Brewers and Brewsters at Todmorden Mills

In 1821, English immigrant Thomas Helliwell purchased a lot of land at this site and established one of Toronto’s first breweries. When Thomas died in 1823, his widow Sarah Lord Helliwell became brewster (female brewer) and ran the business with three of her sons, Thomas Jr., Joseph and William. Beermaking was a respectable occupation for women in 19^th century Upper Canada, and brewsters were not uncommon in the trade, often taking over a beermaking operation when a brewmaster husband died. 

Sarah's daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, married paper mill owners, Colin Skinner and John Eastwood, connecting Todmorden's businesses through family ties.

Sarah Lord Helliwell, 1775 - 1842

 

The Helliwell brewery was built into the hillside.

The Don Brewery operated for nearly thirty years, until it was destroyed by fire in 1847.

The Don Valley provided an excellent environment for a brewery: the Don River powered the brewery’s water wheel, driving its pumps and machinery, natural springs in the hillside provided pure water for beermaking, and the steep ravine supported a stepped foundation for the brewery’s gravity-fed processes and deep cellars.

A water wheel drove the rollers in the Don Brewery's malt mill.

Beer requires only three ingredients: grain, water, and yeast. Hops is often added as a flavouring and a mild preservative. To make beer, the brewer cooks a mixture of water and sprouted grain (called malt) in a large vat called a mashtun. He drains off the liquid, now called wort, and adds hops, and then boils the wort in a special kettle called a copper. The wort is then allowed to cool, and yeast is added, which ferments the brew into an alcoholic and bubbly beverage.

Todmorden, 1835, showing an extensive brewery.

By 1830, the expanding Don Brewery dwarfed the nearby paper mill, and included a multi-story brewhouse, a distillery, a malthouse, and a grist mill. Todmorden’s malthouse stretched along the length of the hillside, measuring nearly 25 metres.  A two- or three story stone house was also part of the complex.  Several mills, farm buildings and stables stood nearby, and the brewery was surrounded by vegetable gardens, meadows, orchards and hops fields. 

Beer is a perishable product and before the days of year-round refrigeration, beermaking was a winter time occupation, providing seasonal employment for farm hands after the fall harvest. When in full operation, the Don Brewery employed 20 men as maltsters, brewers and labourers. A typical working day in the brewery would be 12 – 14 hours long, and some workers were required to live on site. Children also worked here seasonally, in the autumn, as hops pickers.

The Helliwells shipped beer from their wharf at Market Street, Toronto

William and Joseph Helliwell, brewers.

The Don Brewery transported kegs of beer by horse-drawn wagon to the city centre. Thomas Helliwell Jr. operated a wharf near St. Lawrence Market, and shipped beer around the north shore of Lake Ontario. Todmorden also supplied the garrison at Fort York, an active military site during the period, as well as many local taverns and inns. Montgomery’s Tavern, made famous as a gathering point for the 1837 rebellion, was one of the Don Brewery’s customers.

The Helliwells also operated a distillery at Todmorden. Rye whiskey was its primary product.

Todmorden's brewery building served as a stables in the 1900s.

After the fire in 1847, the Taylor family acquired the brewery property and adjoined it to their Brickworks operation, using the surviving structure as a stables and storage building. Eventually the Don Brewery’s first story and cellars were landfilled with debris from Brickworks kilns. Today’s brewery building represents only the top story of the original structure.

Sister Site - Mary, Betty and Rhoda!

Want to have some fun with interpreting Todmorden Mills? Looking for a critical analysis? Check out the Sistahs at:


http://marybettyrhoda.blogspot.ca/

Living at Todmorden

As industry grew in the Don Valley, settlement followed.  Temporary camps and rough log houses were replaced by more permanent dwellings of local stone or sawn lumber. Later – especially after the Brick Works opened in 1889 – brick houses became more common.

The designs of the two surviving residences at Todmorden – the grand Helliwell House and the single-storey wooden cottage – reflect the social and economic status of their residents.  Although both houses had fine features, such as fireplaces, wall paper and woodwork, neither had running water or bathrooms.  After Todmorden became the property of the Taylor family in the 1850s, both houses were rented to Brick Works employees and other tenants until 1950.

Helliwell House, built 1838.

Helliwell House 

The large, extended Helliwell family, described as the "great colony of Helliwells" by a neighbour, operated the Todmorden brewery from 1821 until 1847. Of several houses they built on the property, only Helliwell House survives. Built in 1838, it is a rare Toronto example of an adobe or 'mud brick' house. The single storey frame portion of the house represents an earlier, more modest family residence.

 Adobe construction is sometimes called 'mud brick' because it uses sun-dried, rather than kiln-fired bricks. A mixture of clay, sand and straw is pressed into a wooden mold, and the block-sized bricks are allowed to dry in the open air. Once the adobe wall is stuccoed, it is impermeable to rain.

Demonstrating adobe brick manufacture.

Adobe construction provides good insulation, retaining heat in winter and keeping an interior cool on hot days. Helliwell House's wide eaves also provided protection against the elements, shedding snow and shading the upper windows against the summer sun.

 
Todmorden’s frame cottage reflects the Regency style of the early 19^th century, with sidelights and a transom at its central front entrance. Legend has it that the house was originally built elsewhere and later moved to this spot. Archival maps and archeological evidence point to an 1850 date for cottage’s construction, or possible relocation.

Unusual for its time, the cottage has its own well in the basement, providing spring water to its tenants. During the 1940s, the central hallway was dominated by a large woodstove, the only ‘central’ heating in the house.

 



Bellehaven, built 1887, demolished 1950s

Archival photographs of other Todmorden houses, now demolished, record the stark contrast in lifestyles between mill owners and their employees. Perched at the top of the ravine at the corner of Pottery Road and Broadview Avenue, the powerful Taylor family lived in a lavish 19-room mansion called Bellehaven. The Taylors owned the Brick Works and several paper mills in the Don Valley.

Worker's cottage on Pottery Road

Tar paper shack in the Don Valley

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Don Valley became dotted with the makeshift homes of hundreds of unemployed men who arrived by rail looking for work. These “cave and shack dwellers”, as they termed themselves, assembled a kind of hobo town called The Jungle.

During the winter of 1930, the Don Valley Brick Works allowed the homeless to sleep inside the brick kilns, after the bricks were fired and left to cool slowly overnight.

By June of 1931 one hundred men were living in the Brick Works, and two hundred more said to be sleeping in the open by the Don River.

In the fall of 1931, many of these homeless were employed by the Canadian government in a make-work project to construct the Trans- Canada Highway in Northern Ontario, and their Don Valley shantytown was demolished.

During World War II, Todmorden was the site of a small prisoner-of-war camp. Most of the camp’s inmates were German merchant marines. The camp consisted of a dozen wood frame cabins located in a fenced-off area on the ‘flats’ where the current Todmorden parking lot lies.

Some of these prisoners-of-war were put to work in the Brick Works during their confinement and repatriated after the war. It’s said that at least one of them, apparently enjoying life in the valley, later returned to Canada and found work once more in the Brick Works, where he was recognized by one of his former coworkers.

River Power at Todmorden Mills

 "Taylor Bros. Mill on the Don River" by D.C. Grouse, 1810

Todmorden’s changing industrial landscape describes 19^th century power generation and its impact on the environment.

From a single water-powered lumber mill operating on the Don River in 1795, Todmorden grew through the 1840s into a busy mill and brewery complex. Until steam power arrived after 1850, Todmorden relied on water power supplied through a system of mill races and water wheels.

A mill race is a manmade channel that diverts part of a river's flow into the water wheel of a mill. The head race carries water to the wheel, and the tail race returns the water to the river, carrying away waste products from the mill. Mechanical sluice gates control the level of the water in the mill race.

A mill pond would form above the dam, storing water power.

Todmorden’s Two Mill Races

 

Todmorden's head race split in two north of the paper mill, 1876

By 1830, Todmorden was a booming industrial site, with numerous mills and associated businesses. To meet the growing demand for power, an east branch to the race was built, splitting off from Todmorden’s head race, just north of the paper mill building.By 1876, the east race entered a brick-lined underground channel beneath the east wing of the paper mill, roughly following the path of Todmorden's current driveway where it meets Pottery Road.

The west race remained as an uncovered watercourse, running between the paper mill building and what is now the Don Valley Parkway. 

Todmorden, 1910. The underground east race is marked as a dotted line. The west race runs from the dam, along Pottery Road.

Fire destroyed some of Todmorden’s industry in 1847. As steam power became available, the need for water power declined, and Todmorden’s mill races were ultimately used as drains for steam-powered mills.

Todmorden’s West Mill Race

In 2004, archaeologists uncovered a portion of the wheel house and west race with its preserved wooden sluice gate still in place.

Todmorden's East Mill Race

Todmorden’s mill races were gradually filled in by debris from both the Brick Works and excavation debris from construction projects in the booming city of Toronto. Todmorden’s underground east mill race remains intact beneath several metres of landfill, and a portion of its 4-metre-wide arched roof was discovered by archeologists during excavations around the paper mill building in 2000.

The east race ran under the paper mill in a brick-lined tunnel.

The underground east race resurfaced at a spot near the brewery and ran along the east bank of the Don River until it emptied into the south bend of the oxbow. One of Todmorden’s tail races is still visible near the entrance to the Wildflower Preserve, a partially filled ditch running to the west of the path.

Todmorden Mills's head race at Pottery Rd, 1909.

A mill race is a powerful and sometimes dangerous watercourse. One of William Helliwell’s children died in an accident at the mill in 1844, possibly drowning in the millrace.

Steam power came to Todmorden in the 1870s, and the paper mill's landmark chimney was built. Water power became a secondary, back-up system to coal-fired steam engines. As power generation changed, Todmorden’s mill races continued to in use, but mostly as sewers for factory wastes. Chemical effluent from paper mills and organic wastes from saw mills damaged the water quality of the Don River.

In 1917, Todmorden was acquired by a Toronto construction company and used as a landfill for excavation debris from downtown building sites. The first storeys of the paper mill building and the brewery, as well as Todmorden's mill races, were buried under several  metres of landfill.

The northern end of the head race was eventually buried under the embankment of the Don Valley Parkway in 1960.

Thinking in 3 directions

I'm working on an cut-away illustration/diagram of a 19th century brewery that used to stand on the Don River near Broadview Avenue. The building burned down in 1847, but the landscape was never redeveloped. From the brewer's diary (which he kept almost every day for many years) I can glean small references to the layout of the brewery, and its malt house, brew tower etc. In addition, beer enthusiasts everywhere have created a large body of educational material about how it might have functioned inside. From these three directions, I'm able to imagine what the brewery looked like, and how people worked inside of it. I'm visually reconstructing something that hasn't stood on that spot in over 150 years.

Zhang Huan's moving testimonial

Zhang Huan...ash paintings and carved ancient doors. Absolutely the most meditative and moving show I've seen at AGO.  Picasso is great, and huge. Zhang Huan is smaller, but just as huge. I envisioned a place where mats could be arranged in the centre of the space, for meditations.

New waves of museum fundraising

A fundraising discussion on a  museum listserve was slammed down by the site's admin as soon as it started recently, and that's too bad because there are so many exciting, engaging, meaningful, content-full, and participatory ways to raise funds for your musuem programs these days. One of my colleagues from U of T Museum Studies, Yael Filipovic has posted this Kickstarter plea on Facebook: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spurse/eat-your-sidewalk

And the sneaker-shod CEO of Kickstarter, Yancey Strickler, is interviewed in the NYTimes's Corner Office column, providing some profound (and FUN) insights into fundraising with an ethical heart.  I love his finishing comment: "Old forms of patronage were about the elite being able to just incentivize people to create the art that they wanted." says Strickler, "And now you have anyone, anyone can be a patron of the arts. Anyone in the world."
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/corner-office/kickstarter-diy-fundraising-social-network-age

iPad Self Portraits

Outreach in Museums

Delighted to drop into the Canadian Art Gallery Educators symposium hosted at the Art Gallery of Ontario this weekend. Had a nibble with some new colleagues at FRANK Saturday night, and then returned Sunday for Lois Silverman's keynote. Lois's ideas about the social work of museums generated quite a bit of discussion later in the day, which continued on Monday during the rather impromptu Session X.  Delegates had agreed on 'museum outreach' as the topic of session, a crucial issue for museologists, whether art gallery educators, curators, interpreters or even those hiring staff, building boards, or raising funds. We're seeking an model of programming and work environment into which new ideas can integrate, but we recognize that if identity is a work in progress then we must tolerate a constant zone of discomfort - not just accept it as normal, but also welcome it as a sign we're doing well!