There was a time not long ago where progress was everything. Old buildings were continually bulldozed in favor of newer ones, parkland was paved and covered in condo towers, and no one really seemed to care much one way or the other. Those days are over. Now people have developed more of an interest in preserving our history rather than replacing it with yet another company that does internet marketing. Toronto is littered with protected historical sites and outlying cities like Vaughan have joined in the trend. Though there's not all that much evidence of it left, we thought you would enjoy hearing a little bit about Vaughan's history.
The area that would become Vaughan was first inhabited by Natives, as was much of Canada. The first Europeans to arrive in the area were Frenchmen who were simply passing through on their way down the Humber Trail. The year was 1615. It wasn't until 1792, when the first townships began to spring up in southern Ontario, and people actually settled permanently in Vaughan. Though it would still be a long time before there were enough people to run a Toronto hockey tournament, it was a start.
The area that would become Vaughan Township was first home to several towns: Concord, Maple, Thornhill, Woodbridge and Kleinburg, all of which grew slowly in their early years because of the York region's extreme remoteness. This remoteness appealed to Pennsylvania Germans and American Loyalists who had been ousted from their homes during the Revolutionary War; so the early farming communities got most of their first inhabitants from these sources. It was in 1814 that skilled tradesmen (early versions of PCB designers) came in large numbers from Britain and began to develop the area's business capacities.
In 1850 these hamlets merged to form the Township of Vaughan but the township remained largely rural and agricultural until the post World War II period, when an influx of returning servicemen and refugees swelled the population from around 5,000 to nearly 16,000 in only a few years. With their help, it became much easier to get amenities and things like a wedding rental. Brantford and other southern Ontario towns were growing significantly at this time as well, buoyed by new arrivals from Eastern Europe and Italy and displaced Jewish people who had been turned out of their homes by the Nazis.
In 1971 the township of Vaughan joined together with the village of Woodbridge to become the Town of Vaughan. At the same time the township gained a unified police force and community services department for all the settlements in the Town of Vaughan from the York Regional Government. This town-township-city-region organization is a Canadian trademark. Firm boundaries between the divisions don't really exist, since the names are often so similar as to be confusing to outsiders. In 1991, the Town of Vaughan officially changed its name to the City of Vaughan, though the towns within it are still often referred to by their original names.
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