5 - Gangs of Fort York: The Orange Order in Toronto

Listening T.O. History

For over a hundred years, Toronto was a stronghold of the Orange Order—a fraternal society founded on principles of militant Protestantism and loyalty to the British Crown—and Toronto's many Orangemen worked to marginalize the city's Irish Catholic population. In an episode that takes us from riots in the streets all the way to City Hall, we talk about what Orangeism was, why people got involved with it (and eventually stopped getting involved with it), what life was sometimes like for Irish Catholics in a bastion of Orangeism, and what all this tells us about Toronto's history.

Some additional resources related to the topics covered in this episode:

• Donald Harman Akenson, The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History, 2nd ed. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999).
• Cecil J. Houston and William J. Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore: A Historical Geography of the Orange Order in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980).
• Gregory S. Kealey, “Orangemen and the Corporation: The Politics of Class during the Union of the Canadas,” in Forging a Consensus: Historical Essays on Toronto, ed. Victor L. Russell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 41–86.
• Ian Radforth, “Collective Rights, Liberal Discourse, and Public Order: The Clash over Catholic Processions in Mid-Victorian Toronto,” Canadian Historical Review 95, no. 4 (2014): 511–544.
• Ian Radforth, Royal Spectacle: The 1860 Visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada and the United States (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).
• William J. Smyth, Toronto, the Belfast of Canada: The Orange Order and the Shaping of Municipal Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).
• David A. Wilson, ed., The Orange Order in Canada (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007).

If you are interested in further exploring some primary sources used in the episode, see below:

• The document from which we sourced the Orange oath is available online: Forms and Ritual of the Orange Order, to be Observed in Private Lodges of the Orange Association of British North America (Cobourg: “The Cobourg Star” Office, 1846). https://hdl.handle.net/2027/aeu.ark:/13960/t9p27z069
• Many issues of the Irish Canadian, the newspaper from which we quoted a few times in the episode, are available online via Google News’s database of historic newspapers: https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=M3NEmzRMIkIC

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Listening T.O. History is created and hosted by Steve Penfold and Louis Reed-Wood. Our artwork was made by Nethkaria, our intro music was recorded by the National Promenade Band, and our outro music was created by Holizna. Follow us on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/listeningt.o.history) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/people/Listening-TO-History/61553456499160/) for additional content and announcements, and get in touch at listeningTOhistory[at]gmail.com!