THE THIRD QUARTER-CENTURY (1900-1925)

St. John's first church had been the work of Dr. James Beaven; the new church came into being during the rectorship of Rev. Charles Ruttan; now in the third quarter-century of its history, St. John's was to extend its church and its cemetery, and build its great parish hall. All this and much more was the result of the untiring efforts of Rev. W. L. Baynes-Reed.

The death in 1900 of Rev. Charles Ruttan, coupled with the pass­ing the previous fall of Mr. James Seal, the second sexton of St. John's, served to mark off the old century from the new. Another tie was broken two years later, when Mr. Spencer Over, who had held every office in the church open to laymen, left St. John's to join a firm in Boston.

The new century was to be marked by a vigorous expansion of church activities and equipment.  Already in 1900 the Vestry was taking thought for the provision of a rectory; this project was not to be brought to completion for many years, but in other directions action was quickly taken.

One of the great achievements of these twenty-­five years, despite the interruption of World War 1, was the building of the parish hall.  It was originally conceived as a means of providing increased accommodation for the Sunday School, which had been occupying the old church.  A committee was appointed as early as 1904 to investigate the possibility of a better building, and two suggestions were made: that a parish hall be built, or that a basement be excavated under the church.  The latter scheme was rejected as unsanitary, and plans for a parish hall were pushed forward.

One of the most active campaigners was Mr. F. V. Philpott (1852-1939) who may well be called the founder of St. John's Sunday School, for he devoted in all thirty-five years of his life to building the school up from a dozen or so children to nearly 1,100 students when he finally gave up his duties as superintendent.

As the need for some sort of parish hall became more pressing, a new committee brought in a report in 1908 urging the erection of at least the basement of such a building, and construction began soon after, the basement and two ground-floor rooms for meetings being built.  Within a few years, however, even this additional space was overcrowded, and by 1913 a strong demand was voiced for the completion of the parish hall. The overcrowding of the Sunday School continued during the war years, but further expenditure was postponed until the return of the Rector from overseas.

Plans were drawn up for the completion of the parish hall by a committee appointed in 1921, but the actual work was begun only in 1924; the Sunday School accommodation had meantime been some­what improved by the excavation of the church basement, a project revived and carried out in 1922.

When the question of financing the parish hall was discussed, the prospect was a staggering one. Nearly $5,000 had been collected, and a mortgage of $3,500 was contem­plated, but it was found instead that some $50,000 would be required for the completion of the hall and for a necessary extension to the church proper. Here was one of those crucial moments when men and women either determine to push on despite great odds, or else give up in despair and accept defeat.  Be it said to their credit, the men and women of St. John's pushed on.

Mr. T. W. Turif, who had been invited to come to St. John's by two members of the Brotherhood of Saint Andrew ten years before, and who was to be People's Warden for a quarter of a century, was the leader in a great movement of faith in the future of St. John's. He obtained from a hundred members of the church their personal bonds to secure $100,000 as a reserve, to be paid over by those individuals if St. John's defaulted on her $50,000 mortgage. Not one of those bondsmen was ever called upon to make good his pledge, for St. John's weathered the storm, and the parish hall was built.

This beautiful building, already twenty-five years old, provides in its four storeys most of the facilities required in a modern parish. There is a basement gymnasium, bowling alley and billiard room, an auditorium seating 600 on the ground floor and 200 in the gallery, a ladies' parlour, kitchen, A.Y.P.A. room, small classrooms, and Rector's offices.

Another great venture of these years was the expansion of the cemetery. Through the foresight of the Rector, Rev. W. L. Baynes-Reed, the churchwardens were authorized by the Vestry to purchase more cemetery land as they deemed it necessary. With a view to setting up a permanent organization and policy for cemetery affairs, the following motion was carried in 1905:

"That whereas by deed dated the 30th day of January 1901, Alexander E. Wheeler conveyed to the Rector and Churchwardens of St. John's Church, Norway, more properly called St. John's Church, Berkeley, lots 5 and 6 and the strip of land marked private road lying between lots 5 and 6 on the one side and lots 3 and 4 on the other side all as shown on the registered plan 505 in the registry office for the County of York upon the trusts therein described; and whereas by deed dated the 1st day of July 1904 said Alexander E. Wheeler conveyed to the Rector and Churchwardens of the Church of St. John the Baptist, Berkeley, commonly called St. John's Church, Norway, lots 3 and 4 as shown on said registered plan 505 together with certain other lands and premises as more particularly Set forth in the said conveyance upon the trusts therein mentioned; and whereas it is desirable to set forth and declare in what manner the proceeds from the said lands whether by way of fees for burial plots or otherwise should be appropriated; be it therefore declared and enacted that the lands included in both the above named conveyances shall be managed by a committee to be called "The Cemetery Committee" to be appointed at the Annual Easter Vestry meeting of the Church and to hold office until their successors be appointed, said committee to consist of the Rector and Church-wardens of the Church , and three other members, the Rector of the Church for the time being to be the Chairman of said committee.

The said committee shall manage the finances of the said lands, and shall apply all moneys received from time to time in any way therefrom as follows-

firstly in payment of salaries of the sexton or caretaker and of all other persons employed in any way in connection with the management of the said lands or in connection with the purposes for which the same are from time to time used;

secondly in defraying the expenses of keeping the said lands in order as a burying ground or cemetery and in laying out, beautifying and fencing and preserving the tame;

thirdly in keeping down the interest on the unpaid purchase money and in making payments on account of the purchase money;

fourthly for any purpose to which the moneys would be applied if paid as pew rents in the Church of St. John the Baptist, Berkeley if the said Church were a pew church."

A further necessary step was taken at this time by the separation of the building fund and cemetery accounts, with the stipulation that revenues from the old cemetery should be applied to the mortgage, thus freeing the mortgaged cemetery land.

The contours of the cemetery and its surroundings were in those days very different. The banks along the north side of Kingston Road rose some twenty or thirty feet above the street level and were covered with beautiful trees and grape vines, which more than once provided the Harvest Thanksgiving decorations for St. John's.  When parts of the cemetery property were subsequently graded, thousands of loads of building sand were removed, the sale of which served the double purpose of paying for about fifteen acres of the new cemetery land, and of providing plaster and mortar for dozens of homes in the Norway district.

The Fogg estate on Kingston Road was added to the cemetery in 1905, and became the site of the cemetery office and home of Mr. Bullock, for many years Cemetery Superintendent, Subsequently the cemetery was extended northward to include what is now Eastwood Road, and a part of this land was later resold to the City of Toronto to provide a road allowance for old Patricia Drive. Then the cemetery was finally enlarged by the purchase of the Banks property, and with this addition the history of the cemetery had come full circle, for this was the former site of the summer home of the Hon. Charles Coxwell Small, who seventy-five years before had given the original tract of land for the church.

The land thus acquired consisted of a very high hill running back to the pond and creek known as the Serpentine, which extended from Queen Street to the back of the present Creber Monument Works. The old building on the property was demolished and the hill levelled out to fill up the adjoining valley. Thus in the course of twenty-five years the cemetery holdings had increased from three or four acres surrounding the church to a huge tract of land fronting on both Kingston Road and Woodbine Avenue, and stretching west and north for many city blocks in the midst of a rapidly develop­ing community.

By 1925 almost all the streets we know to-day in the parish had been opened up and their lots subdivided; the topography of the district was to change less and less as these streets were built up.

As the cemetery and its surroundings changed, so did the church itself.  Certain new practices were introduced in the service, two at least of which were the subjects of heated controversy at the time of their inception. One of these was the introduction of vestments for the choir, a proposal which was vigorously debated for three years, until it was adopted in 1907, with Mr. McLean Howard contributing $100 towards the purchase of the new surplices. The other innovation was the intoning of the service, which was begun in 1906, but at first only on feast days and on the first Sunday of each month, in a desire to compromise with some loyal members of the parish, who, like Miss Daisy Williams, firmly opposed the new trend.

In its physical appearance too, the church changed greatly in these twenty-five years. The overcrowding which had attended the growth of the Sunday School had also been apparent in the church proper; to such an extent that in 1915 the Vestry authorized Mr. Charles Lennox, a churchwarden and architect, to proceed with a wes­tern extension to the church building, the corner stone of which was laid on July 6, 1915, just a few weeks before the Rector left to accom­pany the 75th Battalion, C.E.F., overseas as its Chaplain.

The congre­gation continued to increase during the war years when Rev. A. S. Madill was serving as Acting Rector of St. John's. Shortly after Rev. W. L. Baynes-Reed returned from France, having been awarded the D.S.O. at Vimy Ridge, it was again necessary to extend the church, this time by the addition of the north aisle in 1922. At the some time, the basement of the church was excavated, and the building began to approach its present size and appearance.

Nor was St. John's neglecting those parts of her parish far from the church itself. Soon after his arrival at St. John's, Rev. W. L. Baynes-­Reed and a few laymen began holding mission services in the district known as "The Midway," i.e. midway between Toronto and East Toronto, near the present Greenwood Avenue.  These services led in 1907 to the purchase of a lot on Gerrard Street, where the Public Library now stands, and the tiny wooden church of St. Monica's was built, partly by the actual labour of the congregation. The Vestry of St. John's from time to time voted assistance for the maintenance and eventual enlarging of the new church, and, owing to the rapid build­ing up of the Gerrard and Ashdale district, St. Monica's prospered to the point of becoming an independent parish in 1914.

In similar fashion there came into existence in 1906 a "grand­daughter church" of St. John's, with the building of the original St. David's Church on Englewood Avenue. The mission had been founded by the clergy and laity of St. Clement's, which had itself been founded about 1883 by Rev Charles Ruttan when he was Rector of St. John's.

But although these years were on the whole prosperous ones for St. John's, they were not without their trying periods. The burden of the several mission parishes, coupled with the vast expenditures necessary for the expansion of the church and the parish hall, obliged the congregation to enter into heavy mortgage commitments, which were only discharged many years later.

The size of the cemetery imposed upon the clergy of St. John's the additional duties of large numbers of burial services, which at this period were always performed by the Rector or by his assistant. Despite the difficulties, however, the work went on; the tireless example of Rev. W. L. Baynes-Reed was followed by a willing group of lay-workers, whose efforts were to an increasing extent seconded by the women’s organizations then coming into existence in the parish. So it was that St. John's toiled through what was later to be recognized as one of the most productive periods of its history.