I grew up in an area of Toronto called Willowdale, north of Hwy. 401 and south of Finch Ave. In the late 1950s my father built a tiny bungalow for us on Ravenscroft Circle, just off Burbank Drive, in a new subdivision called Bayview Village. At the corner of Bayview and Sheppard Avenues were a couple of gas stations and a lone Loblaw’s with a huge parking lot.

The subway only went as far as Eglinton in those days so I had walk two miles to the Bayview bus and ride it south to get to my ballet class at Yonge and Eglinton. Willowdale no longer exists, swallowed by the maw of the Greater Toronto Area, but some street names remain and architectural hints of the past linger, between towers of condominiums and shopping malls built on former farmland.

Scott Kennedy probes the history of this distinctive former Toronto neighborhood in his book, Willowdale: Yesterday’s Farms, Today’s Legacy (Dundurn). Our conversation has been edited for length.

Why was Willowdale a choice neighborhood for young men coming home after World War II?

Willowdale was centred on Yonge St., which was really the only reliable route into the city for people seeking employment. Most of the jobs were downtown. Then, as now, the further north you go, the cheaper the housing is. That was a big factor for the returning vets.

But the initial settlement of Willowdale was by United Empire Loyalists, who were invited by Lt.-Gov. John Simcoe to build homesteads there. He’d commanded the Queen’s Rangers during the American Revolution and he was sent back to Upper Canada to protect the land and maintain it for the British. Having homesteaders and farmers there helped him do that.

The first thing Simcoe was charged with was opening Yonge St. This was so they could start surveying the individual tract lots and recruit landowners. The road was named after Sir George Yonge, the British Secretary of War.

Tell us a little about what you learned about the famous Canadian writer, Mazo de la Roche. I remember the CBC television series based on her Jalna series of novels but I wonder if many Canadians remember her.

She lived in Willowdale, just before World War II. Just after Jalna was published in 1927 she and her partner, Caroline Clement, moved to England and rented an estate near Windsor Castle. When the war clouds loomed at the end of the 1930s they decided to come back to Ontario and chose to leave near Bayview and Steeles, which was then out in the country. When de la Roche returned to Canada, Ethel Barrymore was touring the stage version of her first novel. Mazo de la Roche was one of the most famous and best-paid authors of her time. Stephen Leacock was the only one of her contemporaries to outsell her.

Cummer Ave., an important east-west corridor in North York, was named after the Cummer family. You say in your book that the Cummers had more impact on the development of Willowdale than any other family. They also had an amazing relationship with the aboriginal people who lived close by.

It is believed John Cummer was the first white person born north of Toronto, near Yonge and Eglinton, in 1797. The Cummers started a farm on Yonge St. near what became Cummer Ave. One day when father Jacob Cummer was out working on his farm and baby John was home with his mother, she was startled to see an aboriginal man staring at them through the window of the cabin. He was staring at a kitchen knife. She assumed that’s what he wanted so she gave it to him. He thanked her and went away. He came back some time later with a cradle he had carved for baby John.

There were very few people living in Toronto at the time.

At the end of the 18th century there were only 612 people living in the city of Toronto. The soldiers were given land grants for bravery. People were given 100 acres at a shot to become homesteaders or farmers. The point was to open the area up. These people were recruited by Simcoe to change the forest into farm land and start a new society.

Who were some of the other interesting characters you came across besides Mazo de la Roche?

Toward the end of farming in Willowdale, after World War II, Bud McDougald operated the last farm in North York. It was on Leslie St., just south of Finch. He made it into an estate farm. He raised thoroughbred horses and dogs and collected expensive automobiles. That was a reasonably typical transformation as the post-war years continued. People who wanted to escape the city and had some money, like McDougald and EP Taylor, would leave the city and move to these estate farms where they could stretch their legs. The hunt clubs would be developed on old farms because the land was useful for riding horses.

The name Bud McDougald immediately brings to mind our most famous convicted felon, Conrad Black.

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Conrad and his brother Montague made a deal in the late 1970s that still raises eyebrows today. They seized control of Argus Corp., the company started by McDougald and E.P. Taylor, wresting the shares from the widows of the founders.

There were other criminals who lived in North York — including Edwin Alonzo Boyd, the famous bank robber who died in 2002. But there were many civic-minded settlers too.

The Bales family is remembered because of Earl Bales Park and because many of the family members served in government office, from city councillor to attorney general. They held those offices from the late 1800s to the late 1900s, almost 100 years of continuous public service.

You have a lot of photographs in your book. Are many of these houses and stores still here?

There still is physical evidence remaining. Yonge St. grew gradually. It was toward the later 1960s that things began to disappear, when building techniques and subdivisions took over. There are tiny houses that have survived. But generally anything on a main street didn’t have much of a chance. A lot of the houses at Finch and Yonge didn’t survive.

How do you feel about the changes to your old neighborhood?

When I was little I could walk from Bayview over to Graydon Hall in Don Mills. We used to go fishing in the Don River. There was farmland all around us. We could see the Northern Lights.

I wrote this book was because I went into the North York Central Library to borrow a book about the farms of North York and no such book existed. So I went up to the Canadiana department and they had maps and photos that were all nostalgia. I knew places were disappearing and I’ve taken photographs of lots of things that have been torn down and rebuilt.

As you get older you feel nostalgic for your youth and your childhood. I remember riding my bike through the fields and hiking in the woods. I wanted to compile information before it was gone and forgotten.