[URBAN NOTE] "The Credit Village"

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist's Kevin Plummer, writing his Historicist feature, describes the brief story of Toronto's Credit Village.

“We found ourselves on an elevated plateau, cleared of wood,” J.E. Alexander, a British officer, recorded of his visit to the Credit village, a First Nations settlement, in about 1830. “And with three rows of detached cottages, among fields surrounded with rail fences; below, a clear stream, abounding in fish, rushed over its rocky bed to join the waters of Lake Ontario. We rode into the open space in the centre of the village, and found…a pole, on which fluttered the Union Jack: on the top was a small house for the martens [sic] to build in, whose presence is considered fortunate [among the Mississaugas] in Canada.”

Founded in 1826 on the hill above the western bank of the Credit River—where the Mississaugua Golf and Country Club is now located—the village marked the Credit Mississaugas’ transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and commerce. By the late 1830s, the village consisted of about forty log and frame houses with well-manicured gardens, a Methodist church, a two-storey Mission House, and a school connected by a wood-plank sidewalk along the road running through town. Beginning with raising corn, wheat, oats, and vegetables as well as livestock, the community had become self-sustaining, with locals operating a blacksmith’s shop, a carpenter’s workshop, several stores, two sawmills, as well as shipping facilities and boats at the lakefront.

Despite their prosperity and self-sufficiency, however, the Mississaugas proved unable to secure clear title to the village lands from the colonial or British governments. And, in the spring of 1847, they abandoned their cultivated fields and comfortable homes—two decades of work—to start over on a corner of the Six Nations Reserve on the Grand River.