This is the fourth post in a series highlighting research from the Assembling a City project, which examines the urban metabolism of Toronto between the 1830s and the 1930s. The project is funded by a SSHRC Insight Development grant.
It’s January 18, 1861. You’re eight years old, living with your mother and two siblings on downtown Toronto’s infamous and recently renamed Stanley Street (known today as Lombard Street).1 It’s been two years since your family lost a father, a husband–a breadwinner. You’re too young to know it, but people suspect your mother has taken to drinking; whether it’s to cope with the cold, the loss, or the lack of food is anybody’s guess. Of course, these circumstances take a toll on your still-developing mind and body, yet you remain hopeful. Your mother, perhaps an unclean and uncouth woman by some standards, has told you that a man will be visiting today to help your family through their unfortunate circumstances. This is not the first time she has received assistance from the House of Industry, so you know that the visit will consist of a short conversation in exchange for much-needed bread, wood, soup, or maybe even coal.
The visitor, who looks to be some sort of businessman–a senator? Perhaps a future city mayor? –finally arrives.2 Upon entering, he immediately begins to berate the unfortunate state of your admittedly dirty dwelling. Not pleased by the visitor’s unfiltered remarks, your fiery mother tells the man to “go to hall,” a strange statement to be made in a one-room home. The interaction comes to a close, and you eagerly wave goodbye as you imagine a coal-filled stove and hot soup.
Relief never comes.
The above story is based on a real encounter recorded in the House of Industry’s minute books (pictured above): this was the harsh reality for many who applied to one of Toronto’s largest poor relief agencies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scholar James Pitsula, who completed an illuminating dissertation on the institution in 1979, describes the House as having had “semi-official or quasi-public status,” referring to it as a corporation despite being largely supported by tax funding.3 The House offered three main types of relief for those deemed deserving: living accommodations for the elderly/infirm, a casual ward that offered food and shelter, and outdoor relief (for example, wood and coal) as was being applied for in the above case. The House of Industry’s records, including its minute book and annual trustee reports, offer a means for understanding early Toronto’s distribution of energy resources, especially coal, and how this was intertwined with economic and social control.
For the purposes of the Assembling a City project, our team been investigating outdoor relief as it appears in the House of Industry minute books, which span from 1855-1882.4 The books consistently detail the names of each applicant and the date they applied, and usually include the applicant’s religion, nationality, age, number of children, marital status, address, and the circumstances that have pushed them to apply for relief. This information was obtained through a combination of home visits from House representatives and in-person meetings between applicants and members of the House’ committee. In instances where relief or admittance to the House was denied, there is often a description of why. These instances of denial are among the most intriguing aspect of the ledgers. Not only do these descriptions reveal much about the Victorian social standards of the time, but they also tell us a lot about how Toronto’s elites determined who was or was not deserving of energy resources.
Many of the visitor’s descriptions more closely resemble an entry in Regina George’s “Burn Book”5 than they do the writing of senators, board members, mayoral candidates, and other high-status men who took on the role of visiting the poor on behalf of the House of Industry.6 From these entries, it becomes clear that the standards for receiving poor relief “usually reflected the attitudes, prejudices, and concerns of the elite much more than the needs of the poor.”7 Also clear in these entries is the heavy influence of religion in creating the moral standards that were to be upheld by Toronto’s poor if they were to expect relief. Based on evidence from the House of Industry minute books, among the most common reasons people were granted relief were the loss of a family’s breadwinner, being deemed “industrious” or “hardworking” by the visitor, illness/injury of either the applicant or one of their family members, having a large number of dependent children, and abandonment by a spouse. For example, the figure below depicts a typical entry in which a woman was granted relief in the form of bread and wood because the visitor perceived her as industrious but unable to work due to economic conditions. However, any combination of these reasons was subject to denial if the visitor perceived the applicant to be intemperate, unclean, lazy, or otherwise improper. For inhabitants already accepted into the House’s casual ward, their place could be revoked for infractions as minimal as cussing or smoking on the property. All of these standards worked to construct poverty as an individual and moral issue, rather than a societal or structural failure.
The strict standards of the House also reflected a prominent fear of pauperism, which is acknowledged in the House’s annual reports, which describe efforts to provide relief to only the “deserving” poor of Toronto. One method the House used to deter paupers from “appealing to the benevolent for very unworthy purposes” was the implementation of labour tests, usually in the form of breaking stone or chopping wood in exchange for outdoor relief.8 The House also required doctor’s notes or testimony to be obtained by those claiming to be sick or injured and therefore unable to earn their living. The more “undeserving” an applicant was deemed, the more likely they were to be subjected to the House’s scrutiny and labour tests. However, the House’s annual reports point to larger factors such as harsh weather and economic instability as causes of poverty, inaccurately painting structural issues and individual issues as equal contributors. In his dissertation, Pitsula asserts that “it is indisputable, then, that widespread pauperism was a myth which conveniently masked the reality of poverty.”9 But how does all of this connect to the Assembling a City project?
Besides the obvious fact of coal and wood being distributed to the poor being relevant to Toronto’s urban metabolism, these ledgers offer some insight into the larger (and perhaps corrupt) happenings of Toronto’s coal industry. As my colleague Hannah Willness writes in her blog post, “Identifying Historical Actors in Toronto’s Coal Network During the Late 19th Century,” prominent coal dealer and Quaker Elias Rogers was accused of running a “coal ring” in the late 1880s.10 Interestingly, Rogers’s company makes an appearance in the House of Industry’s annual reports as a contributor under “Subscriptions and Donations.” Equally noteworthy is that the President of the Consumers Gas Company acted as a manager or trustee of the House at some point between 1876 and 1900. Beyond these two men, Pitsula highlights a myriad of board members and trustees hailing from “prominent family names,” many of whom appear in other records relevant to Assembling a City, such as the Customs House manifests. This raises questions regarding the extent to which the largest players in Toronto’s energy industry influenced social status and norms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While Pitsula’s dissertation provides a strong foundation for this investigation, his work was completed in 1979 and was thus limited to the House’s Visitors’ minute books from 1879-1882. The Visitors’ minute books from which I am currently assembling a database span from 1855-1882, leading me to believe that there is much to be added to Pitsula’s work.
Notes
1. Kristine Morris. “The Names of Lombard Street, Toronto: Not 1, Not 2, but 3, and Almost 4,” Lively Legacy of Lombard Street (blog), October 28, 2019, https://lombardstreethistory.wordpress.com/2019/10/28/the-names-of-lombard-street-toronto-not-1-not-2-but-3-and-almost-4/.
2. James Michael Pitsula, “The Relief of Poverty in Toronto, 1880 – 1930” (PhD diss., York University, 1979), 37, http://cyber.usask.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/relief-poverty-toronto-1880-1930/docview/303020381/se-2?accountid=14739.
3. Pitsula. “Relief of Poverty in Toronto.” 26.
4. This investigation has been made substantially easier thanks to the hard work of the Ontario Genealogical Society, who have transcribed these minute books: https://torontofamilyhistory.org/projects/toronto-house-of-industry-project.
5. Mean Girls, directed by Mark Waters (2004; Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 2004), film.
6. Pitsula, “Relief of Poverty in Toronto,” 37.
7. Janice Harvey, “Dealing with the Destitute and the Wretched: The Protestant House of Industry and Refuge in Nineteenth Century Montreal,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 12, no. 1 (2001): 74, https://doi.org/10.7202/031142ar.
8. Trustees of the House of Industry, Report of the Trustees of the House of Industry for the Year 1857. (House of Industry, 1857). 10.
9. Pitsula, “Relief of Poverty in Toronto,” 83.
10. Hannah Willness, “Identifying Historical Actors in Toronto’s Coal Network during the Late 19th Century,” The Otter, NiCHE blog, February 17, 2026.
Feature image: House of Industry sketch. From Trustees of the House of Industry, The Ninety-Ninth Annual Report of the House of Industry: City of Toronto For the Year 1935-1936 (1936), https://archive.org/details/annualreportofho00trus_32.
Kenzie Kosowan