May, 2019:

Port Perry, Ontario

Port Perry is a community located in Scugog, Ontario. The town is located northeast of Toronto and just north of Oshawa. The area around Port Perry was first surveyed as part of Reach Township by Major S. Wilmot in 1809. The first settler in the area was Reuben Crandell, a United Empire Loyalist who built a homestead with his wife in May 1821.

Settler Peter Perry laid out village lots on the shore of Lake Scugog in 1848 on the site of a former native village known as Scugog Village. The town site was named Port Perry in 1852 and its first Postmaster was Joseph Bigelow.

The first train on the Port Whitby and Port Perry Railway reached the terminus in Port Perry in 1872. Cargo from all over northern Ontario was shipped via the Trent-Severn Waterway to Port Perry via Lake Scugog, and then via the railway to Whitby, where it could be loaded onto the Canadian Pacific or Canadian National mainlines running along the shore of Lake Ontario, or onto ships in Port Whitby.

The village was amalgamated with Cartwright, Reach and Scugog Townships to form the Township of Scugog in 1974 upon the creation of the Regional Municipality of Durham.

On July 3, 1884 the entire business section of Port Perry was destroyed by fire. The wooden buildings exploded when sparks hit them. The Ross & Sons Grain Elevator on the waterfront, plus two other buildings were the only ones to survive. Thirty-three commercial buildings housing nearly fifty businesses, as well as factories, warehouses, stables, six lodges, and a dozen homes were reduced to rubble in under an hour.

Four months later, the entire commercial sector with seventeen large brick buildings were built.

Uxbridge, Ontario – Book 2

Uxbridge is a township in the Regional Municipality of Durham in south-central Ontario and is located about forty kilometers northeast of Metropolitan Toronto. The main center in the township is the community of Uxbridge. Other communities within the township include Coppins Corners, Goodwood, Leaskdale, Sandford, Siloam, Victoria’s Corner, and Zephyr.

The first settlers in the area were Quakers who started arriving in 1806 from Pennsylvania. The community’s oldest building, the Uxbridge Friends Meeting House, was built in 1820 and overlooks the town from Quaker Hill, a kilometer to the west.

Uxbridge, Ontario – Book 1

Uxbridge is a township in the Regional Municipality of Durham in south-central Ontario and is located about forty kilometers northeast of Metropolitan Toronto. The main center in the township is the community of Uxbridge. Other communities within the township include Coppins Corners, Goodwood, Leaskdale, Sandford, Siloam, Victoria’s Corner, and Zephyr.

It was named for Uxbridge, England, a name which was derived from “Wixan’s Bridge”.

The first settlers in the area were Quakers who started arriving in 1806 from Pennsylvania. The community’s oldest building, the Uxbridge Friends Meeting House, was built in 1820 and overlooks the town from Quaker Hill, a kilometer to the west.

The first passenger-carrying narrow-gauge railway in North America, the Toronto and Nipissing Railway arrived in Uxbridge in June 1871, and for over a decade Uxbridge was the headquarters of the railway. In 1872, the Village of Uxbridge was separated from the Township and incorporated as a separate entity.

With the creation of the Regional Municipality of Durham in 1974, Uxbridge Township was amalgamated with the Town of Uxbridge and Scott Township to create an expanded Township of Uxbridge.

Today, Uxbridge is as a mostly suburban community in northern Durham Region. Major manufacturing employers include Pine Valley Packaging (packaging, containers and portable shelters), Koch-Glitsch Canada (mass transfer systems) and Hela Canada (spice and ingredient manufacture). Many residents commute to other centers in Durham and York Regions and beyond.

Oshawa, Ontario – Book 3

Oshawa is a city in Southern Ontario on the Lake Ontario shoreline. It is about sixty kilometers east of Downtown Toronto. The name Oshawa comes from the Ojibwa word meaning “the crossing place” or “where we must leave our canoes”. More than 5,000 people work and more than 2,400 university students study in the downtown core.

Oshawa’s roots are tied to the automobile industry with the Canadian division of General Motors located here. It was founded in 1876 as the McLaughlin Carriage Company. The lavish home of the carriage company’s founder, Parkwood Estate, is a National Historic Site of Canada.

In 1822, a “colonization road” (a north-south road to facilitate settlement) known as Simcoe Street was constructed. It ran from the harbor to the area of Lake Scugog. It intersected the “Kingston Road: at what became Oshawa’s “Four Corners.”

In 1846 there were about 1,000 people in a community surrounded by farms. There were three churches, a post office, various types of tradesmen, a foundry, a grist mill and a fulling mill, a brewery, two distilleries, a machine shop and four cabinet makers.

In 1876, Robert Samuel McLaughlin, Sr. moved his carriage works to Oshawa from Enniskillen to take advantage of its harbor and of the availability of a rail link not too far away. He constructed a two-storey building, which was soon added to. This building was heavily remodeled in 1929, receiving a new facade and being extended to the north. Around 1890, the carriage works relocated from its Simcoe Street address to an unused furniture factory a couple of blocks to the northeast, and this remained its site until the building burnt in 1899. Offered assistance by the town, McLaughlin chose to stay in Oshawa, building a new factory across Mary Street from the old site. Rail service had been provided in 1890 by the Oshawa Railway; this was originally set up as a streetcar line, but by about 1910 a second freight line was built slightly to the east of Simcoe Street which provided streetcar and freight service, connected central Oshawa with the Grand Trunk (now Canadian National) Railway, and with the Canadian Northern (which ran through the very north of Oshawa) and the Canadian Pacific, built in 1912-13.