November 19th, 2024
D. Rollings

7749 Churchville Road has stood near the centre of our village from its earliest years, playing witness to the arrival, lives and deaths of the founding families, the rise of the Mormon congregation and their departure from the village, William Lyon Mackenzie's visit and the ensuing riot in 1837, the coming of the railroad, economic and industrial success and the long, slow descent into rural obscurity that followed for many decades. It served as one of the village's hotels for many years. It has survived countless floods and was host to family joys and heartbreaks. While the property receives legal protection as a heritage property, in the past few years it has seen attempts to sever and develop the lot, a petition by the owners to the city to demolish the home and rebuild and, most recently, a fire.

         A silver lining that emerged from these events is the excellent Heritage Impact Assessment (HIA), completed by Bruce Corley in 2023. The document details not only the history of the property, but also of surrounding properties and Churchville in general. In light of 7749’s seemingly inevitable fate, I thought that I would share some of the research that Corley presented in this publicly-available document. You can read the entire HIA here.

         7749 Churchville Road is a unique property in the village, sitting astride Lots 11, 12 and 13 on the 1864 TOR 11 plan. Crossing over Lots 13 and 14 WHS, its strange shape may actually reflect initial industrial usage. It appears in an earlier village plan that dates to the original subdivision of land, referred to in Rhoda Church Mathews-Stoyell’s will in April, 1835. The property has an extensive open area on the north side along the road and the TOR 11 plan reveals that a public lane once extended into the garden, built by Mathias Ingram, though no signs of it are now visible. Corley’s research revealed that two other buildings once stood on the lot, but were lost before 1864 and never replaced. These may have been Daniel Rowe’s shingle factory that burned in 1853, or perhaps they were Howland’s general store in the village, which is only noted as existing in the 1830s. They may also have been associated with a stage coach service which ran daily to and from Toronto in the 1840s. It is impossible at this time to say for sure. The lot to the south of 7749 was occupied by a blacksmith's shop in the 19th century.

     What we do know for sure is that the house is old; possibly one of the oldest in the area. It’s use of construction techniques such as hand-sawn timbers, split lath and a pebble-dash limestone stucco exterior (long concealed by siding, but still in place) prove that the home actually predates the village’s sawmill… a fact that immediately calls into question almost everything that we have been taught over the years about Churchville’s origins. If the Church family’s sawmill had existed on the banks of the Credit only a few hundred feet from the home, it certainly would have played a role in the construction of the building. The Church family certainly were present in the community when it was built, however, as Orange and Susan Church’s Inn to the north of the lot was built around the same time. This timeline undermines the accepted theory that Amaziah Church operated a sawmill on the flats from 1815 and places the likely establishment of Church’s Mills as being closer to the late 1820s. 

         The use of pebble-and-dash limestone stucco on the exterior of the home, as well as on the Orange Church hotel next door, hints that a lime kiln must have been built somewhere nearby, something that a team of archeologists would be able to locate. It seems likely that such a facility would have been located somewhere on this large lot.

          An advertisement placed by Rhoda’s Church Stoyell-Matthews’ husband Thomas Stoyell in the February 27th, 1830 edition of the Christian Guardian describes “nearly new” grist and sawmills for sale in the village, which he calls Church’s Mills, along with a number of other buildings in the immediate area. The village at this point did not extend south of the Credit and the development was generally contained to the valley - the rectangle that we now know as Churchville Road, Church Street and Victoria, with the now-invisible Bennett Street on the north side. The timing of this ad, combined with the pre-sawmill techniques utilized in building the home, indicates that 7749 Churchville Road was actually built in the 1820s and has stood on that same spot for nearly two centuries. 

         Like many of the historic buildings in Churchville, it is designed to be a story-and-a-half tall. It is believed that this design was often chosen to avoid the extra taxation levied on two-story homes at that time in Upper Canadian history. For much of its history, the building was accessed through a door that stood where the center window is now located at the front. Residents and patrons would enter directly from Churchville Road / Main Street. 

     7749 Churchville Road was built to be a residence, but served as one of the two hotels in the village during the mid-19th century. This has led to some confusion, as it has been generally accepted over the years that the two hotels that served the community were Orange Church’s hotel at 7767 Churchville Road and Whitehall at 7825 Churchville Road. While 7767 was certainly a hotel and tavern up until the Great War broke out, there is no historical record to indicate that Whitehall ever served as anything other than a residence.  7749, on the other hand, was expanded only a few years after it's initial construction, likely to accommodate the change from residence to hotel. In the 1840s a significant portion of the industrialized village’s population were renting rooms and living in hotels, so it is not surprising that this transformation took place. 

     It is unclear when exactly the building served as a hotel, but a report in 1877 lists only one hotel in the village, indicating that it had returned to its original residential purpose by then. Though it is not mentioned in the HIA, I recall hearing once that at some point in the 20th century the place served as an ice cream shop. Perhaps a reader could confirm whether this was the case.

     Several important local figures owned and lived in this home. The property was owned by the Wiman family and Corley indicates that Erastus Wiman Jr. lived in the home during his difficult childhood. Erastus Wiman Jr. is likely the most famous person to emerge from the village, having risen from his humble roots to the highest echelons of New York City society in his lifetime. You can read about him here. Theodore Turley, an early leader in the Church of Latter Day Saints who led the Churchville congregation to join their fellow Mormons in the U.S. also lived here, and it is likely that Joseph Smith Jr., LDS founder and prophet, would have visited the home during his stay in Churchville in August 1837. You can read more about Theodore Turley here.

        It will be interesting to see what actions the city takes to protect and preserve this house and property. In the HIA, Corley describes it as being an “Exceptionally rare, unique, early example of a style and type of pioneer village house” associated with “the complete history of Churchville”. Also intriguing is the situation of the property itself, on a bank overlooking a curve in the Credit River. In the HIA, Corley explains that these geographical features make the site an extremely likely candidate for having hosted pre-colonial indigenous settlements.  Hopefully we will learn more about this in the future.

I know that I join with the rest of the community in hoping that something can save this important house and property from redevelopment. This is an excellent opportunity for the City of Brampton to convincingly demonstrate its commitment to the preservation of heritage buildings, of our shared history and ultimately to the Churchville community.