[2006/07/10 12:00 AM]
Early Days in Richmond Hill - A History of the Community to 1930
The Road through Richmond Hill
Driving north on Yonge Street in the last decade of the twentieth century, accelerating to catch a green light at the Highway 7 intersection, our imaginations link past and present along this two-hundred-year-old main street of Richmond Hill. GO Bus shelters of the 1990s are transformed into radial railway stops of the 1920s. Traffic lights remind us of the nineteenth-century Langsstaff toll-gate. Four lanes of paved highway fade away to become the dirt trail of late eighteenth-century Yonge Street.
The future, too, announces its presence along this Yonge Street lifeline. Signs of growth are everywhere. Population figures rise annually on the Richmond Hill town limits sign near Langstaff Road. New commercial and residential developments sprout on the left and right as we drive north across the Carrville Road/ 16th Avenue intersection. How significant that a real estate office should occupy the southeast corner of Yonge Street and Major Mackenzie Drive, where Richmond Hill pioneer Abner Miles first settled almost two centuries ago.
Still, links between past and present remain strong. As Yonge Street rises in elevation south of Major Mackenzie Drive, we glimpse the picture-postcard church spires that dominated the village of Richmond Hill in the latter years of the nineteenth century - Anglican and Presbyterian churches on the west side of the street, Methodist and Roman Catholic on the east.
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