page_title: Whitchurch-Stouffville
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Whitchurch-Stouffville / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of Stouffville, 1880
context_page_description: Whitchurch-Stouffville is a town in the Greater Toronto Area of Ontario, Canada, approximately 50 kilometres north of downtown Toronto, and 55 kilometres north-east of Toronto Pearson International Airport. It is 206.22 square kilometres in area, and located in the mid-eastern area of the Regional Municipality of York on the ecologically-sensitive Oak Ridges Moraine. Its motto since 1993 is "country close to the city".
  The town is bounded by Davis Drive in the north, York-Durham Line in the east, and Highway 404 in the west. The southern boundary conforms with a position approximately 200 metres north of 19th Avenue, and is irregular due to the annexation of lands formerly part of Markham Township in 1971.
  Between 2011 and 2016, the town grew 21.8%, making it the second fastest growing municipality in York Region. The number of private dwellings jumped from 7,642 in 2001 to 15,712 in 2016, with an average of 2.9 people per private dwelling. The town projects a total population of 55,800 by 2021, and 60,600 in 2031, with 97% of the growth within the urban boundaries of the Community of Stouffville.
context_section_description: The oldest human artifacts found in Whitchurch Township date to 1500 BC and were found in the hamlet of Ringwood (now part of urban Stouffville).  Prior to the arrival of Europeans, two Native trails crossed through what is today Whitchurch–Stouffville. The Vandorf Trail ran from the source waters of the Rouge River to Newmarket, across the heights of the hamlet of Vandorf. The Rouge Trail ran along the Rouge River and northwest from Musselman Lake; both were part of the aboriginal and Coureur des bois trail system leading through dense forests from Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe. The territory was the site of several Native villages, including Iroquoian peoples' settlements around Preston Lake, Vandorf, and Musselman Lake. 
  In 2003, a large 16th-century ancestral Huron village was discovered in Stouffville during land development; approximately 2000 people once inhabited the site (Mantle Site), from 1578 to 1623.  A palisade protected more than 70 longhouses, and tens of thousands of artifacts were excavated here. 
  In 2012, archaeologists revealed that a European forged-iron axehead, believed to be Basque, was discovered at the site--"the earliest European piece of iron ever found in the North American interior."
  Other significant late precontact Huron village sites have been located to the south-east (the earlier Draper Site on the Pickering Airport lands) and to the north-west of urban Stouffville (the later Ratcliff or Baker Hill Site on Ontario Highway 48, and the Old Fort or Aurora Site on Kennedy Road).
  The western end of Whitchurch and Markham townships was purchased by the British crown from the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation in 1787 as part of the Toronto Purchase. Whitchurch Township was created in 1792 as one of ten townships in York County. It was named in honour of the village of Whitchurch, Herefordshire in England, where Elizabeth Simcoe was born (she was the wife of Upper Canada Lieutenant Governor Sir John Graves Simcoe). The first European settlements in Whitchurch Township were established in the 1790s. The south-Central Ontario Mississaugas did not formally cede these areas of Whitchurch and southern Ontario until 1923. 
  Between 1800 and 1802, John Stegman completed a survey of the township, which created a system of land concessions. This allowed for the organized distribution of land to settlers, with each concession containing five, 200-acre (0.81 km²) lots. This layout remains visible today, as the road network in the area reflects the locations of the boundaries between concession blocks.
  Early settlers of this period included Quakers and Mennonites—two pacifist groups from the nearby American states of Pennsylvania, Vermont and New York. Both groups were seeking religious freedom, and were identified by the Upper Canadian government as people with necessary skills and abilities for establishing viable communities that could, in turn, attract others to settle in the region. The Crown also granted land in Upper Canada to mercenary German Hessian soldiers, such as Stegman, in exchange for their service against the 13 Colonies in the American Revolution.
  Many of the first settlements in Whitchurch Township were developed at the intersections of main roads throughout the township and /or near streams where mills could br built to process the timber cleared from the land. Stoufferville was one such hamlet, developing around the saw and grist mills of Abraham Stouffer, a Mennonite who with his wife Elizabeth Reesor Stouffer immigrated from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in 1804. He acquired 600 acres (2.4 km²) of land. Elizabeth's brother Peter Reesor established what is today Markham, first called Reesorville. Fifty-five more families from Pennsylvania, mostly Mennonite, arrived in Stoufferville in the next few years. Stouffer's sawmill was in operation by 1817 on Duffin's Creek on the Whitchurch side of Main Street. By 1825 he had a gristmill across the street on the Markham Township side of Main St. as well.
  In the early 1830s, the old Stouffville Road was carved through largely virgin forest
caption: Map, Village of Stouffville, 1880
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