\'Church' Article for 'Bloor West Journal' (2007)/

Winnie Czulinski: Article for "The Bloor West Journal" (Toronto) 2007 (pics added)

~?~ UNQUIET SLUMBERS ~?~

...The only bells you’ll hear ringing through this churchyard are those on the GO trains to the south. But to walk among the myriad tombstones, from mere weather-worn stumps to elaborate tall monuments, is to feel the history of a church inextricably interwoven with the history of early Mimico.

Intermarrying names like Gamble, Greey, Hendry, Poole, Van Every and Tremayne go back to a time of United Empire Loyalists, Wm. Lyon MacKenzie’s Rebellion and Queen’s Rangers militia, and church rectors who served other institutions like Upper Canada College and the Legislative Assembly.

Now urban development going on around the cemetery has prompted Etobicoke-Lakeshore city councillor Mark Grimes' recent motion to have the cemetery of Christ Church historically designated under the Ontario Heritage Act.

In front of the churchyard facing Royal York Road, a flat muddy field is all that’s left of the church itself. It (the third building, 1956) was demolished near Christmas, December 2006, after a fire costing $1 million in damage – following a previous recent fire costing about $350,000 damage. Some furnishings and stained-glass windows made by renowned Toronto firm McCausland were saved. But the loss of Christ Church reverberated. Ultimately the “mother” of all other area churches, it was the first Anglican church in Etobicoke.

And built for good reason. One John William Gamble, who later took a Parliament seat after Mackenzie’s 1837 Rebellion, and who also helped found The Bank of Toronto, ran a local sawmill in the early 1820s. Many of his lumberjacks liked to “carouse.”

“It was an unbroken series of Sunday brawls that led to the founding of Mimico’s first church,” wrote Harvey Currell in The Mimico Story (Town of Mimico and Library Board 1967). The first service, taken from the Church of England Prayer Book, took place in “Squire” Gamble’s home, then a long schoolhouse.

Gamble then donated land in 1832 for a small clapboard-wall frame building, with a belfry but no chimney, just a stovepipe through the wall. The parson often stopped during the service to call to the sexton, "George, the wind's changing, go out and turn the pipe!" In early days, each family paid one York shilling to rent a pew, which also allowed them to take part in congregational business meetings.

The church also was a focal point in a workman’s town, modeled after the English Christian Socialism movement, around the new railway station of Mimico. From a Mississaugas First Nations word meaning “resting place of the wild pigeons,” the name reflected the passenger birds that stopped at the Creek mouth before flying south across Lake Ontario.

Niagara/York stagecoaches traveled the lakeshore road. More locally, Christ Church’s first regular minister, Rev. Dr. Thomas Phillips, rode horseback along rough "native" paths (like Royal York Road) to parishioners and another Anglican church, St. Philip’s, miles to the north.

By 1889, Christ Church needed more than its recent $100 purchases of a cabinet organ and chancel. Parishioners quickly raised $3000 of the $5000+ needed to build a beautiful brick church of Gothic architecture. It somehow reflected the glory of rector Francis Tremayne, who at his death in 1919 had served under three sovereigns and four Bishops of the Diocese. And in 1927, his son the Canon Herbert O. Tremayne, compiled a history of Christ Church for its 100th anniversary.

In 1956 the church was again rebuilt, its foundations still bearing the memory of these long-running rectors, a mere four in the first 100 years. And in June 2002, Christ Church celebrated its 175th anniversary with a churchyard tour and Victorian tea-party. There were plans to develop the grounds, now minus its church, as a memorial garden.

Meanwhile, Christ Church parishioners, still wondering about the cause of the fire, worship at St James, Humber Bay Anglican Church. As for the Christ Church cemetery historical designation, “It’s a way of recognizing and protecting and preserving,” says Gregory Wowchuk, president of the Etobicoke Historical Society. “The pioneers who built South Etobicoke are buried there.”

(Bloor West Journal, 2007)

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