30 / 64
28
HAVERGAL COLLEGE
H
avergal is one of those remarkable places that gives off a nearly
palpable sense of character. Visitors can feel its unique identity
and the attachment of the people who belong there. Sociologists call
this a sense of place.
So it’s hard to imagine that the school was once scattered across the
city in half a dozen different locations. At various times as the school
grew, there were rented schoolhouses and residential buildings, satellite
properties and feeder schools all over the city—on Jarvis Street, St.
George Street, Bloor Street (the Preparatory School), St. Clair Avenue
(Havergal-on-the-Hill), Beaumont Road and elsewhere.
Havergal’s first home was Morvyn House at 350 Jarvis St. When
Ellen Knox first laid eyes on the building in 1894, she found it dusty,
dreary and somewhat worse for the wear after 24 years of hard use.
Her spirits were brightened by the sight of a crab apple tree under
the window. In what would become a school tradition, Havergal’s
First Principal soon turned that tree into a classroom, allowing the
girls to study while perched on its branches.
From just seven boarders and 31 day students when the school
opened, enrolment swelled to 96 within a year. Classrooms were
rented in a nearby church (the girls had to carry their school supplies
along Carlton Street every Monday morning) and nearby houses and
galleries were rented. It was clear that 350 Jarvis Street would not
suffice. In 1898, construction began on a new facility right next door.
Designed by architect George Miller, the new school was a Gothic,
red-brick building with all the modern conveniences. Drawing
rooms, classrooms and an assembly hall graced the main floor, with
sitting rooms, bedrooms, piano rooms, studios and a laboratory on
the floors above. There were maids’ rooms on the fourth floor and a
250-seat dining hall in the basement.
That summer, with construction on the new school nearly complete,
Ellen Knox returned to England for a much-needed vacation. Just a
few days after she arrived, she received a distressing cable: a fire had
destroyed the new building. She returned to Canada on the next boat.
Reconstruction began immediately and, amazingly, the school was
rebuilt by November. The Boarders spent their first night in the
new building before the front doors were even installed. “As fast as
a room was even half finished we began to move into it,” Miss Knox
later recalled. The building would house Havergal students for the
next 44 years.
In those days, Jarvis street was “Toronto’s Champs Élysées,”
1
but as the city grew, the ever-prescient Knox could see that the
area’s demographics were shifting. The fashionable residential
neighbourhoods were moving north and Havergal needed to follow.
In 1923, Knox persuaded the Board of Governors to purchase the
27-acre Northdale Farm at Avenue Road and Lawrence Avenue.
Her bold and astonishing plan was to build a new school in what
was then countryside, far from everything and accessible only by an
unpaved mud trail.
“The school was so remote that they had to put signs out on
Yonge Street, directing people over to Avenue Road,” says Library
The Building of a School
A Brief History of Havergal’s Facilities
By Catharine Heddle 1989
The new Junior School, Havergal-on-the-Hill, 1911.
1
Austin Seton Thompson,
Jarvis Street
“
“
Our mission is to
provide spaces that
inspire learning.
—Lisa Massie, Director of Facilities
Traditions