A wonderful piece on the history of cricket in Toronto from David Wenger for the Torontoist
George A. Barber came to Upper Canada from England in the 1820s to assume a teaching position at the Home District Grammar School in the town of York. When Upper Canada College was formally established a few years later, in 1829, Barber was recruited as one of the school’s first faculty members, teaching writing and arithmetic at U.C.C. for the next 10 years. He is probably best remembered to history, however, as the man credited with having popularized cricket in Canada, leading to him being nicknamed “the Father of Canadian Cricket.”
Due to the limited source material available, it is unclear when the game was first played in York. Several historians, including Stanley Fillmore in The Pleasure of the Game: The Story of the Toronto Cricket, Skating, and Curling Club, 1827–1977, believe that troops at Fort York played cricket near the garrison. The earliest known civilian cricket pitch appears to have been on the grounds of the Home District Grammar School, near what is now Jarvis and Adelaide. In their 1893 history of Upper Canada College, George Dickson and G. Mercer Adam write that “the ground surrounding the school which, in primitive times, was slightly undulating, had been cleared of the stumps, and a face of a few hundred feet square, was selected for the good old English sport of cricket, which was cultivated from 1825, under the enthusiastic direction of Mr. George [Anthony] Barber.”