page_title: Unionville, Ontario
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Unionville, Ontario / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Unionville Festival (Main Street Unionville Markham, Ontario, Canada)
context_page_description: Unionville is a neighbourhood and former village in Markham, Ontario, Canada 33 km northeast of Downtown Toronto and 4 km east of southern Richmond Hill. The boundaries of Unionville are not well-defined, as it is an unincorporated community. Several neighbourhoods claim to be part of it however, this has been disputed between the various wards.
  Unionville was founded north of 16th in 1794, and many of the farms on and around Kennedy Road. The Unionville Ratepayers Association designated a relatively new road, Rodick Road, as its western boundary, in the 1980s. Main Street, which was Kennedy Road in the mid-to-late 20th century, runs through Unionville while the new Kennedy runs 300 m to the east. Rouge River runs north of the central part of Unionville and to the southeast. The highway is to the west, the nearest interchange with the Highway 407 is 2 km south on Kennedy Rd. The population lives in almost all parts of Unionville except for the south central industrialized area, which is slated for massive intensification.
  Tourism is a major part of Unionville's economy.
context_section_description: Unionville's name was derived from Ira White's Union Mills built in 1839, which in turn was named for the Act of Union 1840 of Upper Canada and Lower Canada.
  William von Moll Berczy brought the first settlers to Markham Township in 1794; they were originally from Germany but first moved to New York State. After arriving here, they acquired large tracts of land. Illness and famine in 1795–1796 reduced the population but the others remained on the develop a settlement. By 1851, the population was 200, served by a grist mill, a saw mill and two churches (Primitive Methodist and Presbyterian).
  Unionville was a police village within what was then called Markham Township within York County until the end of 1970, at which time it was reorganized into the Regional Municipality of York by Provincial Statute. Unionville and all of the nine other Police Villages in the county (Buttonville, Thornbill, Markham Village) were abolished.  Markham Township was also abolished, some of its lands were annexed by neighbouring Richmond Hill and Whitchurch–Stouffville, and the remainder was annexed by the Town of Markham, an urban area 4 km east of Unionville, now the City of Markham. The town and the township were named after two different people named "Markham". The name "Unionville" remained a valid postal address until the early 1990s at which time most addresses were changed to "Markham". In 2009, Markham Town Council reinstated the name "Unionville" for that portion of postal addresses within its Ward 3, which lies between Warden, 16th, McCowan and the 407. However, the Post Office used "Unionville" as the postal address for a larger delivery area that included the farms that it considered to be "in Unionville". Unionville's historical boundaries, therefore, maybe based on the historic Post Office delivery area for the name
  "Unionville". These varied somewhat over a century and a half, as neighbouring post offices came and went, but at some time or other the following areas had a "Unionville" address:
  Hwy 7 & southward: all of the area north of Steeles between Woodbine on the west & McCowan on the east, including both sides of Woodbine, McCowan & Hwy 7.
  North of Hwy 7: all of the area to 19th Avenue between Warden on the west & McCowan on the east, including both sides of Woodbine, McCowan & 19th.
  Based on the boundaries for Milliken, Ontario, Unionville's southern boundary is Highway 407 ETR.
  Unionville also extended westward on both sides of 19th Avenue to the 404.
  Since 1 January 1971, Unionville has had no legal municipal boundary.
  Markham changed its status from town to city on 1 July 2012.
  In the 1960s, major housing development came to Unionville and is still ongoing. Having old buildings available at low cost, a number of antique stores sprang up and for a while in the 1970s Unionville ranked high on the list of places to go to get antiques. After the commitment to a bypass was realised, in the 1970s, entrepreneurs appeared. The Old Country Inn opened for business and Old Firehall Sports brought a new clientele to the village. Over the next decades, the antique places disappeared being replaced by high-end antique and replica outlets, restaurants, pubs, and clothing establishments. Tourism was born. Starbucks appeared in the late 1990s. Many of the buildings have been spruced up, extended and upgraded to meet this new reality. The old original road, to the immediate east of Main Street, once considered to be swamp land, has been converted to a large parking lot.
  Walking paths through the local conservation lands connect directly to the village roads, one of the most used being the path around Toogood Pond, named after the Toogood family – the pond was originally the mill pond that powered the grist mill in the 1840s. In the early 20th century the pond was called Willow Pond or Willow Lake and was the home to several small summer cottages on north Main Street. Some had been cottages, for grist mill workers, in their earliest incarnation. Those cottages evolved into homes by the middle of the century, but are almost all gone now be
caption: Unionville Main Street
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