Grenadier debate on thin ice
[attach]824[/attach]There are no bodies of British grenadiers lying at the bottom of High Park’s famous lake.
Busting the myth that soldiers stationed near Grenadier Pond at Fort York during the War of 1812 had drowned there was Colborne Lodge museum coordinator Cheryl Hart.
But she admits nobody knows just exactly how the small marshy inlet of Toronto got its original name: Grenadiers Pond.
“We have no idea where the name came from but it wasn’t because the grenadiers fell through the ice,” she said. “It didn’t happen.”
She explains British soldiers, most likely British Grenadiers of the King’s Eighth Regiment of the Foot, were in the area when, in 1836, John and Jemima Howard purchased land for a sheep farm in what would become High Park.
“The legend has all kinds of iterations,” she says. “People will tell you different kinds of stories about it, but the grenadiers never fell through the ice at Grenadier Pond.
“One of the suppositions is that because Fort York was really not that far away from the pond and the pond would’ve been a great place to fish, the grenadiers … may very well have come here, or even just the soldiers,” she adds. “The grenadiers being the elite of the foot companies, it may have been just a romanticization of things.”
Author John Robert Colombo has collected personal accounts and mentioned Grenadier Pond in many of his books on Canadian lore, including Haunted Toronto.
Some say the drowned grenadiers still watch from the water’s depths.
More than likely, the only bodies rising to the surface are the ample lily pads, reeds and duckweed that cover the surface.
Back to the pond’s history, the Howards owned only a small portion of the body of water.
“John and Jemima Howard did not own all of Grenadier Pond, they just owned the little part that juts out on the southeast corner,” Hart says. “In fact, some people who have been in the area for a long time even call that Howard’s Cove.”
High Park was donated to the city after John Howard’s death at Colborne Lodge in 1890, but Grenadier Pond did not fully come into Toronto’s possession until the 1930s.
The pond itself has also seen some transformations.
“There used to be a soft connection to Lake Ontario, so it was kind of a marshy area,” Hart says. “So there was an outlet to the lake, and that of course was lost with the railway, and then the Queensway moved in.”