David Ward Jr. (1839 - 1912) was a prominent Toronto, Ontario businessman, sportsman and decoy* carver. Attached below is his biography excerpted and abridged from the book Traditions in Wood: A History of Wildfowl Decoys in Canada":

At the age of 19, David Ward Jr. watched as a storm crashing off Lake Ontario breached the Toronto peninsula and reshaped the harbour behind it, creating Ward's Island out of the land on which his family lived. More firmly rooted, apparently, than the Peninsula itself, successive generations of the family remained there from the time David Ward Sr. emigrated from Yarmouth, England, in 1798, until 1982.

The eldest of three sons, Ward spent his early years working with his father as a c...