Early Days in Richmond Hill: A History of the Community to 1930 : electronic edition. : The Neighbours at Mid-Century

Chapter 7 The Neighbours at Mid-Century

Table of Contents

	Title Page
	Author's Preface
1	The Road through Richmond Hill
2	First Peoples on the Land
3	The European Settlers Arrive
4	From Miles' Hill to Richmond Hill: The Birth of a Community
5	Tories and Reformers
6	Stagecoach Lines and Railway Tracks
7	The Neighbours at Mid-Century
	Beyond the Village Centre
	Assorted Residents of Langstaff Road West in the Early 1840s
	Langstaff
	Hallowe'en Pranks at Langstaff Corners
	Elgin Mills
	Entertaining Girls at Twickenham Farm
	Jefferson, Bond Lake, Oak Ridges
	"The Passing of Headford Mill"
	Headford and Dollar
	Carrville, Patterson, and Temperanceville
	Markham and Whitchurch, Vaughan and King
8	Fire Brigades and Fence Viewers
9	Picture Post Card Village of the 1880s and 1890s
10	Rails through Richmond Hill
11	The Flowering of Richmond Hill
12	The Village Transformed
	Epilogue
	Appendices
	Table of Illustrations
	Index

Jefferson,Bond Lake,Oak Ridges

St. John's Anglican Church,Jefferson.

Yonge Street north of Elgin Mills supported a number of small settlements in the middle of the nineteenth century, each with its own claim to continuing fame. Opposite Jefferson Sideroad,

Pupils of Jefferson Public School.

St. John's Anglican Church offered spiritual comfort to the weary traveller. Erected as a wooden frame structure in 1848, the now brick-clad building is the oldest church edifice in present-day Richmond Hill.

Bond Lake Hotel and stables.

At Bond Lake, comfort of another sort awaited travellers at the well-known Bond Lake Hotel. Built in 1834, the hotel boasted twenty overnight rooms, plus a grand ballroom, and provided the setting for local dances and sleigh-ride parties. Nearby was the fifty-five-acre (twenty-hectare) spring-fed lake itself, which attracted generations of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century swimmers

Poster for a picnic at Bond Lake

and boaters in summer months, while curlers and skaters used its frozen ice for their winter sports.

The Routledge family of Oak Ridges. Pictured left to right are: mail carrier C. Harper,Hettie Routledge,Marsh Routledge on the grass, Charlie Routledge,Emma (Mrs. Peter) Routledge,Lucy Routledge,Peter Routledge,John on the grass, Mary Jane Routledge (Peter's sister), and Watson on the grass. Peter Routledge was appointed postmaster at Oak Ridges in 1889, and ran the mail operation from his home.

At Oak Ridges, the mid-nineteenth-century traveller encountered a community nucleus of a hotel, post office, and blacksmith shop. In the early years of the twentieth century, this emerging community would profit from its location at the junction of the Metropolitan and Schomberg & Aurora electric railway lines and from its proximity to summer cottage development around Lake Wilcox. Still later, in the closing decades of the twentieth century, Oak Ridges would become Richmond Hill's major northern commercial and residential area.

Routledge's blacksmith shop at Oak Ridges, with Walter Mortson in front.

Drynoch, the residence of Captain Martin Macleod, west of Yonge Street and north of Jefferson Sideroad. Macleod built the home in 1846, named it after his home estate in Scotland, and made it the headquarters of his vast 600-acre (about 240-hectare) Canadian farming operation. One of his sons, Colonel James Macleod, achieved fame with the North-West Mounted Police and came to be regarded as a founding father of southern Alberta.

Previous Next