You know your own corner of Durham pretty well. The shortcut through the park. The coffee place ☕ with no lineup at 8:15. Which road turns into a skating rink the first week of January.
But there's a lot here that never comes up in conversation.
Heads up before we start: I'm writing this one early. By the time it lands in your inbox I'll be in a canoe 🛶 somewhere in Temagami with no cell service, which is either a great idea or a bad one depending on the weather. Regular schedule picks back up next week.
So this week is a detour. ↩️ Normally I'm telling you what's coming up, the markets and the festivals and the thing happening Saturday you didn't know about. This one goes the other direction, into what's already here and has been for a long time. Eight stories, one for each municipality.
A spy school on the Whitby waterfront. A lake that didn't exist two hundred years ago. A church frozen in time since the 1870s because the town got up and moved without it.
I've lived here a long time and a few of these were news to me. Even if you've been here your whole life, I doubt you'll get through all eight without learning something.
And if you're new around here, and a lot of you are this summer (we've gone from about 225 neighbours to more than 500), this isn't our usual shape. The weekend lineup, the new openings, the people quietly doing good work around the Region: all of that's back next week. Think of this one as a keeper.
Oh, and if you haven’t already, check out our Beach Guide before you hit the water. We’re planning on doing more of these guides and would love to hear some of your ideas on needed guides for Durham Region. Reach out.
Pour the coffee. Let's go.
Eight municipalities. Eight things you might not know.
Photo courtesy of Ajax Bomb Girls Committee
💥 Ajax — The town that didn't exist before the war
In 1941, Defence Industries Limited put a munitions plant on 2,985 acres of Pickering Township farmland. It became the largest shell-filling operation in the British Commonwealth. More than 9,000 people worked there at peak. Forty million shells went out the door before 1945. 💣
A plant that size needs housing, roads, a school, a rail line, its own water treatment. All of it went up fast. And once that many people were living there, they needed a post office, which meant somebody had to give the place a name.
So they ran a contest in the plant newsletter. The winning entry came from the assistant safety director, who put forward HMS Ajax, 🚢 one of three British ships that had just beaten the Graf Spee at the Battle of the River Plate.
The war ended, the plant closed, and a lot of the workers decided to stay and buy the wartime houses they'd been living in. Ajax became a town in 1955.
The street names are the part most people miss. A good chunk of them are named for sailors who served aboard Ajax, Exeter and Achilles.
More Info: https://ajaxbombgirls.wordpress.com/
Photo courtesy of Beacan Presbyterian Church
🏛️ Brock — The church the town left behind
Scottish settlers 🏴 built the Old Stone Church east of Beaverton in 1840. Small, plain, nicely proportioned Georgian stone. Then the town moved.
The settlement it was built to serve drifted west toward Lake Simcoe, and the congregation put up a new St. Andrew's in town. The Old Stone Church saw regular use for only about thirty years. They kept holding services there for the Gaelic speakers and the original parishioners, but the building itself stopped changing.
That's exactly why it matters now. Inside and out, it's essentially untouched, which the Ontario Heritage Trust calls a rare thing in this province.
There's one more wrinkle. When the Presbyterians and Methodists merged into the United Church of Canada in the 1920s, the disagreement over it in Beaverton got heated enough that it had to be settled by the Ontario Legislature. The Beaverton Presbyterian Church Act of 1927 gave the new church in town to the United Church and left the Old Stone Church with the Presbyterian congregation. ⛪According to the Ontario Heritage Trust, that makes it the only Presbyterian church in Canada owned outright by its own congregation.
It's a National Historic Site now, fully restored in 1991, looked after by trustees and by a group of volunteers who have cleaned it every May for decades. It has traditionally opened to visitors on Sundays through July and August.
More Info: https://www.oldstonechurch.ca/
Belmont Farm with hatchery ca. 1877 - Photo courtesy of 2 Old Guys Walking
🐟 Clarington — The farmer who brought the salmon back
In 1866, a Newcastle-area farmer named Samuel Wilmot started trying to breed Atlantic salmon artificially in a creek running through his property. 🐟 Atlantic salmon had nearly disappeared from Lake Ontario's tributaries by then, cleared out by overfishing and decades of logging. Wilmot worked it out mostly on his own, in his own basement to start.
By 1868 the federal government had seen enough to take it seriously. They made his operation Ontario's first full-scale fish hatchery, one of the earliest anywhere in North America. At its peak in 1876 it was hatching 1.5 million eggs a year, and Wilmot was appointed Canada's Superintendent of Fish Breeding Establishments, overseeing hatcheries from Ontario to the Maritimes.
A provincial plaque marks the spot today, on Durham Road 2 beside Wilmot Creek, just east of Highway 35/115. The creek carries his name.
Photo courtesy of Oshawa Museum
💰 Oshawa — The one-dollar deal
In July 1920, General Motors of Canada sold 44 acres of waterfront land to the Town of Oshawa for one dollar. 💵
One condition: it had to stay public parkland. Permanently.
The McLaughlin brothers bought the property in GM's name, handed it over for the dollar, and added a cheque for $3,000 toward getting it ready, plus $6,000 more for a playground. Then the parks board asked the public to name it. Around 240 suggestions came in. Lakeview Park won.
More than a century later, the condition still holds.
There was also, for a stretch in the 1920s, a buffalo enclosure in the park. That part did not last.
More Info: https://lakeviewparkoshawa.wordpress.com/
Photo courtesy of Pickering Museum Villlage
🏡 Pickering — A whole village hiding in Greenwood
Most people drive through Greenwood without stopping. That's a shame.
Tucked into the hamlet is Pickering Museum Village, a 27-acre living history site with more than 15 heritage buildings spanning the 1810s through the early 1900s: a log schoolhouse, a blacksmith shop, a general store, a church, all set out as a working period village rather than behind glass.
It's also home to the Roots to Rebellion exhibit, which digs into Durham's early Black community and the area's connections to the Upper Canadian Rebellion of 1837. That's history that doesn't make it into most textbooks, sitting right here.
Open seasonally. Hours and details at pickeringmuseumvillage.ca.
Photo courtesy of ontarioplaques.com
🌊 Scugog — The lake that wasn't always there
Lake Scugog is not a natural lake.
In 1834, a mill operator named William Purdy dammed the Scugog River at Lindsay to power his gristmill. The water backed up roughly ten feet and turned a shallow, marshy river valley into open water. About 11,000 acres flooded. Farms went under. Then the fevers started, and the families living around the new lake blamed the standing water.
By the summer of 1838 they'd had enough. Settlers came out with axes, flintlocks and pitchforks and took the dam apart themselves.
No charges were laid. Feeling in the area ran strongly enough that nobody was much interested in prosecuting them.
The lake was brought down to a lower level by 1844 and has sat roughly there ever since. Every time you cross into Port Perry, you're looking at a body of water that was, at one point, somebody's decision.
Photo courtesy of hikingthegta.com
📯 Uxbridge — The meeting house at the end of the horn call
When twelve Quaker families came up from Pennsylvania to Uxbridge Township in the early 1800s, they ended up scattered across heavy forest, far enough apart that they couldn't see each other's homesteads. So they blew horns through the trees. You'd hear the call and make your way through the bush.
By 1820 they'd built a meeting house: a plain board-and-batten building on Concession Road 6 that's still standing. It's the oldest surviving building in Uxbridge Township.
The hand-hewn pine pews come in two styles, open-backed for the women and closed-backed for the men. A small detail, but it says something about how seriously that community took women's participation for the era.
Worth a slow drive past if you're heading north.
Photo courtesy of Eugene Nielsen https://spotterup.com/
🕵️ Whitby — Durham's real spy school
On Boundary Road in Whitby, down by the water, there's a small park called Intrepid Park. Easy to drive past. What happened on that land during the Second World War is not.
Camp X, officially Special Training School No. 103, was the first covert-agent training school ever built in North America. 🕵🏽 Canadian spymaster William Stephenson set it up to train Allied agents in sabotage, espionage and clandestine radio work, and more than 500 Canadian and American civilians went through it. The site also ran Hydra, a high-speed transmitter relaying secret traffic between Canada, Britain and the United States. Igor Gouzenko, the Soviet cipher clerk whose 1945 defection is often called the opening of the Cold War, was hidden here afterward.
The James Bond connection is real, 🤵 though not the version you usually hear. Ian Fleming is often said to have trained at Camp X, and historians treat that as unproven. What is solid: Fleming and Stephenson became close friends after the war, and Stephenson is widely considered one of the models for Bond.
The buildings came down in 1969. Two plaques stand at Intrepid Park today, including a federal designation added in 2014. It's a quiet spot on a waterfront trail, and most people walk straight past it.
More Info: https://www.camp-x.com/
Unidentified German officers at Camp 30 (Bowmanville). Author’s Collection. Courtesy of Michael O'Hagan, PhD
One more, about half an hour east. Bowmanville's wartime story went the other direction entirely. Camp 30, on Lambs Road, held high-ranking German officers, and in 1942 the prisoners took the place over for three days in what got called the Battle of Bowmanville. There was also a 300-foot tunnel dug out under the building and past the guard tower, part of a plan to get U-boat commander Otto Kretschmer to a submarine waiting off the New Brunswick coast. He never made it out. It's the last intact POW camp in Canada and a National Historic Site. The property is closed to the public while Clarington and the Jury Lands Foundation work through restoring it, so for now this one's for reading about rather than visiting.
Good work happens here year-round, not just when there's a deadline.
🍲 Durham Outlook for the Needy — St. Vincent Pallotti's Kitchen in Oshawa serves a hot meal every single day of the year. Volunteers are welcome in the kitchen and on delivery runs. durhamoutlook.com
🥗 Community Care Durham — Meal delivery drivers are needed across the Region, including Meals on Wheels routes in Whitby and Oshawa. A few hours a week, and somebody gets a hot meal and a familiar face at the door. communitycaredurham.on.ca
Know a Durham group that needs hands? Hit reply and we'll put the word out.
🏊 Check before you go — Durham Region Health tests all 15 officially monitored beaches weekly through the season and posts results at durham.ca/BeachResults. And we’ve just produced “The Beach Guide to Durham Region.” Check it out!
Always worth a look before you drive out, especially in the day or two after heavy rain.
📚 Summer reading — Library branches across the Region run summer reading programs through August. Check your local library's site for hours and how to sign up.
🚌 Transit fares — DRT fares changed as of July 1. If you haven't looked at the new rates yet, durhamregiontransit.ca has them.
Photo courtesy of Government of Ontario
The hill you've been driving over your whole life
Head north out of Oshawa or Whitby and at some point the land starts to roll. Gravel pits, kettle ponds, hardwood along the ridgelines, roads that dip and climb for no obvious reason. That's the Oak Ridges Moraine, and it might be the most important thing in Durham that nobody thinks about.
It's a ridge of sand and gravel roughly 13,000 years old, left behind when the last glaciers pulled back and meltwater dumped sediment between two lobes of ice. It runs from the Niagara Escarpment east to the Trent River, about 1,900 square kilometres in all, and one of its six main plateaus sits directly under Uxbridge. The name comes from the oak forests that used to cover it.
What it does is the interesting part. The moraine is porous enough that rain doesn't run off it, it sinks straight in. That's why there are so few streams on the moraine itself. The water keeps going down until it hits denser clay, turns sideways, and comes back out along the flanks as cold, clean springs.
Those springs are the headwaters. The Nonquon, the Beaver River, Blackstock Creek, the tributaries feeding Lake Scugog, plenty of what eventually reaches Lake Ontario. All of it starts as water that soaked into that ridge and took the slow way out.
It also splits the region in half. Rain landing on the south slope ends up in Lake Ontario. Rain landing a few hundred metres north ends up in Lake Simcoe. Same storm, two different lakes.
So next time you're on a back road in Uxbridge or north Clarington and the ground starts doing that gentle roller-coaster thing, that's a glacier's leftovers underneath you. And it's most of the reason there's clean water in this part of Ontario.
Durham doesn't announce itself.
The spy school has no sign on the highway. The oldest building in Uxbridge has no gift shop. The man who spent his life bringing Atlantic salmon back to Lake Ontario has a plaque on a county road most people have never turned down.
But it's all still here. A safety director who named a town by winning an office contest. Settlers who took a dam apart with their own hands because nobody else was going to. A congregation that held onto a little stone church for a hundred and eighty years and never let anybody modernize it.
Nobody made a fuss at the time. It just stayed.
Until next week.
This is Durham Life.
Be good. Do Good. ❤️
MiKe Dee
Publisher
Durham Life - Local Media that Inspires
Share Durham Life Durham Life covers Durham Region's 8 municipalities: Ajax, Brock, Clarington, Oshawa, Pickering, Scugog, Uxbridge, and Whitby.