HERITAGE

Located within the boundaries of Old Town Toronto, Corktown is home to some of Canada’s best preserved Victorian-era architecture, including the eponymous Enoch Turner Schoolhouse, a oneroom school established in 1848 by the wealthy brewer and philanthropist to educate the children in the neighbourhood surrounding his brewery. This historic building remains the oldest school still standing in Toronto, and played an important role in the development of Ontario’s provincially supported free school system.

Right next door to the Enoch Turner Schoolhouse is Little Trinity Anglican Church, Toronto’s oldest surviving church. This architectural gem of a pre confederation church is just up the street from historic Parliament Street, once home to the first purpose-built parliament buildings in what was then known as the province of Upper Canada.

Corktown is also where you can find the remains of the Lucie and Thornton Blackburn House, a small cottage where these freedom-seeking National Historic Persons of Canada lived for many years while participating in Toronto’s abolitionist movement. After having escaped enslavement in Kentucky and further capture and imprisonment in Detroit, the Blackburns became some of early Toronto’s most important community leaders. They not only participated in historic abolitionist discussions, such as the 1851 North American Convention of Coloured Freemen at St. Lawrence Hall, Old Town Toronto, but created Toronto’s first taxi cab company, “The City,” adorned with a fire engine red considered to have influenced the colours of today’s Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) public transport.

Download the free Driftscape app to learn more about Corktown in the 19th-century and the neighbourhood’s earlier Indigenous history.