James Mink (1797-1868) plaque, 2022. Photo by Chris Bateman.  

Plaque Text

James Mink was a respected Black Toronto businessman who ran a series of successful livery stables, a type of business that rented out horses and wagons.

Mink was born in Upper Canada (now Southern Ontario) near Kingston, where his father was enslaved by a Loyalist family. Mink drove horse-drawn carts in Kingston. Around the time Toronto became capital of the Province of Canada in 1849, he started a livery at present-day Queen and Bay Streets.

By 1850, Mink ran the prominent Mansion House Inn and Livery Stable on Adelaide Street near here. With his brother George, who ran his own livery and stagecoach business in Kingston, Mink started a public bus service. The brothers also had a contract to transport prisoners between jails in Toronto and Kingston. Mink often hired Black men to drive his vehicles.

As a successful Black business owner, James Mink became a target for attack. He and his wife, Elizabeth, had a daughter, Mary, who in 1860 became the subject of a long-lasting racist myth. A false story in a popular Scottish journal that was reprinted in newspapers across North America claimed Mary had been tricked into marrying a white man who sold her as a slave. In reality, Mary married William Johnson, a Black man, in 1852.

The Mansion House was destroyed in an 1858 fire. In the 1860s, James Mink owned a smaller livery on Terauley (now Bay) Street and later on King Street West. He is buried in the Toronto Necropolis cemetery.