Sharon Temple receives National Trust award

Facility recognized for its historical building

Yorkregion.com
October 18, 2019
Simon Martin

The Sharon Temple is being recognized for its historical building. The temple received a National Trust Ecclesiastic Insurance Cornerstone Award last month in the resilient place category. Those recognized were owners and organizations using historic places or landscapes in ways that illustrate extraordinary resilience, significance and benefit to a community over a sustained period of time, with a successful track record of 10 years or more.

The Ecclesiastical Insurance Cornerstone Awards bring national attention to exemplary projects and places that contribute to quality of life and sense of place, and illustrate the viability of heritage buildings and sites for traditional or new uses.

Recipients are recognized at a reception during the National Trust conference. People and organizations associated with winning projects and places will be invited to participate in the winners circle session at the conference, where they will have the chance to showcase their award-winning projects to delegates.

The Sharon Temple was built during the 1820s by the Children of Peace, an Upper Canada Quaker faction led by founder David Willson. After his death and the decline of the group, the building fell into disrepair and was abandoned.

Family shares story of strife, settlement at East Gwillimbury's Sharon Temple
In one of Canada’s earliest conservation projects, the structure was converted into a museum in 1917 by the York Pioneers and Historical Society. Over the next several decades, the site would expand to include a park and several relocated outbuildings related to the Children of Peace.

Now operated by the Sharon Temple Museum Society, the temple remains one of the most recognizable buildings in Canada. In 2006, it was named one of the top 10 most architecturally important buildings in Canada by the Toronto Star.

To share the values of the Children of Peace with a modern audience, last year museum staff added a fully accessible, sustainable garden with the food donated to local food pantries to help vulnerable residents of East Gwillimbury.

Throughout the last 100 years, the Sharon Temple has left behind a legacy of equality, social justice and peace, and remains an important site of historic conservation and remembrance.