Prior to the period of colonial settlement the Southern Ontario region had been inhabited by aboriginal cultures for many thousands of years. It is believed that people inhabited the land in North America as the ice age retreated. Burial Mounds found from Ohio, through Southern Ontario, and reaching as far as the Labrador coast date the Aboriginal cultures here as at least 7,000 years old. Within this more recent historical scope it was Iroquoian peoples who mostly lived in this area. The name  “Toronto” itself is derived from the Mohawk term toron-ten according to modern linguistic analysis.

Much of the specific history of the First Nations in the Junction is lost to the public record while oral histories of the area are still current among the Six Nations and Mississauga.  It is commonly known, however, that Davenport Road and Dundas West running through the Junction was part of a major trade route that ultimately ran from Montreal to Detroit. The area known as Baby Point was at one time a Seneca village called Taiaiako’n. Governor general of New France, de Denonville mounted a campaign to rout the Seneca of Southern Ontario in the late 1600’s after which, the village was reoccupied by the Mississauga. Taiaiako’n had been a very important site along the trade routes of the First Nations and was situated on the Toronto Carrying Place trail that ran north to Lake Simcoe. Indeed there are a significant number of burial sites around the Junction ( in High Park and Baby Point), which is criss-crossed by trails and trade routes. Clearly the Toronto area was a significant economic base of many First Nations over the millennia, the Humber River area having existed as a key area of settlement and trade. The Colonials appropriated these sites and trails for themselves laying their roads over the trails and developing communities on sites that were once inhabited by First Nations and thereby enclosing them.

Between the first contact between European “explorers” and Aboriginal peoples and the period of intensified colonization marked by massive immigration, land settlement, and wars, there were the epidemics which caused a devastation of the communities and cultural strength of the many nations of this land.

As “primitive accumulation” is characterized as an act of naked violence, so the acquisition of the land was achieved in processes of corruption followed by force. The land of Toronto was first appropriated by John Graves Simcoe who quickly identified Toronto as a potential site for the capital of Lower Canada. He sought to take possession of the land by “negotiating” the “Toronto Purchase” with the Mississauga. In what was a modus operandi for colonialists agreements were claimed when there were very different understandings between the Mississauga and Simcoe’s negotiators as to what was being discussed. The Mississauga perceived the “gifts” that were given as for their loyalty to the British during the American Revolution whereas the negotiators claimed that they were payment for land, the boundaries of which were not documented at the time. The boundaries of the “land sale” were much disputed in subsequent meetings and only asserted through military and settler intimidation by the British. Capitulation on the part of the Mississauga came through a weakening of their power structures due to epidemics, war and increasing limitation to access to the land and therefore subsistence. Having succumbed to the colonialists, the Mississauga then hoped for some remuneration for their loss, an expectation only just decided by the courts this year, more than 200 years later. (Toronto Purchase Specific Claim, Arriving at an Agreement)

While the Mississauga were the last nation to have occupied the lands of Toronto, this area is at the same time the traditional lands of the Six Nations, the Iroqoian people who lived here for millennia before colonization. No account has been made to the Six Nations who have not ceded this land and who maintain connections to traditional sites here.

Upon the alienation of the First Nations from the land it was subsequently given in land grants to members of the military, clergy and important businessmen in the colonial scene. Agriculture and industry were developed and land subdivided into smaller parcels for sale. The land was carved up, forest resources exploited, rivers were covered and the grid of city streets laid over: “Urban design, in fact, is a site of important attempts to enclose human and social behavior in forms and patterns compatible with the accumulation process and the profit motive” (De Angelis, 2004, p. 79). Dundas West was built in sections by soldiers and was important as a transport route to the American front.

The neighborhood in which we now live is the reified material structure of all these capitalist and colonial processes past, serving in the present to reinforce the reproduction of capitalist relations. Not only has land speculation become the driving economic and ideological force still operating in coercive fashion in the Junction, but the carving up of the land into discrete private lots (not large enough to provide subsistence but to guarantee that people will live in alienated relations to production), and the neighborhood into bourgeois areas and working class or immigrant areas creates the environmental basis for social atomization and alienation that marks the Europeanized industrial character of the neighborhood. First Nations people are subsumed however painfully into this dominant set of relations, while at the same time some still contest the enclosure of their lands by visiting their ancestors and practicing rituals regardless of legal constrictions.

Once the Junction had successfully established its geographic identity with the (short lived) acquisition of town status the process of reproduction was well underway. Marx describes the process of the expansions, concentration and diversification of capital:  “The mass of social wealth, overflowing with the advance of accumulation and capable of being transformed into additional capital, thrusts itself frantically into old branches of production, whose market suddenly expands, into newly formed branches, such as railways, etc., which now become necessary as a result of the further development of the old branches” (Marx, 1976, p. 785). This process was enacted in the Junction in several dominant early forms: land speculation, industry and the building of the railway. Early land speculators acquired vast estates and immediately set forward in agricultural enterprises: David Kennedy harvested timber, John Scarlett had a mill and a racecourse, Colonel Thompson ran a vineyard. According to the Scarlett family genealogy website among the papers left upon John Scarlett’s death was a receipt for the purchase of a slave, and there is evidence that escaped slave labor was employed at the vineyard.

Junction mayor, D.W. Clendenan, instrumental in its acquisition of town status, formed a company with his uncle, “Clendenan and Laws,” in order to buy up land. They were gambling on the construction of a train line through the area, which would increase the value of the land considerably. Clendenan was able to cash in on his investments as the railway brought with it both new industry (Heintzman Piano factory, a motorcar company, and various others) and propelled the immigration of a class of “surplus labor” which settled along both sides of the tracks north of Dundas. Dundas West itself became a site of commercial concentration again drawing more businesses and laborers to the neighborhood. The railway running through the Junction and the offer of tax breaks enabled Clendenan to negotiate a relocation of the Toronto Stockyards from downtown Toronto greatly adding to the industrial base of the neighborhood which Clendenan was always trying to build.

While the growing bourgeois class of land speculators, industrialists, corporations and banks established themselves as a financial and cultural elite, the working class struggled:

“Earnings for workers were very low and only a fraction of labourers were organized for collective bargaining. Girls worked in stores and offices for as little as three dollars a week. Most of the railway employees had effective organizations, however, called brotherhoods, which insisted upon and obtained pretty fair remuneration for the labour of its members, all of whom were skilled workers. Unorganized groups of CPR workers, however, did not fare so well. In 1894 the CPR was paying its section men – the workmen responsible for keeping the right-of-way in good order- $1.25 per day of 10 hours, 47.50 per week of 60 hours. But even that was too much for CPR executives and an order went forth to lop five cents a day from the pay of every section man.” (Fancher, 1986, p. 37)

The twin historical developments of land speculation and industrial development secured the Junction as a site of class differentiation between the owners of industry who built themselves grand mansions south of Dundas West, many of which still exist in the neighborhood, and the labor army who lived in smaller homes to the north. These two sectors became wedded in the roller coaster ride of capitalist reproduction:

“The path characteristically described by modern industry, which takes the form of a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations) of periods of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis and stagnation, depends on the constant formation, the greater of less absorption, and the reformation of the industrial reserve army or surplus population. In their turn, the varying phases of the industrial cycle recruit the surplus population, and become one of the most energetic agencies for its reproduction.” (Marx, 1976, p. 785)

If the Junction imagined itself as a potential economic center ever to expand outward, this hope was eventually crushed. As the different branches of capital ebbed and flowed in the course of these cycles, the neighborhood went through a series of “boom times” followed by economic crisis. When finally the railway line closed its Junction station many jobs were lost and working people were shuffled into the “reserve army of the unemployed” at the same time becoming what was considered by many to be a “social blight” affecting property values. A temperance movement was born in the Junction in an attempt to moralize the neighborhood serving ultimately to extend the economic depression while failing at their cause of “cleaning up” the neighborhood. With the subsequent closing of the slaughterhouse (which itself was a “blight” as it smelled bad and the working culture around it was perceived as “rough”) the marginal aspect of the neighborhood was exacerbated, again putting a lowering pressure on property values. The fate of the Junction as a struggling neighborhood was sealed which, at the same time however, provided new basis for capitalist opportunity.

As such the Junction went through new phases of development including the building of a strip of malls along the north side of the railway tracks where multi-nationals such as Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Office Max and Future Shop established a global corporate presence as well as a new wave of meat packing industries and other light manufacturing. Low wage jobs are created at the same time cheap commodities made in Asia (by workers who are paid much less) are sold primarily to the working class here in the Junction and those who travel through. A stable “bourgeois” class has replaced the early landowners and businessmen who lived south of Dundas and for whom many of the streets are named. Until recently these residents rarely ventured up to the “sketchy” Dundas West preferring to shop on Bloor. North of Dundas has remained more working class until recently.

The boundaries of “the Junction” date back to the amalgamation of three townships to form The West Toronto Junction in 1888, an amalgamation which ended 20 years later when it again amalgamated with Toronto proper. While these original boundaries extend north to St. Clair, south to Bloor, west to Jane and east beyond Dundas West, many groups now come to associate “the Junction” with the little commercial strip of Dundas West from Dupont to Runnymead, north to the train tracks and south to Annette. This operates in conjunction with the intensified gentrification of this strip, and the particular identity that it has as a dividing line between the middle class area to the south, and the working class area north.

Canniff, WM (1878). Illustrated Historical Atlas County of York
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De Angelis, Massismo (2004). Separating the Doing and the Deed: Capital and the Continuous Character of Enclosures.” Historical Materialism, volume 12:2 (57-87).

Marx, Karl (1976). Capital Vol. I. New York: Penguin. (original work published 1867)

Miles, J., Fancher, D., (Ed.) (1999). West Toronto Junction Revisited. Toronto: West Toronto Junction Historical Society.

Nagam, Julie. “Digging Up Indigenous History in Toronto’s Cityscape.” Canadian Dimension Jan/Feb 2009.

Scadding, Henry (1873). Toronto of Old. (first edition) Toronto: Willing and Williamson.
http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924081312070#page/n0/mode/2up

Trigger, G. Bruce. (1985)  Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s Heroic Age: Reconsidered. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.

Toronto Purchase Specific Claim, Arriving at an Agreement. Pamphlet published by the Mississauga of the New Credit First Nations. http://www.newcreditfirstnations.com