James Beaty's Toronto

On December 7th, 2009 the statue of James Beaty was installed in the courtyard of King George Square. As the installation began the first snowflakes of the season fell, reminiscent of the real James Beaty's 1818 arrival in Muddy York, where an unusual March snowfall had taken place. On a flatbed truck, and wrapped in blankets and special padding, Beaty's statue was delivered to the courtyard on King Street East from the foundry in Georgetown, Ontario, where it had been cast. It took over an hour for the truck's large crane to swing the statue into place over its resting place on a cement pedestal in a nook of the courtyard. The statue's permanent location was chosen for its sight line to the historic building across the street at 169 King Street East, the site where among other achievements, James Beaty published his newspaper, "The Leader." The accompanying photo of James Beaty's statue reveals a few of the statue's unique features. For instance, the ...

Watch the video above and see James Beaty's statue take shape. (Search "James Beaty" to follow it on YouTube.) Now, at the end of June a full-size clay model of the statue is complete. The next stage—now underway and shown in the last part of the video—is to make a rubber mold for the foundry, where the bronze statue will be finished. In the beginning Adrienne Alison, a well-known Toronto sculptor commissioned for the project, started with some rough sketches. From these she moved on to the construction of two clay figures, called maquettes. The maquettes are about a foot in height. "I like to work in three dimensions," she said. When they were finished Adrienne invited the client to choose the maquette he liked best. Next she made a larger replica about two to three times the size of the clay original. "A larger figure reveals details not evident in the smaller maquette, such as the way the clothing fits." Using the blowup as a guide, Adrienne began w...

Born 1798 in Killishandra, Ireland, James Beaty emigrated to New York at the age of seventeen where for a while he practised his trade as a shoemaker. Though he made money quickly in New York Beaty, a loyal subject of the King, preferred to live where the Monarchy still reigned and this prompted him to move to Canada, where at first he settled in Kingston. In Kingston he began to hear good things of the new settlement of Muddy York, as Toronto was then known. Sometime later, in an interview with the Evening Telegram newspaper, Beaty recalled his arrival in Toronto on Saturday March 17, 1818. "I waited a long time for a chance to ride west, and at last the man who used to carry the mail agreed to take me in his rig. It was the month of March, but there was no snow in Kingston all that winter. A storm came on while we were on our journey, and when I reached York there was four feet of snow on the ground. "We put up at a hotel kept by a man named Jordan, near where the market (...

The following text is the official biography of James Beaty, which can be found in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online http://www.biographi.ca BEATY, JAMES, shoemaker, politician, businessman, and office holder; b. 1798 in Killashandra (Republic of Ireland), the youngest of five sons of Robert Beaty; m. 26 Dec. 1822 in York (Toronto) Sarah Anne Armstrong (d. 1829), and they had two children; d. 5 March 1892 in Toronto. James Beaty learned his trade in Ireland, and then emigrated to New York City about 1815. In the spring of 1818 he moved to York, where he entered into a partnership in bootmaking and shoemaking with William Armstrong. The two lived and worked in the same house, and their connections were further strengthened by Beaty’s marriage to Armstrong’s sister. In 1818 his brother John had begun to farm in Trafalgar Township, in Halton County. Later, a number of nephews, including several from John’s family, would work in Beaty’s Toronto enterprises; one, James Beat...

Like James Beaty, many other spirited young men and women came to Toronto to make their mark on the new city. Many of them established their businesses and homes in close proximity to Beaty. Brief biographies of a few such notables are contained in the following paragraphs. Thomas Dalton Publisher of The Patriot and Visionary Thomas Dalton ran a successful brewery in Kingston before establishing the "Patriot" newspaper in Toronto in 1832. As well as running the brewery, Dalton was the director of the first bank of Upper Canada and did not hesitate to express his opinions in the form of letters to newspapers or pamphlets he published on his own. In 1828 the brewery burnt down and Dalton eventually sold the land to Thomas Molson. "The Patriot" was established in 1829 in Kingston and was not immediately profitable. Dalton attempted to sell the paper but was unsuccessful. He decided to move to York [as Toronto was known before 1834] instead. Here, Dalton was successful ...