April 6, 2024 The oldest standing schoolhouse in Toronto was built in 1848 just five years after York changed its name to Toronto and became a city. The population of the city stood at about 25,000 and some of the poorest people lived in the St. Lawrence Ward which is seen in the map below. This image is taken from the 1884 Goads Fire Insurance Map of Toronto. Trinity School, as it was then known, is circled in green. Also featured in this story are the East Toronto Brewery (blue) and Little Trinity Church (orange). Enoch Turner was born in Stafforshire, UK in 1792 and came to York early in t ..read more

March 16, 2024 For years we used to stop at the entertainment facility just north of Barrie on highway 11 as we made our way back home from Gravenhurst. Usually we would grab a coffee or a snack from McDonalds but this section of the highway used to be known for cheaper gasoline. Therefore, we if we had seen cheaper gas on the route north we might stop on the way back home to fill up. The image below shows the site from the air and indicated the location of the Go-Kart Track, the Kids Track, The Coffee Time, McDonalds and the Shell gas station. Other blogs online suggest that the business was ..read more

Saturday, March 9, 2024 The Uxbridge Historical Centre was founded in 1972 and was created around the Quaker Hill school house. It is home to ten buildings and a large number of artifacts that combine to tell the local history of the township and the town of Uxbridge. When Uxbridge township was opened up for settlement a lot of the early pioneers were Quakers. These members of The Society of Friends came from Pennsylvania along the newly created Yonge Street. Twelve families started to carve out a new life for themselves in 1804. Soon they started to make plans to build a Meeting House for the ..read more

February 10, 2024 The Somerset House Hotel was built on the south west corner of Church and Carlton Streets in 1895. It served as a hotel for 35 years until the building was sold. The hotel was renovated in 1930 by the architectural firm of Langley and Howland and was converted into a Bank of Commerce. In 1961 the largest merger in Canadian banking history took place and the Imperial Bank of Canada and the Bank of Commerce joined to become the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. The CIBC branch at 436 Church Street lasted until a few years ago when it was closed and the structure’s future was ..read more

Feb.3, 2024 The Oro African Methodist Episcopal Church is a National Historic Site that was designated in 2000. It is the last remaining building in an African Canadian community that was developed in Oro Township between 1830 and 1850. The idea of such a community was first proposed in 1783 by Sir Guy Carlton who was the Commander-in-Chief of British forces in North America. It was thought that integrating African Canadians into a farming community would allow them to settle into a new life in British North America. Carlton had promised freedom to slaves of the American Revolutionaries who fo ..read more

January 27, 2024 Erindale isn’t a ghost town in the traditional sense because it is now part of the larger city of Mississauga. However the older homes that remain scattered through the area provide a ghost of the town that once was. Over the years we have written eight other blogs which focus on various aspects of the local history of Erindale and links to all of these can be found at the end of this post. Erindale began in 1825 and was originally known as Toronto. It went through several name changes being known as Credit, then Springfield and finally Springfield-on-the-Credit. In 1900 it to ..read more

January 13, 2024 The old jail in Cornwall is one of the oldest surviving public buildings in the province. I had the opportunity to visit it on the same business trip that resulted in our past two stories Prescott Waterfront and Lost Villages of the St Lawrence River. This completes a trilogy of Eastern Ontario posts.  Indigenous People had lived along the St. Lawrence River for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. The first formally documented settlement of Europeans in the area occurred in 1784 when United Empire Loyalist moved north from Johnstown, New York following the end ..read more

January 6, 2024 In July of 1958 nine villages and an inhabited island along the Canadian shoreline of the St. Lawrence River were flooded during the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Moses-Saunders Power Dam. 1,200 acres of reserves belonging to the Mohawks and Akwesane as well as 15,000 acres of traditional hunting grounds were also flooded. The indigenous peoples were not consulted or compensated and only in the last couple of decades has any attempt been made to correct this travesty. 6,500 residents of 6 villages and 3 hamlets were forced off their lands and given market valu ..read more

December 23, 2023 A recent trip to Eastern Ontario gave me the opportunity to visit Prescott to find some lunch and take a break from driving for a hour or so. I used my time to wander along the Heritage River Trail and see some of the local history of the waterfront. Prescott was named after General Robert Prescott who was the Governor of Canada from 1796 to 1799. Col. Edward Jessup had received a large land grant for his loyalty and service during the American Revolutionary War and in 1810 laid out the streets for a new town on the side of the St. Lawrence River. Within a decade the town had ..read more

December 02, 2023 Starting in the 1920’s the wealthy of Toronto were building mansions in the area of Bayview Avenue and Lawrence Avenue. This was a rural setting at the time which featured the Don River for fishing and large lots with plenty of places to ride their horses. We’ve covered a number of these in past issues of our blog and they can be found in the links at the end of this post. Today we’re looking at Stonedene which sat on Bayview just south of Post Road. It dates to the end of the 1920’s, reportedly built in 1929. The image below from the Toronto Archives aerial photograph collec ..read more