THE OLD POST OFFICE CORNER
By Gary E. French©, April 6, 2025
The north east corner of Elmvale is the south half of lot 5, concession 9. It was a Canada Company lot. First leased by Andrew Graham in 1843, that lease was cancelled and John Ritchie leased it with the usual option to purchase in 1854. “Old John” Ritchie completed the purchase in 1861 and transferred the west 80 acres to his son Thomas that same year. Thomas Ritchie began his farm and married Agnes Kerr in 1863. Their house was at 80 Queen St East (the present house is newer but rests on the old foundation). Agnes was later commemorated by having one of the streets developed on the property named Kerr Street and another Agnes Street. Sadly, the Ken Knox council changed the name of Agnes Street to A.C. McAuley Street – a silly removal of the name of an Elmvale pioneer and scarcely an adequate recognition of the community service of Alec McAuley to have the shortest street in town named for him.
Settlement on the Elm Flats began in the late 1840s and within a few years the settlers wanted to have basic services provided locally – school, churches and post office. They had previously had to travel to Hillsdale, Waverley and Craighurst. The family of James Harvey had been the first to settle (south half lot 1, concession 9) in 1848 and James’s son William attended to most of the clerical duties in the community. He became the first postmaster when the post office was created in 1859. At first the post office was located on the Harvey farm but by 1864 it had been moved to the corner of what is now Queen and Yonge streets, the north east of the “Four Corners” as the village had been called. While William Harvey was postmaster, the office was operated after it was moved to Elmvale by his sister, Ann (Nancy) Maguire. She had married James Maguire and lived in Toronto but he died in 1863 and the widow brought her family back to Elmvale and the house on the corner was built for her in 1863. Mrs. Maguire operated the post office there, under her brother’s name, for about 27 years until the office was transferred to A.T. Cooper and relocated to Cooper’s store on the south side of Queen Street.
Ann Maguire sold the post office property to george Stephenson in 1893. One of Ann Maguire’s children was James Harvey Maguire. In 1896 he purchased George Stephenson’s seed business and moved it to a building he had constructed opposite the Ellis’s Hotel (this was just after the 1895 fire had destroyed a great part of the commercial section). He built an addition in 1898. Possibly he used the money his mother had received for the sale of the post office building. The building he built, on the corner of Queen and Maria
Streets, was long used as a seed and feed store and most recently by the Christies, Fergusons and the Stan Ritchie family and is currently a restaurant.
George Stephenson was part of an extended family in Elmvale. John H. Smith and Oliver St. John Smith were his brothers in law. The Stephenson had the old post office demolished in the fall of 1899. When the outside cladding was removed and the logs of the old structure were exposed, they had a photograph taken. In 1900 they had the present structure, long known as the Four Corner Tea Room, built. Stephenson had been trained as a blacksmith and had followed that career in his younger days, but not in Elmvale. He had been farming the old Paterson farm, east of the village (the Reg Bertram farm) but gave up that operation in 1899. In their new building the Stephensons operated a business and Mrs. Stephenson a millinery shop. When George Stephenson died in 1907 the building was sold to Edward Montgomery.
The Montgomerys had lived in Cookstown but when his father William Montgomery died in 1894, Edward moved to Elmvale to take over the shoemaking business his father had operated on the north side of Queen Street, opposite A.T. Cooper’s store and post office and next door to the old bank. In 1906 they opened the village’s first ice cream parlour in the Elliot block, at first making the ice cream the old way in a small container in a pail of ice, turned by a hand crank (later replaced by an electric motor). This ice cream business was moved to their newly purchased building at the corner of Queen and Yonge.
Mr. Montgomery died in 1923 and the store property on the corner of Queen and Yonge was sold the following year to Charles “Bert” Dutcher. It later passed to James Beardsall (1932), to Herb Fleming (1946) and to the Park family (1980).
The overhanging porch roof at the front of the building was always a distinctive and prominent feature of this building. Located in a prominent location in the village. This type of front port was not rare when it was built and they were useful at a time when the streets were not paved and the sidewalks, if there were any, were wooden. Few survive – there is one, now enclosed, at “The Leading House” 3 Queen St East and another at 34 Queen St West, but the structure on the old Tea Room is the best and unusual in that it was never supported by porch posts. Sadly it was damaged this winter by a very unusual snow accumulation. There was and is nothing defective about the design, which obviously stood for 125 years, but it was not adequate for such a year. The structure is now endangered. It could easily and certainly should be restored, as the Park family wish, but the municipal council of Springwater generally shows little interest in Elmvale and no interest at all in cultural heritage and the council is likely to insist that the porch be demolished. There is a heritage policy in the township but it is ignored by the council and the township staff (the policy was put in place by the OMB – the township council did not ant a policy). There is a heritage committee but it is essentially dormant. The appearance of the village’s main street has been steadily degraded over the last forty years, to a large degree as a result of the council ignoring it. This one part of one building does not constitute the village’s heritage but is a significant part of it. The deterioration of the main street has not happened overnight but over a period of years by incremental and steady poor decision making. Is there no end to it? Does the municipal council care so little?