July 26, 2014

Moving day, but still time for a short hike before we have to get serious about hiking between the apartment and the truck.  It was a cooler day and overcast.  We parked in Bathurst Park on the West Don River.

We hiked south along the river into an area known as the Hinder Property.  An extensive mountain bike trail runs through the area making use of fallen trees and boardwalks.

As we hiked along the side of the Don river we found this sewer cover which commemorates a point in history for the City of North York.  The Township of North York (NYT on this cover) was incorporated on June 13, 1922 out of the rural northern parts of York County.  It became the Borough of North York in 1967 meaning that there are not too many covers made after this one that would say NYT.  North York was incorporated as a city on Valentines day 1979, leading to it’s solgan “City with a Heart”.

Near this we found another cover that was nearly buried in leaves and soil.  This one is unlike any I’ve ever seen before.

As mentioned in an earlier post, the province of Ontario was well known for it’s brick buildings.  Some bricks are made with three round holes that reduce the amount of clay required and improve the speed of drying.  A lot of early brick buildings are originally wooden buildings that have been veneered in brick.  The holes are then used to tie the brick skin to the building using metal straps.  This brick is unique in it’s patterned holes.

Pop began to be sold in cans in the 1930’s.  The can went through several changes, an early significant one being the inclusion of a liner to protect the contents from tasting like the can.  Originally a can opener was required to pierce a hole in the top.  In 1959 the invention of a pull tab eliminated the need of an opener but created a litter problem.  This was solved in the 1970’s by the push tab where a small raised blister was pushed into the can to open it.  This exposed the finger to sharp edges and was eliminated with the “sta-tab” that continues to be popular today.  7-Up was released just two weeks before the stock market crash in 1929.  There was 7 main ingredients in the original recipe, including the mood stabilizing drug lithium citrate.  Originally it was a patented medicine marketed as a cure for hang-overs.  Unlike bottles, cans were never dated and so coming up with a date can be tricky.  In this case we can define this can as 1975, the year in which the marketing slogan was “The Un-Cola.”

Climbing the hill to the clearing above brought us face to face with a dragon.  This is part of a large memorial being erected in North York Cemetery.

As we arrived back at the car we passed through a double row of trees that mark an old lane way.  That was our clue to head home and start hiking the lane way into the house where my wife and I were moving.

Sunday June 22, 2014

It was sunny and 25 degrees, a gorgeous Sunday afternoon.  I parked on Bridle Path and entered the gardens from there. The upper part of the gardens is an arboretum full of many varieties of mature trees.  The main trail will lead you down the bluff and into the Wilket Creek valley.  Wilket Creek was known as Milne Creek for the first 150 years of settlement.  Here, the creek has been dammed to create a small mill pond as seen in the cover photo.  A miniature water wheel has been recreated below the dam. This is an example of an “overshot” wheel where the water would be dropped into the buckets from above to turn the wheel.  Inside the mill, the drive shaft that the wheel is turning provides power to turn the gears and pulleys that run the factory.

Alexander Milne and his family first settled on this property in 1817.  He built a three story mill and a small community grew around it.  The mill stood on the east side of the creek an the top floor was used as a saw mill while the lower two floors were a woolen mill. The wooden wheel in the Milne mill was an overshot wheel, 18 feet in diameter.  When the water level became inconsistent at Milne Creek, the Milnes moved to their property on the West Don River at Lawrence.  Here the town of Milneford Mills was re-established.  Two building survive from this era.  One is described separately in a post called “Milneford Mills”.  The second has been moved back to Edwards Gardens.  One of the buildings in Milneford Mills was a wagon shop.  The large door on the end of the upper floor in the picture below is typical of wagon shops where painting and drying were done upstairs.  A temporary ramp would allow access to the door.

When the Milnes moved the property was left to turn into a weed patch.  In 1944 Rupert E.Edwards purchased the property with the intention of making a country estate.  Very soon the city was closing in on all sides and Edwards sold everything to the city for a public gardens.

Leaving Edwards Gardens you enter Wilket Creek Park.  As I walked along the west side of the river I found that there were a lot of small rivulets that cut steep channels through the hillside.  I kept having to go back down to the river to get around the valleys.  Fortunately there are several sets of “stairs” running up the sides of the hills made of tree roots.  In the picture below the trail runs between the large trees and climbs a point of land which is over 100 feet high.  These hill sides have been kept clean by the groundskeepers, but I did find a 1976 nonreturnable Pepsi bottle.

Along the way the main path follows the creek crossing it on several bridges.  Just north of the fourth bridge up from the mouth of the creek lies the ruins of an old dam.  The centre piece has been broken out.  Erosion was a constant enemy of the settlers who built dams on the rivers.  Early wooden and earth dams often had to be rebuilt or repaired every spring.  Wilket Creek is prone to flooding and the one end of this dam has been washed clean so that water now flows around it.

This may have been the mill race for this dam but I suspect that it is the original creek bed and that the old mill race has been taken over by the creek.

The remains of another dam stand near the first foot bridge up from the mouth of Wilket Creek at the West Don River.  This one, like many others, was likely destroyed by the conservation authority as part of flood control measures implemented after Hurricane Hazel.  It has been difficult to find any information on these other millers in the Wilket Creek watershed.

At one point along the top of the hill I began to follow a set of deer tracks through the woods.  It wasn’t too long before a young buck stepped out of the woods and posed for a few pictures.  I normally see the tail ends of deer as they try to get away but this one was looking me straight in the eye.  I had no way of knowing if he was used to being fed by humans or was thinking about trying out his new antlers.  He followed me through the woods until I found a place to get out onto Leslie Street.

White Tailed deer bucks grow a new set of antlers every year, beginning in the spring.  The antlers generally grow larger every year until the animal reaches it’s prime at 5-7 years of age.  Antlers can grow up to an inch per day and are covered with a tissue known as velvet during the growth period.  In late summer the antlers calcify, becoming hard and losing their velvet.  The antlers come in handy in the fall when the males fight for supremacy and the attention of the females.  At the start of winter when mating season is complete they lose their antlers.

Having circled the deer I found a way back into the trees.  The trail makes its way along the crest of the ravine until it reaches Sunnybrook Park and the West Don River.

Wilket Creek empties into  the West Don River in a rather unspectacular way just beside the roadway into the park.