A colourful look at Toronto's pioneer roots, tracing the history of three neighbourhoods from their farming days to modern day. Includes: Don Mills: From Forests and Farms to Forces of Change As recently as 1970, wheat crops were grown at Don Mills — and no small amount, but enough to line Toronto’s grocery-store shelves with baked goods. Single-herd milk was also commonplace, thanks to this last vestige of the city’s agricultural past. By 1980, it had been paved over, but Scott Kennedy offers a glimpse of the way things used to be. 200 Years at St. John's York Mills: The Oldest Parish in Toronto St. John’s Church at York Mills was built in 1816 on land that had been donated by pioneer settlers: a little log building that was the first parish church in the City of Toronto. The brick church that stands there today, completed in 1844 and enlarged over the years, stands as a welcoming place of worship and repository of Canadian history. Willowdale: Yesterday's Farms, Today's Legacy In 1855, Willowdale post office opened in Jacob Cummer's store on Yonge Street. Today it is a bustling urban environment. Scott Kennedy recounts the notable stories of what happened in between and who was there as Willowdale evolved into a modern community.

A unique and readable microhistory of an ordinary physician and his community during a period of revolutionary medical change. Duffin bases her insights on a detailed computer-assisted analysis of 40 years of extant daybooks of James Langstaff (1825-1889).

Many writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emphasized the virtues of early rural pioneers and life on the land as a general criticism of what they perceived to be the negative, alienating influence of Ontario's rapid urban and industrial expansion. Such work often highlighted the difficulties the recent emigrant faced: the clearing of forest and the breaking of new ground, the isolation and long Canadian winters; however they in turn celebrated the progress demonstrated in the pioneer's domination over nature, the establishment of thriving communities and the extension of transportation networks. William Wye Smith, a popular nineteenth century Upper Canadian poet, was no exception. Smith prepared his Canadian Reminiscences, a hand-written compilation of anecdotes collected during his lifetime that relate to his experience as journalist, clergyman and son of Scottish settlers, to provide his own unique perspective of pioneer life. This fully annotated version of Smith's unpublished manuscript highlights Smith's unwitting testimony to the social life of the province, his relationship to the construction and maintenance of Scottish and Canadian identity, as well as his position in literary history.

St. John’s Church at York Mills was built in 1816 on land that had been donated by pioneer settlers: a little log building that was the first parish church in the City of Toronto. The brick church that stands there today, completed in 1844 and enlarged over the years, stands as a welcoming place of worship and repository of Canadian history.

Suburbia may not seem like much of a place to pioneer, but for young, religiously committed Jewish families, it's open territory." This sentiment--expressed in the early 1970s by an Orthodox Jew in suburban Toronto--captures the essence of the suburban Orthodox Jewish experience of the late twentieth century. Although rarely associated with postwar suburbia, Orthodox Jews in metropolitan areas across the United States and Canada have successfully combined suburban lifestyles and the culture of consumerism with a strong sense of religious traditionalism and community cohesion. By their very existence in suburbia, argues Etan Diamond, Orthodox Jewish communities challenge dominant assumptions about society and religious culture in the twentieth century. Using the history of Orthodox Jewish suburbanization in Toronto, Diamond explores the different components of the North American suburban Orthodox Jewish community: sacred spaces, synagogues, schools, kosher homes, and social networks. In a larger sense, though, his book tells a story of how traditionalist religious communities have thrived in the most secular of environments. In so doing, it pushes our current understanding of cities and suburbs and their religious communities in new directions.