Boomtown: A look back at Woodbridge 150 years ago

Yorkregion.com
June 21, 2017
By Adam Martin-Robbins

Heading west into Woodbridge, bumping along the corduroy road in a stagecoach, you see before you a village that, at first glimpse, appears fairly typical for these parts of recently created Ontario.

Pine Street, the main east-west road, is dotted with shops: a blacksmith, carriage works, general store, hotel and post office. Tucked back on side streets are villager’s log homes.

It’s a warm September morning, shortly after the birth of the Canadian nation.

You’re visiting Woodbridge to find out why there’s so much chatter about this burgeoning village in Vaughan Township, north of Toronto.

You quickly discover why. There’s a large factory, plumes of smoke wafting from its chimneys, situated along the banks of the Humber River.

Inside, the Woodbridge Agricultural Works and Machine Works is buzzing with activity. Machinists are hard at work manufacturing farming equipment and steam-powered machinery to be sold locally and internationally. The factory is driving the village’s boom.

Entrepreneur John Abell started the business with 20 employees in 1862, when the village was known as Burwick. The firm expanded rapidly, eventually employing 200 workers, which spurred the establishment of several taverns to slake their thirst.

Abell will be ultimately be elected as Woodbridge’s first reeve in 1882, when it was officially incorporated as a municipality.

He wasn’t the first businessman attracted to the area. Rowland Burr, who moved to the area in 1837, is considered the village’s founding father.

Like many of those who settled in the area, Burr was born in Pennsylvania, but as a youngster he moved to Canada after the American Revolutionary War. Upon moving to Vaughan Township, Burr established a flour mill on the Humber River followed by a saw mill and a textile mill. Those mills fueled the village’s initial growth and led to it being named Burwick.

As you roll westward down Pine Street and listen in on people’s conversations as they pour out of the taverns and shops, you detect a range of accents - English, Irish, Scottish - and, occasionally, catch a phrase uttered in German.

By 1855, the area had attracted enough settlers to warrant a post office. At that point, the village was renamed Woodbridge - in part due to the large number of bridges over the Humber River - to avoid confusion with another settlement named Berwick.

In addition to the factory and mills, Woodbridge has two large churches and a school.

The brick Wesleyan Methodist Church, with Gothic-arch windows, stands on a hill overlooking at the village’s north end, on Church Street. It was built in 1856 to replace the log church that was too small for the burgeoning congregation. The Anglican Church had humble beginnings too with services held in a tiny log building in the northeast.

As the area’s population blossomed, land was purchased to house a church and cemetery. The white-frame building with a brick chimney, you glimpsed at the east end of Woodbridge, was erected on the site.

Reaching the village’s west end, the carriage rolls to a stop at the Inkerman Hotel where you’ll rest for the night.

Nathaniel Wallace, a retired military captain originally from Ireland, who settled in Woodbridge and went on to have seven children built the grand, two-storey hotel in 1860.

He’s busy preparing to on open The Wallace Brothers Dominion Exchange in the village core in time for Christmas. The country store - housed in a large, red-brick building with a balcony opening off the second storey - will be run by his sons, Thomas Frazier and Nathaniel Clarke Wallace.

Local farmers will be able to trade produce, eggs, butter, ham or pork for items they need. The store will stock soap, hardware, crockery, medicine, clothing, whiskey, and myriad other things.

As you settle into an armchair in the hotel’s lobby to contemplate what you’ve seen so far, Woodbridge’s future seems bright.

Indeed it is. By 1880, it will boast two newspapers, a physician and surgeon, druggist, watchmaker, butcher, undertaker, tinsmith and nearly 1,400 residents.

There’s no inkling Abell will shutter his factory and move it to Toronto, causing the population to plummet to just more than 600 by 1901.

Woodbridge will enjoy a slow and steady resurgence in the years and decades after the First World War; with that many of the original homes and buildings will give way to modern glass and brick buildings.

But a handful of those historic homes and buildings remain - and that's not all.

“Today, Vaughan has 99 languages and back in 1867, it had pretty well one or two because there was maybe some German spoken as well. In that sense, there is a very significant difference in terms of the cultural composition of the community,” City Archivist Dan Zelenyj said. “I think, one thing that has always remained is a sense of pride in and commitment to the community. That’s one thing that has transcended time.”