Harold Edwin Doughty

It was a hot summer day in 1910, when Mrs. Eva Doughty caught her stepson, Harold, scratching his name into the bricks of their brand new house on Garden Avenue—egged on, no doubt, by the bad influence that lived next door. And so, the next morning, she walked up to Mrs. Mary Prescott’s stationery shop at 357 Roncesvalles and paid the twenty-four cents for a single insertion of the following classified advertisement in the Personals column of the Toronto Daily Star: 

WANTED—A good home in the country for the summer, where boy of 13 can make himself useful.”

The farm was but a short walk from the station in Emery, but not a long trip at all from Parkdale. John Watson, a widower, lived there with his daughter, Jennie. He was 88 when they responded to the ad, and Jennie—who had never married—was 53. Not a particularly exciting prospect for a teenage boy up from the city, but they promised his mother there was a boy his age—Mary Devins’s son, David—living on a farm nearby. History doesn’t record how Harold got on, but the 1911 census does show he went back the next summer.

Inspired by Mrs. Eva Doughty. Photo by the author.