TORONTO OP OLD. 83 



adjoining flower gardens. Mr. Secretary Jarvis died in 1818. He is described by tliose who 

 remember him as possessing a handsome, portly presence. Col. Jarvis, the first military com- 

 mandant in Manitoba, is a grandson of the Secretary. 



Of Mr. McGill, first owner of the next park-lot, and of his personal aspect, we have had occa 

 sion to speak in connexion with the interior of St. James's Church. Situated in fields at the 

 southern extremity of a stretch of forest, the comfortable and pleasantly situated residence 

 erected by him for many years seemed a place of abode quite remote from the town. It was still 

 to be seen in 1870 in the heart of McGill Square, and was long occupied by Mr. McCutcheon, a 

 brother of the inheritor of the bulk of Mr. McGill's property, who in accordance with his uncle's 

 will, and by authority of an act of Parliament, assumed the name of McGill, and became sub- 

 sequently well known throughout Canada as the Hon. Peter McGill. The founder of McGil 

 CoUege in Montreal was of a different family. The late Capt. J.ames McGiU Strachan derived 

 his name from the connexion of his father by marriage, with the latter. In the Gazeite & Orac'e 

 of Nov. 13th, 1803, we observe Mr. McGill of York advertising as " agent for purchases " of 

 pork and beef to be supplied to the troops stationed " at Kingston, York, Fort George, Fort 

 Chippewa, Port Erie, and Amherstburg." In 1818 be is Receiver-General, and Auditor-General of 

 land patents. He had formerly been an ofiScer in the Queen's Rangers, and his name repeatedly 

 occurs in •' Simcoe's History" of the operations of that corps during the war of the American 

 Revolution. From that work we learn that in 1779 he with the commander himself of the corps, 

 then Lieut. Col. Simeoe, fell into the hands of the revolutionary authorities, and was treated 

 with great harshness in the common jail of Burlington, New Jersey ; and when a plan was 

 devised for the Colonel's escape, Mr. McGill volunteered, in order to further its success, to' 

 personate his commanding officer in bed, and to take the consequences, while the latter was to 

 make his way out. The whole project was frustrated by the breaking of a false key in the lock 

 of a door which would have admitted the confined soldiers to a room where "carbines and 

 ammunition" were stored away. Lieut. Col. Simeoe, it is added in the history just named, 

 afterwards offered Mr. McGiU an annuity, or to make him Quarter-master of Cavalry : the • 

 latter, we are told, he accepted of, as his grandfather had been an officer in King William's 

 army; and "no man," Col. Simeoe himself notes, "ever executed the office with greater 

 integrity, courage and conduct." 



The southern portion of Mr. McGill's park-lot has, in the course of modern events, come to 

 be assigned to religious uses. McGUl Square, which contained the old homestead and its sur- 

 roundings, and which was at one period intended, as its name indicates, to be an open public 

 square, was secured in 1870 by the Wesleyan Methodist body and made the site of its principal 

 place of worship and of various establishments connected therewith. Immediately north, on 

 the same property, the Roman Catholics had previously buUt their principal place of worship 

 and numerous appurtenances, attracted possibly to the spot by the expectation that McGUl 

 Square would continue forever an open ornamental piece of ground. 



A little farther to the north a cross-street, leading from Youge Street eastward, bears the 

 name of McGill. An intervening cross-street preserves the name of Mr. Crookshauk, who was 

 Mr. McGiirs brother-in-law. 



The name that appears on the original survey of York and its suburbs as first occupant of 

 the park-lot westward of Mr. McGill's, is that of Mr. George Playter. This is the Captain 

 Playter, senior, of whom we have already spoken in our excursion up the valley of the Don. "We 

 have named him also among the forms of a past age whom we ourselves remember often seeing 

 in the congregation assembled of old in the wooden St. James's. Mr. Playter was an English- 

 man by birth, but had passed many of his early years in Philadelphia, where for a time he 

 attached himself to the Society of Friends, having selected as a wife a member of that body. B at 

 on the breaking out of the troubles that led to the independence of the United States, his 

 patriotic attachment to old far-off England compelled him, in spite of the peaceful theories of 

 the denomination to which he had united himself, promptly to join the Royalist forces. He 

 used to give a somewhat humorous account of his sudden return to the military creed of ordinary 

 mundane men. " Lie there, Quaker !" cried he to his cutaway, buttonless, formal coat, as he 

 stripped it off and flung it down, for the purpose of donning the soldier's habiliments. But 

 some of the Quaker observances were never relinquished in his family. We well remember, in 

 the old homestead on the Don, and afterwards at his residence on Caroline Street, a silent 



