A Plaque For James Beaty's Statue

Last month a plaque highlighting the life of James Beaty was placed on the wall behind his statue. Visitors and passers-by will now have an opportunity to contemplate the achievements of a man who contributed much to early Toronto.

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James Beaty's Contemporaries

Like James Beaty, many other spirited young men and women came to Toronto to make their mark on the new city. Many of them established their businesses and homes in close proximity to Beaty. Brief biographies of a few such notables are contained in the following paragraphs. Thomas Dalton Publisher of The Patriot and Visionary Thomas Dalton ran a successful brewery in Kingston before establishing the "Patriot" newspaper in Toronto in 1832. As well as running the brewery, Dalton was the director of the first bank of Upper Canada and did not hesitate to express his opinions in the form of letters to newspapers or pamphlets he published on his own. In 1828 the brewery burnt down and Dalton eventually sold the land to Thomas Molson. "The Patriot" was established in 1829 in Kingston and was not immediately profitable. Dalton attempted to sell the paper but was unsuccessful. He decided to move to York [as Toronto was known before 1834] instead. Here, Dalton was successful ...

The Evening Telegram's Interview with James Beaty

Born 1798 in Killishandra, Ireland, James Beaty emigrated to New York at the age of seventeen where for a while he practised his trade as a shoemaker. Though he made money quickly in New York Beaty, a loyal subject of the King, preferred to live where the Monarchy still reigned and this prompted him to move to Canada, where at first he settled in Kingston. In Kingston he began to hear good things of the new settlement of Muddy York, as Toronto was then known. Sometime later, in an interview with the Evening Telegram newspaper, Beaty recalled his arrival in Toronto on Saturday March 17, 1818. "I waited a long time for a chance to ride west, and at last the man who used to carry the mail agreed to take me in his rig. It was the month of March, but there was no snow in Kingston all that winter. A storm came on while we were on our journey, and when I reached York there was four feet of snow on the ground. "We put up at a hotel kept by a man named Jordan, near where the market (...

James Beaty Statue Takes Shape

Watch the video above and see James Beaty's statue take shape. (Search "James Beaty" to follow it on YouTube.) Now, at the end of June a full-size clay model of the statue is complete. The next stage—now underway and shown in the last part of the video—is to make a rubber mold for the foundry, where the bronze statue will be finished. In the beginning Adrienne Alison, a well-known Toronto sculptor commissioned for the project, started with some rough sketches. From these she moved on to the construction of two clay figures, called maquettes. The maquettes are about a foot in height. "I like to work in three dimensions," she said. When they were finished Adrienne invited the client to choose the maquette he liked best. Next she made a larger replica about two to three times the size of the clay original. "A larger figure reveals details not evident in the smaller maquette, such as the way the clothing fits." Using the blowup as a guide, Adrienne began w...

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