Hughie Gallagher, the Yonge Street Flagman

By Gregory Clark, August 2, 1913.

Hughie Gallagher A Flagman For 26 Years

For a Dozen Years He Has Watched Yonge Street Crossing.

Born At Beaverton

Lost an Arm Years Ago – Not Afraid of Losing Job When Viaduct Comes.

Hughie Gallagher is the flagman1 at the Yonge street crossing. You see him as you cross the tracks to the Niagara boats and to the R.C.Y.C. dock. The photograph shows Hughie with his beard. In the summer he wears only a moustache, but the beard makes little difference, because of his eyes – twinkling and kind. You shout: “Hello, Hughie!” And you are answered by a wave of his flag and the glistening eye, as Shakespeare might say.

Gallagher was born near Beaverton. He was bitten by the railroad bug at an early age, and at eighteen years of age, in 1879, he was a brakeman on the Grand Trunk. The first year he was stringing together some box cars near Port Hope, and a coupling pinched his left arm off at the elbow.

“That was the end of my dream, just when I had reached the beginning of them. You can’t be much of a railroad man with one arm,” said Hughie.

So Hughie started on a long and dreary existence of signaling and flagging. For fourteen years he worked with his red cotton and his lantern in the yards at Port Hope.

For twelve years he has been on the Yonge street crossing, and in all those years, in spite of the danger of the spot, which receives so much attention from calamity howlers. he has never seen an accident on it.

“And I sneak a little credit to myself,” says Hughie, “because several times I have been in on some narrow squeaks.”

“Well, it’s a dangerous spot. But how about your job when the viaduct is built?”

“Oh, that ain’t worrying me none,” says Hughie. “I says to myself when I think of the viaduct, I says, ‘Hughie you have years of useful life ahead of you here.'”

Editor’s Notes: This is the forth in a series of pieces about people in Toronto when Greg was still new and had to write these filler stories. He often did “man-in-the-street” or stories about the poor at this time.

  1. A flagman directs rail traffic when there are people who could be on the tracks. Toronto Historic Maps shows that in 1913 the train tracks were near The Esplanade at Yonge Street, and you had to walk over them to get to the Harbour. The Viaduct is the elevated train bridge over Yonge Street that was built so a flagman at the location would not be needed anymore. ↩︎