Freeland's Soap Factory

Among his “landmarks” J. Ross Robertson includes Freeland’s Soap Factory. The soap and candle factory was built on a wharf at the foot of Yonge Street in about 1837 by Peter Freeland, who had come to Toronto after operating a similar business in Montreal.

Robertson introduces the soap factory this way: “The following sketch will at once be recognized by all of our older citizens as a familiar friend. They will also remember it with pleasure as an institution which contributed largely to their comfort by helping to throw light upon the dark days of this city’s early history.”[1] The first line reminds us that the entire production of Robertson’s Landmarks is something of a nostalgia trip for Robertson and his readers; he assumes that many of them will know of or remember the landmarks of which he writes. In the second line he seems to be playing with metaphors. The factory made candles, so it no doubt did help provide comfort and light to people in the 1840s, which were otherwise “literally” dark days. But we also come full circle in the second line because if the city’s early history was its dark days then the time in which Robertson writes illustrates a city moving through light and, though Robertson probably wouldn’t have used the term, modernity. (The dark days of history are also a little unknown and Robertson is helping to illuminate them.)

I think that an evolution is at work in the descriptions that Robertson chooses to provide of the factory. They detail a period when the relationship between the city and its surroundings was far more fluid and organic; something that Robertson, born in 1841[2] and living in the contemporary period felt on a personal level.

Robertson doesn’t provide an estimate of how many people worked in the factory but along with publishing a sketch of the building, he includes an extensive description of its appearance and operation. The main building was “ninety feet by forty, and three storeys high, having large Double doors in each end.”[3] It was built on a water lot, which meant it sat at the beginning of the wharf on the east side of Yonge Street and Robertson argues literally had to be built on cribs rather than land given that it was a water lot and not a land lot.[4] In the sketch the wharf can be seen stretching out from the factory into the lake. Adjacent to the factory on land are a series of sheds that were used for storing wood ashes, lime, ice and tallow. The last two ingredients were probably the prime incentives for the company’s lake side location. The tallow was imported by “schooners from Rochester”[5] and unloaded on the docks and the ice could be drawn directly from the lake. Robertson also includes a list of the people who were stockholders in the Yonge street wharf. The list includes Freeland and another soap manufacturer, W. D. Taylor, and a number of merchants who might have benefited from the wharf directly. But the extensive list also includes a number of people simply listed as gentlemen, and others who seemed to look upon it as an investment property. The list suggests there was a broader interest in the wharf; an interest that is reflected in its broader community use, as I’ll note below.

Robertson’s discussion of the factory includes a series of vignettes of events that happened at the factory during its, presumably, early years. These vignettes suggest a close relationship between the community and its natural environment:

“The bay was full of wild ducks in the early days, and were so plentiful around the wharf that Mr. Freeland used to shoot them from the factory door or windows.
Mr. Richard Tinning was one day walking along the shore, when some ducks flew up from the water. He fired at them with out looking where the shot was going, and it crashed into the windows of the factory. Mr. Freeland ran out, with a number of men, to repel the invaders.”[6]

Ducks weren’t the only things being caught around the factory. In what seems an overly romanticized description, Robertson describes an almost seamless link between the factory and the lake: “When the Freeland boys wanted to fish they had not far to go; they just put their poles out of the windows and managed it that way.”[7] Civilization, or dare I say modernity, and nature were tethered through the fragile link of a fishing line.

Robertson also lists a tame muskrat as one of the factory’s residents and notes that it “used to dine on fish caught by the men.”[8] He’s not specific about which men and whether they worked in the factory or simply dried their catches next to it.  However the muskrat must have lead a precarious existence because in the very next paragraph Robertson mentions that “The Indians used to catch large quantities of muskrats on the Island, and would land their canoes and cargoes of muskrats skins on the beach, which was very wide at this point.”[9] The “Indians,” it’s not clear which “Indians,” are a stock figure in this narrative of nostalgia and nature. (I’ll have more to say about that in other blog entries.) So it’s not surprising that they appear here.  We’ll also see that while settlers actively and aggressively discouraged Aboriginal people form moving on the land, the waterfront remained a more, no pun intended, fluid space. In some ways Robertson almost offers a stream of conscious narrative with the muskrat providing the entry point for the Aboriginal actors. It’s not clear when the Aboriginal people would have been bringing their catches onto the shore and whether it was contemporary with the resident muskrat’s existence in the factory. Hopefully for the muskrat, it was not.

Freeland lived in the upper story of the factory and we occasionally get a sense of the paternal relationship that must have existed between him and his workers or at least that’s how it appears through the lens of Robertson’s writing. Several of the vignettes suggest that the workers worked unorthodox hours and remained around the factory during their off time. For example, Robertson notes that “After work was done the men employed in the factory would sit around the kitchen area moulding bullets.”[10] And in another telling vignette Robertson relates how “a number of boys  were sailing around the factory on planks” and when one tumbled into the water “an old workman, by the name of John Lawrence, ran from the cabin in which he lived, partially dressed, jumped into the water, swam out to and snatched the boy by the hair, and deposited him among the spectators on the bank, then walked off to his dwelling, asking no thanks.”[11] The description suggests what the sketch of the Freeland factory does not, that workers were scattered directly around the factory and engaged with it even on a Sunday. Finally, Robertson describes how Freeland was living in the upper floors of the factory at one point in time—the suggestion being that he didn’t always live in the factory—and came home one cold winter night to find “a soldier lying on the snow, under the influence of liquor”[12] Although it was late, workers were still available in the factory for Freeland to call upon and they pulled him into the factory and wrapped him up in a buffalo skin to sleep it off. The soldier’s adventures didn’t end there; waking up in the middle of the night he ended up stumbling into a soap kettle and wasn’t finally freed until morning when Freeland lowered a latter down, allowing the soldier to climb out and then steal along the shoreline out of sight and reach the garrison further to the east.[13] And, in yet another winter adventure, the workers even brought a cow, belonging to Chief Justice Hagerman no less, that had tumbled through the ice and into the lake into the factory to warm up.[14] The running theme in all of these intentionally amusing little tales is that the workers were around the factory at all hours of the day and clearly saw it as more than simply a workplace. We also see, again, this organic relationship with the environment from cows tumbling into the ice and then being brought into the factory to soldiers hugging the shore line on their way home from a night of carousing to avoid being spotted.

The mention of boys floating around the factory on planks also suggests that this was not by any means a fully industrialized environment. Similarly, Robertson notes that “For years an old schooner remained high and dry on the lot alongside of the factory, and was a playground for the boys, swinging from its pendant ropes and halyards.”[15] The lines between play space and work space, built and natural environment all blurred.

The description of a wide beach, above, in tandem with descriptions of the beach and embankment elsewhere, suggests that in its early years the Yonge Street wharf must have been moored against what was still substantially a natural environment. This would have changed in the 1850s when the Esplanade was constructed on the central waterfront. As Thomas McIlwraith notes “during the 1850s the northerly shoreline of Toronto Bay moved south, and by 1858 the gently sloping beach had been replaced by a sharp edge well over a metre above the waterline and three below.”[16] But the process was not as simple or as complete as that sharp edge would suggest. McIlwraith argues that the fill needed to create the extended and sharpened shoreline was drawn from banks of the lake itself. He specifically points to a raised bluff, the Ontario Terrace west of Spadina, as providing a portion of the fill.[17]

 Robertson’s various descriptions of an embankment above the “beach” suggest that McIlwraith was probably right. Specifically above the Freeland Soap Factory “In the early days there was a magnificent row of oak trees at the top of the bank, west of Yonge street. A son of Mr. Joseph Rogers, hatter, shot a racoon up in the branches. There was an old hickory tree on the bank, near the factory, one half of which, it is said, bore hickory nuts and the other half haws.”[18] The description suggests a more elaborate embankment in the early days of the factory. It also illustrates how the boundary between civilization and nature was not drawn at the water’s edge. The trees, raccoons, and hickory nuts were around and above the soap factory. The Esplanade project would have changed that setting. Later, and again, it’s not clear when or if this was during the Esplanade construction, Robertson states, “Mr. Freeland, a!ong with other property owners, had a dispute with the city as to the northern boundary of the lots. Experts were employed to dig into the ground to find the original bank.”[19] At this point it’s hard to imagine when and where the “original” bank might have been given that even before the Esplanade project the process of filling in and shifting the lake front had already begun in the 1840s and early 1850s.[20] As I noted above, the process was not complete even in 1858 when ostensibly the Esplanade was “complete.” McIlwraith argues that in fact there wasn’t enough fill or incentive to complete the job and while the rail companies received the territory they needed to run their trains along the Esplanade, the shoreline itself remained incomplete and a work in progress for the next 30 years with portions of the land inside the boundary of new and extended shoreline unfilled and “pocked with little cesspools.”[21] It was an area caught in limbo between development and undevelopment.

We might fairly ask, where are women in this narrative. Some of Freeland’s servants might have been female, but that’s never mentioned. Otherwise the workers all appear to have been male and while we hear about boys paddling or playing around the factory we hear no mention of girls doing the same. This was often a male homosocial environment when it came to both work and play. And yet it was not solely that. Freeland had two sons, William and Robert, which suggests that there might have been an otherwise unmentioned Mrs. Freeland on the scene and perhaps living in the factory. Among the owners of the Yonge Street Warf was Catherine Drummond, listed as a widow, which suggests she might have been left the share by her husband.[22]

However, at times the substantial Yonge Street Wharf served as a focal point for the community. Robertson notes the visit of Lord Elgin drew thousands of people to the wharf and that  “The windows of the factory were invariably lighted up with candles on public occasions, such as the Queen’s birth day or coronation.”[23] Robertson doesn’t put a date to these various recollections, but it seems likely he is referring to events that took place in the 1840s before the construction of the Esplanade and before increased rail traffic if not severed then at least diminished Toronto’s relationship with its waterfront. In another vignette, he notes, “The American steamers used to arrive on Sunday morning, and crowds of people went down to see them land. The wharf was a popular promenade for the people an hour or two before church time, to watch the boats come in.”[24] Here we would have found women among the promenading groups of people and for brief period of time the wharf would have turned into a heterosocial space and, no doubt, operated by a different series of social norms and expectations.

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[1] J. Ross Robertson, Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto: A Collection of Historical Sketches of The Old Town of York from 1792 until 1833 and of Toronto from 1834 to 1893, Toronto, 1894, Page 182

[2] Minko Sotiron, “ROBERTSON, JOHN ROSS,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed September 2, 2013, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/robertson_john_ross_14E.html.

[3] Robertson, Landmarks 1894, page 182.

[4] Robertson, 186.

[5] Robertson, 183.

[6] Robertson, 183.

[7] Robertson, 186.

[8] Robertson, 183.

[9] Robertson, 183.

[10] Robertson, 183

[11] Robertson, 183, 185.

[12] Robertson, 183

[13] Robertson, 183.

[14] Robertson, 183.

[15] Robertson, 185.

[16] McIlwraith Thomas, Digging Out and Filling In: Making Land on the Toronto Waterfront in the 1850s , Urban History Review/Revue d'histoire urbaine, 20:1 (1991:June) p.15-33, 15.

[17] McIlwraith, 26-27.

[18] Robertson, 185.

[19] Robertson, 185. Presumably we know that it at least happened prior to 1861 when, Robertson states, Freeland died and the property passed on to his sons. Page 186.

[20] McIlwraith, 26-27.

[21] McIlwraith, 22, 29.

[22] Robertson, 182.

[23] Robertson, 185.

[24] Robertson, 185.