reburied outside of Vaughan, one of the many sites in southern Ontario where remains have been found since the mid-20th century.
Lesser known is that the Huron-Wendat Nation once lived in midtown, and specifically, Eglinton Park.
“There was a 15th century village up in that area that was found in the mid-20th century, but (the site) was destroyed,” Dr. Ronald Williamson, founder of Archaeological Services Inc., said in a recent phone interview. “But we know from the artifacts
that were discovered in that area that it was a village.”
Those artifacts, he said, included pots and pieces of projectile points.
“The main thing is … we’re able to tell the age of the site based on the way they designed the pots, the kind of designs they put on them and the shape of the pots,” he said.
So what would midtown life have been like in the 1400s? According to Williamson, it was a very organized life, with clear social
structures.
“Their life at that time was organized such that they traced their descent on the woman’s side,” he said. “What basically happened is when the man married, he moved into his wife’s longhouse.”
Those longhouses were about 100 feet long, and both width and height would have been about 17 feet. They would have been
covered in bark, with smoke holes to accommodate the fires that burned constantly inside during the winters, for heat. Each
longhouse would be home to about 100 people.
“A site like (Eglinton Park) would have … four or five long houses, 400-500 people, with a half a kilometre of corn around it — not just some little garden,” he said with a chuckle. “This is a backyard garden that goes for 500 metres in every way, in every direction.”
Eglinton Park is bound roughly by Roselawn Avenue to the north, Eglinton Avenue West to the south, Oriole Parkway to the west and Edith Drive to the east.
A field would occupy an area the size of what is currently bounded by Cortleigh Boulevard, Craighurst Avenue and the very
southern tip of Lytton Park in the north, down to midway between Hillsdale Avenue West and Tranmer Avenue in the south, and from Castle Kknock Road in the west, to Yonge Street in the east.
This would be necessary, Williamson said, because corn accounted for between 50 and 60 percent of the people’s diet, likely meaning the average person ate more than a pound of corn daily.
“They would tend these fields, and they would also hunt and fish,” he said of the other main food sources. “They would get fish
from the lake and whatever stream fish they could catch, but they were close enough to the lakeshore to go down and get the better and larger lake fish.”
Deer were the main hunting targets, used for meat, to make tools from the bones and clothes from the skins.
“They would also have to hunt a lot of deer because each person needed a couple of deerskins annually,” Williamson said. “And frankly, for a population of 500 people you’re looking at 2,000 deerskins you would need annually, so deer hunting was very important.”
From towering corn stalks to towering condos, midtown Toronto has seen drastic changes in the last few hundred years. While
this may be a relatively unknown history to many, it received some official recognition this year when Mayor Rob Ford proclaimed June Eric’s Eglinton Park area map 15 Huron-Wendat Day in the City of Toronto.
“These were very sophisticated communities that were in Toronto 700 years ago,” Williamson said.