Weston, Ontario
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Weston is a neighbourhood in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in the north-west end of the city. The neighbourhood generally lies south of Highway 401, east of the Humber River, north of Eglinton Avenue, and west of Jane Street. Weston Road just north of Lawrence Avenue is the "downtown" core of Weston, with many small businesses and services.
The first European settlement was in the 1790s, when a saw mill was built on the west side of the Humber River, named after the well-known Humber estuary in Yorkshire, England. In 1815, James Farr, a prominent local mill owner, named it "Weston" after his ancestral English home, although it is unclear which of the dozens of towns in Britain of that name his home-town was.
As this page on Weston (http://www.westonplace.ca/aboutweston.html) notes, "Weston grew along both sides of the river until 1850 when a disastrous flood destroyed the west bank settlement. Improvements to Weston Road (then known as Main Street) and the arrival of the Grand Trunk Railway in 1856 stimulated substantial growth on the east side."
The Town of Weston grew, and over the 19th century became an important industrial centre for the Toronto area. The symbol adopted for the town, an outline of an old-fashioned bicycle, was based on this history of manufacturing and especially the old Canada Cycle and Motor Company Limited (CCM) bicycle factory on Lawrence Avenue just east of Weston Road. Models of bicycles now hang from the streetlights along Weston Road.
Weston was incorporated as a village in 1881, but became part of the Borough (later City) of York in 1967. In 1998, York was in turn amalgamated with the five other members of Metropolitan Toronto, (Toronto, Etobicoke, North York, East York, and Scarborough) in the new "megacity" of Toronto.
So in a sense, the Town of Weston has not existed as a legal reality for almost forty years, but the strength of identity of the area is such that it continues to be informally known as "The Town of Weston" to this day. The town has a historic library (previously a Mechanic's Institute and Carnegie library) and there is a Weston farmers' market every Saturday morning from early June to the first weekend in November.
See also
External link
- Weston Place (http://www.westonplace.ca/home.html)
- Welcome To Weston (http://www.welcometoweston.ca/)