MEDCALF, Francis Henry

Francis Henry Medcalf crossed from County Wicklow to Upper Canada as a sixteen-year-old in 1819. Fifty-six years later, as Mayor of Toronto, he sat at the Lord Mayor of London’s banquet in the Guildhall. In between, he put three foundries into the city — the Don Foundry alone turned out threshing machines, steam engines, and mill gear for half a generation of Upper Canadian farms — served three terms as mayor, chartered the County Orange Lodge of Toronto as its first County Master, and fought at Ridgeway against the Fenian raid. None of that had been plotted out in the family’s Wicklow-to-Toronto passage. He was the kind of civic figure Victorian Toronto produced and later forgot it had.

Early life

Medcalf was born at Delgany, County Wicklow, in Ireland on 10 May 1803. The family emigrated to Upper Canada in 1819, when Francis was sixteen. He spent his early adulthood in the United States before settling permanently in Toronto in 1839.

The foundries

Medcalf ran one of the earliest foundry and machine-shop operations in the city. His first works opened on the Queen Street East block running east from Yonge. A second plant, the Don Foundry and Machine Shops, went up along the Don River, turning out the threshing machines, steam engines, and mill equipment that an expanding Upper Canadian farm economy needed. A third foundry on King Street was added in the 1860s. The Medcalf house stood at King and Queen, within walking distance of the King Street works.

Orange Order

Medcalf served as Master of Loyal Orange Lodge No. 275. When the County Orange Lodge of Toronto was chartered in 1860 as the umbrella body for the city’s lodges, he was installed as its inaugural County Master. Between 1862 and 1864 he presided over the Ontario West jurisdiction of the Order as its Grand Master — only the second man to hold that chair.

Mayor of Toronto

He took the mayoralty out of the separate-schools fight of 1863. A cross-party coalition — Orangemen, Conservatives, and Liberals who supported the common-school position — put him up against the sitting mayor, John George Bowes, whose willingness to defend publicly-funded Catholic schools had become the organising issue. Medcalf won the vote of 6 January 1864 and served through 1866.

He remained in municipal politics after leaving the mayoralty, sitting as alderman for St. John’s Ward in 1870 and 1871. In 1874 he was returned to the mayor’s chair and re-elected in 1875. In July of that year he represented Toronto at the Lord Mayor’s banquet at Guildhall in London, the formal reception for mayors of the major British and colonial cities.

He saw militia service during the 1866 Fenian raids and was on the field at the Battle of Ridgeway that June. His sons Alfred and Edward followed him into the Order; Edward also served in the Fenian emergency, aboard a Lake Erie gunboat commanded by Captain McMaster.

Death

Medcalf died in Toronto on 26 March 1880, at the age of seventy-six. He was buried at St. James Cemetery.