John Graves Simcoe

British army officer, politician and colonial administrator (1752–1806)

Lieutenant-General John Graves Simcoe (25 February 1752 – 26 October 1806) was a British army officer, politician, and colonial administrator who served as the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada from 1791 to '96. He founded York, the present-day city of Toronto, in 1793 and was instrumental in introducing institutions such as courts of law, trial by jury, English common law, freehold land tenure, and also in the abolition of slavery in Upper Canada. His long-term goal was the development of Upper Canada (Ontario) as a model community built on aristocratic and conservative principles, designed to demonstrate the superiority of those principles to the republicanism of the United States.

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