Spadina Museum

This guide to the Spadina Museum in Toronto follows three generations of the Austin banking family through the house, ending with Anna Kathleen Thompson, who lived alone among its furniture and letters until 1982. It reaches back to an earlier house on this ridge, built by a doctor in 1818 and lost to fire, before banker James Austin bought the property in 1866 and his son Albert expanded it into the Edwardian mansion standing today. The family and their servants lived out the First World War and the Depression under the same roof, in very different ways.