Oak Ridges: A timeless Richmond Hill neighbourhood connects the past with present

Family and friendship make the community, and physical separation helps retain its character

Yorkregion.com
November 16, 2018
Sheila Wang

This is the second in a four-part series looking at communities within Richmond Hill that have retained their deep roots and identity.

Those who grew up in Oak Ridges never left Oak Ridges.

Karen Mitchell is well-travelled, but Oak Ridges is the only place in the world she would call home.

“Why would I be moving? I’m perfectly happy here,” said Mitchell, 67, who was born and raised in a house built on a 55-acre family farm on the west side of Yonge Street near Bond Lake.

In Oak Ridges, many old-timers share the same sentiment, which is probably what has kept this unique community -- located north of Richmond Hill proper - alive and vibrant for many decades.

Unlike other storied communities that have vanished in Richmond Hill, Oak Ridges is one of the few that have withstood the test of time, compromised little on the urban sprawl, and maintained a somewhat small-town character.

Located east of King City, Immediately south of Aurora and west of Whitchurch-Stouffville, Oak Ridges today is actually an amalgamation of a few historic hamlets that are less talked about even among residents.

But the name of Oak Ridges sticks.

It is family and friendship that have given it the staying power, Mitchell said, while having morning coffee in the kitchen with her sister Janet Sherman and their childhood friend Brenda Ingledew on a Monday morning.

“Everybody knows everybody. We go to school together. We do things together,” said Sherman, two years older than Mitchell, and only three days apart from Ingledew.

When asked what it was like to have grown up in Oak Ridges, the three of them went down memory lane with experiences they shared, old jokes they told, and sadly, farms that have disappeared before their eyes.

Sipping on her coffee at the century-old house, Mitchell recalled the time when Yonge Street was nothing but a dirt track with one lane each direction, and the Dutch family who used to live in the gateway house across the street, which would become the oldest surviving stone house in the present-day Oak Ridges.

Established by Joseph Geneviève and a group of French Royalists in 1799, Oak Ridges has been a quiet rural community developed around Lake Wilcox, once even unknown to the travellers who passed it on Yonge Street.

At the turn of 20th century, railway services brought prosperity to Oak Ridges, but it wasn’t until the Second World War when Oak Ridges had an influx of people who flocked to the white cottages around Wilcox Lake driven by a housing crisis.

One year became two, two years became three. Many of those who were seeking temporary accommodation never left. Cottages were torn down, replaced by homes built on spacious lots, where families put down roots and became part of the community.

“There is no nice-size lots anymore,” Sherman frowned at the new development in Oak Ridges where townhouse complexes are packed into smaller footprint.

As of 2015, Oak Ridges is home to approximately 36,000 people.

Through it all, one thing remains unchanged.

“We see each other at least once a week,” Ingledew said as she played with Mitchell’s a-month-old kitten named Pancake.

Sherman and Ingledew have moved away from Oak Ridges to Newmarket and south Aurora respectively, but they said they never left the community.

Sherman still shops, goes to bank, and – until recently - went to church in Oak Ridges.

No matter where they go, they come back to Oak Ridges.

“It’s more than the community centres, the churches, the schools we built. It’s the people,” said Maggie MacKenzie, Richmond Hill heritage services co-ordinator. She pointed out that the neighbourhood groups and taxpayers’ groups helped keep the community spirit alive.

MacKenzie, once an Oak Ridges resident herself, said the community has a real passion about Oak Ridges because they grew up here with a strong sense of history.

In addition, there are separate sports organizations, like Oak Ridges Soccer Club and Oak Ridges Men’s Recreational Hockey League.

“You have vehicles by which people in the community can make connections with each other and develop relationships and friendship,” said Patrick Lee, director of policy planning and regulatory services for Richmond Hill.

The Town of Richmond Hill has helped.

The Mitchell sisters talked about their community amenities with pride, including the Oak Ridges Community Centre in the east, the Bond Lake Arena in the west, and the new Oak Ridges Public Library being built (halted due to contractual issue) just north of Mitchell’s house.

“We always recognize Oak Ridges as a unique area within the town,” Lee said. “We attempt to perpetuate that to some degree.”

The town envisions Oak Ridges as a low-rise, pedestrian-oriented community in the Richmond Hill Official Plan, 2010.

In contrast to the high-density residential development planned for south Richmond Hill, the town limits the maximum building height to four storeys in Oak Ridges. Meanwhile, new townhouses, infill development and residential subdivisions are oriented to Yonge Street and along King Road.

“No, thanks,” said Ingledew who turned down an offer to have lunch at Mitchell’s. “I have to go to Richmond Hill later.”

Oak Ridges is Oak Ridges, she said. It is a town of its own.

Oak Ridges had been a separate police village for a long time before its annexation by the Town of Richmond Hill in 1971.

Today, Oak Ridges is still geographically separate from the rest of Richmond Hill because it is wholly situated on the Oak Ridges Moraine, an important regional groundwater recharge area.

The provincial government has banned land development since 2002 in the rural fringe of the moraine between Bathurst Street and Bayview Avenue, just north Jefferson Sideroad and Stouffville Road.

The area, currently known as Oak Ridges Corridor Park, is Richmond Hill’s only undeveloped “natural linkage area.”

Thanks to the physical separation, Oak Ridges has been largely spared by the massive development in Richmond Hill.

“If it weren’t for the Oak Ridges Moraine,” Lee said. “Oak Ridges would just be all part of the continuum of urban development right from the north boundary of the town and further south.”

Nonetheless, Oak Ridges is not going to stay the way it is.

While the town has managed to retain the heritage character of Oak Ridges, higher-density development is almost unavoidable in about eight or ten years from now, Lee said.

The challenge lies in how to balance between the scale of development while maintaining the community identity, he added.

“I think it’s gonna end up being a ghetto city as those little townhouses all squeezed in there,” Sherman said.

Population growth is good, said Laura Taylor, urban planner and associate professor at York University.

“You don’t want a community identity in a place that is declining,” Taylor said.

It is not decline that Oak Ridges residents worry about, but rather disconnection.

“When new people move in, they never saw what used to be there,” MacKenzie said. “What they see is the new structures. They don’t see what used to be there and those memories that people like the Mitchells would have.”