Bank of Toronto

The Bank of Toronto was a Canadian bank that was founded in 1855 by a group of grain dealers and flour millers. On February 1, 1955, it merged with The Dominion Bank to form the Toronto-Dominion Bank. Its first president was James Grant Chewett.

In July 1856, the Bank of Toronto opened its offices at 78 Church Street, Toronto, with a staff of three and immediately began development of a provincial network of branches. In 1860, it opened its first branch outside of Ontario (then as Canada West), in Montreal, Canada East.

The Bank of Toronto established itself as an efficient, profitable, but essentially conservative bank through the 19th century. It maintained a very high reserve against its capital and enjoyed the highest share price of any bank in Canada. Growth was very slow and deliberate, with a few new branches opened in emerging regional centres. Core customers remained farmers, merchants, and processors of farm products (millers, brewers, distillers).

With the maturing of the Canadian economy and the opening of northern Ontario and the West in the 1880s and 1890s, the banks became more aggressive in loans to resource industries, utilities, and manufacturing. In 1899, the Bank of Toronto opened a branch in the British Columbia mining town of Rossland. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the banks rapidly expanded their branch networks in central Canada and across the west.

To mark their rise as significant national institutions, the Bank of Toronto moved into a large new head office building at the corner of King and Bay Streets in Toronto in 1913.

World War I brought new challenges for the two banks when they were called upon to finance war expenditures and to support the innovation of war bonds marketed to the general public. Half of the staff of the two banks served in the armed forces.

Except for some contraction in the western provinces due to drought, the decade following the war was one of expansion and increasing profitability due to resource development and industrial expansion. The bank weathered the storm of depression in the 1930s without great difficulty, despite a decline in earnings. Like all Canadian banks, they endured criticism of its credit policies and resisted the introduction of a central bank to control the money supply and advise on fiscal policy. Ultimately the Bank of Canada was established and the banks relinquished their right to issue their own currency.

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