In a muddy trench where the North Market once stood, archeologists Peter Popkin and David Robertson scan for clues about a long-buried structure: shards of ceramic and brick mingled with stone remnants give a hint of an elaborate network of drains built in the early 1830s to serve the butchers who once sold meat on this spot.

This pit — and the rest of this extensive dig at Front and Jarvis Sts., across from St. Lawrence Market — is providing a rare glimpse back in time to the earliest origins of Toronto’s foodie industry, which has grown over two centuries to become the $17-billion-a-year behemoth it is today, encompassing everything from artisanal butcher shops to grocery giants.

The North Market remains the only piece of property in the entire city that has been used continually for a single function — food retailing — since its inception in 1803, notes Robertson, a partner with ASI.

At the beginning of the 19th century, Toronto was a colonial outpost, scarcely more than a garrison, a small commercial district around what today is Parliament and King Sts., with a population of fewer than 9,000 people. The colonial administrators needed a market zone and chose a spot on the harbour.

Since then, “at least” five separate market buildings — constructed successively in 1820, 1831, 1851, 1904 and 1968 — have occupied the property, once abutting the Lake Ontario shoreline before landfill stretched the city farther south.

“All would have been equally important to public life in York at the time,” says Popkin, a senior archeologist with Golder Associates, noting that in the market’s early period, there was no other place in the city to buy fresh food. “It’s a living site.”

And it will continue to be so — following the demolition last fall of the single-storey farmers market built in 1968, a striking $91.5-million four-storey glass-and-steel, city-owned market building is slated to be constructed at the location. In the meantime, the archeological excavation ordered by the city will unearth and document the past. (The total cost of demolishing the old North Market and excavating the site is pegged at $2.7 million.) A team of up to 10 archeologists and heavy equipment operators will be digging up the site until at least March. “It depends on what we find and how much hand excavation we have to do,” says Popkin.

The city’s heritage interpretation plan, which sets out how the site’s history will be preserved, proposes that the ground and mezzanine floors of the new building include interpretive panels, artifacts, images of the previous markets and possibly embedded markers indicating the location of old walls, according to the city’s supervisor for archeology, Susan Hughes. “We do archeology and it’s important, but we have to share the findings.”

To date, the crew has exposed the massive foundations of three earlier market buildings as well as cellars used by butchers to store their produce, plus a range of artifacts, including sheep and cattle bones bearing saw marks, shards of pottery, meat hooks, clay pipes and a glass bottle produced for J.J. McLaughlin, the Toronto pharmacist who invented Canada Dry ginger ale in the 1890s.

In the construction trailer that serves as the project office, Robertson shows off a triangular shard of earthenware with a pale blue design found earlier this week — in all likelihood, a piece from a bowl or plate. The merchants and farmers “were here all day,” says Popkin, “and they would probably be eating their lunch and dinner. They would have had their own dishes.”

This project marks the latest in a remarkable series of major digs. For decades, Toronto was notorious for demolishing heritage structures and allowing recognized archeological sites, such as the original parliament, to languish. That changed after council approved an ambitious archeological management plan in 2004. Since then, downtown projects have included the Georgian row house Bishop’s Block, on Wellington St., next to the Shangri-La Hotel; Toronto’s first General Hospital, on the site of what is now the TIFF Bell Lightbox; and the Stanley Barracks, next to the new hotel rising on the Canadian National Exhibition Grounds.

Last year, under a parking lot next to city hall slated to become home to a new $500-million provincial courthouse, a crew led by archeologist Holly Martelle found hundreds of thousands of artifacts from what would have been a dense immigrant enclave. Those discoveries included the foundations of a black church established in the 1840s by African Americans who fled slavery.

All these projects are yielding public exhibits and, in the case of the Stanley Barracks, the preservation of the foundation walls. Infrastructure Ontario, the provincial agency building the courthouse, is working with the city on a commemoration and preservation strategy for the artifacts found under the parking lot.

These recent projects have caught the attention of international archeologists, hundreds of whom are in the city this weekend for the annual Archeological Institute of America’s conference. A public session about major recent digs in Toronto is on the conference agenda.

Historian and archeologist Karolyn Smardz Frost, an adjunct professor at Acadia University who has written extensively about the Underground Railroad and black history in Canada, points out that besides the market’s role in the local food industry, it provided a venue where some of Toronto’s earliest African-American residents established businesses. “A number of the city’s African-American immigrants had stalls in the market that burned in 1849,” she says.

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Excavations and historical research conducted to support the dig have revealed how the city’s food industry drove engineering innovations related to public health.

In the 1830s, because of a high water table and poor construction, merchants complained to city officials about damp warehouse spaces, flooded cellars and leaks that destroyed their produce. The two-storey quadrangular structure built in 1831 — attached to St. Lawrence Hall, then the seat of local government — was fitted with drains feeding into a vaulted main sewer designed to remove standing water and the organic refuse of a busy meat market. Similar infrastructure was found under the Toronto General Hospital site on King West, says Robertson, who worked on that project. “They understood the need for cleanliness.”

The 1851 market, constructed following a fire that razed many buildings in the area, was a larger I-shaped structure fitted out with covered stalls facing onto Market and Jarvis Sts., east and west of the building.

Half a century later, with city hall set to move to Queen and Bay Sts. and a market redevelopment plan in the works, municipal officials embarked on a fact-finding mission to New York, Philadelphia, Montreal and other metropolitan centres with large wholesale and retail food markets. They returned with news of cutting-edge cold storage facilities with refrigeration provided by “cold brine” pipe systems that freed up valuable space once used to store lake ice.

The Market Commission recommended that the proposed south market, now St. Lawrence, be fitted with cold storage technology. The north and south buildings — originally linked by an arch that would be removed in 1954 — created a critical mass, attracting farmers and merchants from across southern Ontario to establish distribution hubs in the market.

Popkin and Robertson say the North Market reveals the connections between some of the city’s other recent archeological projects, where evidence of Toronto’s early food-related consumer culture — everything from bones to flatware and packaging — has been found in privy pits. The market, Popkin says, is where the food would have originated.

As with other excavations, the archeologists overseeing the dig will have to store the vast majority of the artifacts that aren’t exhibited. While city council last year adopted a policy to have archeological discoveries found in the city stored or displayed here, the bulk will remain under lock and key, as is the case with some 150,000 historical objects in two city warehouses. The continuing accumulation of such materials has prompted numerous calls for the establishment of a Toronto museum.

A market timeline

1803: Upper Canada’s lieutenant-governor, Peter Hunter, designates the site, then on the lakeshore, as a public marketplace.

1820: The first market consisted of a 14-by-11-metre wooden “shambles” that contained 22 butchers stalls. As the city grew, it quickly outgrew this temporary facility.

1831: Architect James Cooper designed a two-storey brick quadrangle with a triple-arched entrance on the north side. After the founding of the city of Toronto in 1834, the newly established municipality moved into a vacant granary space on the second floor, overlooking King St. One 1833 evaluation claimed the state-of-the-art market had “no equal” in any other North American city.

1851: As the city began planning a new municipal building in 1844, officials decided to redevelop the market as well. The I-shaped structure contained a 61-metre-long arcade, with shops opening off both sides, as well as other general stores facing onto Front St. According to Popkin, the area around the market became a magnet for taverns, inns and dubious businesses.

1904: Following the recommendations of the 1899 Market Commission, the city completed the south and north markets in 1902 and 1904 respectively. The massive 106-by-44-metre north market, made from brick and stone walls, a glass roof and heavy iron girders, was designed so farmers could drive their wagons directly inside. It had 10 entrances on the east and west sides for wagons, and two at either end so “people who want to come into the market can do so without having to thread their way between the various teams,” as Toronto Telegram publisher John Ross Robertson observed in 1908. A giant vaulted structure over Front St. linked the two markets, while rail spurs from tracks running along the Esplanade led directly into the south building.

1968: Mayor William Dennison opened the much more modest single-storey farmers market. Just three years later, however, the city threatened to demolish St. Lawrence Market to create a parking garage. A public outcry led the city to shelve those plans, paving the way for the revival of St. Lawrence as a foodie haven.