This may look like another pre-confederation Georgian style farmhouse. However, just a minute drive away is one of the busiest intersections, Yonge & Sheppard, named after this very house and the owner, Joseph Shepard.

So far on this account, only two houses featured before are older than Shepard House (1835). They are Drumbsnab (1834) and Cox Cottage (1797).

Just like those two houses, the orientation of Shepard House predates the street grid. Offset from its street address on Burndale Ave, with the front door facing Yonge Street (Beecroft didn’t exist until a century later). The carriageway from Yonge would have been a good few hundred meters leading to the estate.

Historically, this house is one of the few buildings left with direct links to the Upper Canada Rebellion in 1837. Joseph Shepard and his wife Catherine were strong supporters of the political reform led by William Lyon Mackenzie.

At the time, colonial Canada was ruled by an elite group of men known as the Family Compact. Soldiers who participated in the rebellion were sheltered at this very house.

Although the house now has a heated driveway and a cinema in the basement, it seems the owner has kept the exterior house as original as possible. It is charmingly simple.

My mom texted me the other day when she found out about a new development in that area, with 2 condos reaching 59 & 53 storey respectively providing up to 2300 units. How could the area handle the additional people and traffic, she asked.

Virginia Woolf (writer) once said, “The past is beautiful,” and that our emotional understanding of the past deepens overtime. Once upon a time, Toronto apartments were some of the prettiest in the world. Luckily, the gardens of Shepard House is so beautifully maintained, as if it is stuck in a time loop in 1835, perhaps just like Joseph’s wife, Lady Catherine Fisher would have kept it.

Some of you may notice the spelling discrepancy between Joseph Shepard and the additional “p” in Sheppard Avenue. No one knows exactly the reason. According to ancestry website, in old English, the word Shepard when used as a first name and / or last name is sometimes indeed spelled with two “p”s.

90 Burndale Avenue, North York

YouTube video about the house (Silver Burtnick & Associates)