A Butcher's Gamble, a Forgotten Tavern, and How the Mile End Earned Its Name

John Clark had the kind of ambition that makes people do reckless things with money: Standing in the woods in 1804, the English butcher from Durham County was betting his entire savings on a hunch that a patch of forest north of Montreal would someday be worth more than the meat business that had gotten him this far.

Clark was buying land, but like many at the time in his show, he was buying an idea of where Montreal was headed, and he wanted to position himself right at the edge of that expansion. When he named his new property Mile End Farm, he was borrowing from centuries of English tradition: Back home, every county had villages called Mile End, places that had started as waypoints and grown into destinations themselves.