Item 3 - [Toronto panorama]

William Thomson Freeland was born in 1870. While very few details of his career have survived, he is known to have had some interest in photographing boats using a large format or panoramic camera as early as the 1890s. He operated a photographic studio for a period of time on Yonge Street in downtown Toronto but it is unknown how long it was in operation or the type of work that was carried out. It is known that Freeland did some work for the Department of Agriculture.

Perhaps his best known photograph is a panoramic photograph of Toronto that is currently housed in the City of Toronto Archives, Library and Archives Canada and the Toronto Reference Library collection. Created in 1903, "this image, comprising the whole horizon, begins and ends at Union Station . . . ". There are other Freeland panoramas in existence from the same period but none approach the size of the Niagara Falls photographs recently uncovered. Freeland died in 1945 at the age of 75.