Jarvis, William Botsford

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Robert J. Burns, “JARVIS, WILLIAM BOTSFORD,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 9, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/jarvis_william_botsford_9E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • sheriff, politician, land speculator, and entrepreneur; b. 4 May 1799 at Fredericton, New Brunswick, third and youngest son of Stephen Jarvis and Amelia Glover; d. 26 July 1864 at Toronto, Canada West.
    • In 1809 Stephen Jarvis moved to York (Toronto) where his cousin William was a prominent local official. William Botsford Jarvis attended the district school at York, under George Okill Stuart and later John Strachan. He became in 1818 clerk of the provincial secretary’s office where a cousin, Samuel Peters Jarvis, was acting head. Here he remained until 1827 when he was appointed sheriff of the Home District; he retired from that position only in 1856, in favour of his nephew, Deputy Sheriff Frederick William Jarvis.
    • Jarvis contested three provincial elections for the town of York. In 1830 he was narrowly defeated by moderate Robert Baldwin in a by-election, but was successful later that year against the same opponent when a new election was called upon the death of King George IV. Jarvis pressed for York’s incorporation as a city, while objecting to the change of name to Toronto, and though he was a Tory (he was president of the British Constitutional Society, the political arm of the Tories, during the 1836–38 period), he advocated voting by ballot in municipal elections because he felt his constituents wanted it. In 1834 he was defeated by a moderate. Jarvis and William Lyon Mackenzie engaged in a bitter personal feud and when the rebellion came he ordered, as leader of the loyalists’ picket, the single volley which disrupted the rebels’ march on Toronto on 5 Dec. 1837. In 1841 Jarvis returned to politics as a Toronto alderman but resigned in early 1842 when the council failed to choose him as mayor.
    • Jarvis is usually thought of as the sheriff of the Family Compact, the man who resisted Mackenzie’s forces and who presided at the executions of Samuel Lount and Peter Mathews in 1838. He was indeed a high Tory, “an ardent politician of the old and nearly extinct school,” an obituary described him, but he was also the man who freed the debtors in York’s jail to save them during the cholera epidemic of 1834. In a career only partially characterized by his official and political activities he showed a keen interest in the development of Toronto and in the welfare of its residents, and ended his life a respected patriarch of his adopted city.
  • Son of Provem Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory –https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=4201
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/59644508/william-botsford-jarvis