TORONTO - Every history has a starting point, and for Toronto, it began at the mouth of Croxton's Run where the currents of time have eddied sometimes as violently as the jaded green currents flowing before it.

The stream defining Toronto's northernmost city limit was named after Abraham Croxton, a Quaker and acquaintance of William Penn. The colonial governor himself granted Croxton 400 acres on both sides of the Ohio River, part of which is present day New Cumberland where Croxton settled. He and his wife Esther Dwyer had three children on the eastern shore of the Ohio, most notably son William, born in 1768.

The family remained in what was then Brooke County, Va., where young William grew up with ambition. Across the river at the stream bearing the family name, William tapped into the abundance of virgin alluvial forest, dominated by silver maples several feet in diameter, their crowns towering 80 feet. Although the red and sugar maples produce the best quality sap, the silver produces an acceptable one from which syrup (then called molasses) is made as well as sugar, candy and even alcoholic drink.

Croxton took his harvest across the river to his Black Horse Tavern, one of the sites along which Indian agent and fur trader George Croghan stopped on his journeys down the Ohio River during the late 1700s.

"We stopped at William Croxton's tavern, the sign of the Black Horse on the Virginia side," Croghan wrote in his journal, "and got a bowl of excellent cider-oil. This is stronger than Madeira and is strained from the cider by suffering it to freeze in the cask during the winter, and then drawing off and barreling up the spirituous part which remains liquid."

Croxton also had a sawmill and a gristmill on the Northwest Territory side of his property, these enterprises fraught with peril from indigenous tribes, who sometimes sought to slake their thirst from the cool spring bubbling from the hillside, the present day Spring Street eventually being named after the aquifer.

In 1787, a battle occurred there between 14 hunters, including soldiers from Fort Steuben, and a band of Shawnees. Ambushing at night, the Shawnees killed and scalped four hunters. The surviving whites managed to reach their canoes at the mouth of Croxton's Run and escaped down the Ohio to the fort.

Three years later while a family and friends boiled sap at the sugar camp, two Wyandots and a Mohawk killed a Mr. Martin, abducting his nieces, Mary and Margaret Castleman, and three other children, all of whom were dispersed and bartered to Indian villages bordering Lake Erie.

In 1792 - the Indians escalating their bloody forays along the upper Ohio Valley - settlers organized to thwart the menace. One of the outcomes of the Committee of Holliday's Cove (present downtown Weirton) was the erecting of blockhouses at strategic points.

"Blockhouses are already erected, we mean, Sir, at Yellow Creek, Croxton's Run and the mouth of Herman's Creek," James Campbell of Holliday's Cove wrote to Colonel Baird of the Virginia Militia. "Men placed in these stations would, in our opinion, be the best mode of disposing them and most agreeable to the inhabitants."

The duration and fate of the Croxton's Run blockhouse is unrecorded, but most likely burned or disassembled for wood by the time Michael Myers assumed ownership of the property as a reward for his services as an Indian Scout during the Revolutionary War. In 1795, Croxton lost his Ohio property to Myers because he had failed to secure tenure and a land grant by not notifying the government.

Undoubtedly, Croxton and Myers knew each other. During the war, Myers scouted the area from Mingo Bottoms to Yellow Creek and had probably asked Croxton for information at the Black Horse Tavern.

In 1774, Myers dispatched two Mingoes with his long rifle "Limber Jenny" at nearby Carter's Run and a couple of days later fired upon a bateaux full of Indians crossing the Ohio to investigate the massacre of Chief Logan's people at the mouth of Yellow Creek. Obviously Myers knew the local terrain well and his selection of the Croxton's Run acreage was not a haphazard guess.

Ancestors' accounts of Michael Myers report that the patriarch and founding father of Toronto predecessor Newburg constructed grist and saw mills and a log cabin on the property opposite Gamble's Run, which, incidentally, was the maiden name of William Croxton's wife. Myers also operated a ferry and wharf opposite Croxton's Black Horse Landing. Whether the two families competed, cooperated or were antagonistic to each other can only be a matter of speculation, although from the west banks the property was seldom called Croxton's Run, but rather "the Myers Mill down at the river," Sugar Grove and even "opposite Rambles Run," the last an obvious slur at the Croxtons and in-laws.

Two and one-half centuries later, the Croxton name continues flowing through time like its historic stream. At its mouth is a large gravel bar called by the Army Corps of Engineers the Croxton Bar and just a pea gravel's throw downstream is the marker and light for Ohio River Mile 58, still referred today by riverboat pilots as Black Horse.

(Petras is a Toronto resident and a member of the Historical Society of Toronto.)