October 2024
Within the growing and busy City of Vaughan, north of Toronto, Ontario, is the former unincorporated village of Teston. In the years after what was then known as Vaughan Township was surveyed in 1792, small communities were established at various street corners throughout the 105 square miles of land within its borders.
Founded around 1850, Teston grew up around the intersection of Concession Road 4-5 (now Jane Street) and Sideroad 25-26 (now Teston Road). The hamlet was originally named Thanesville, after the first family to settle in the area. When the post office was opened in 1868, the name was changed to Teston, after the birthplace of a early settler, T. Chapman, who originally came from Teston, near Maidstone, in Kent, England.
The boundaries of Teston extended to the current-day Kirby Road to the north (Side Road 30-31), Weston Road (Concession Road 5-6) to the west and Keele Street (Concession Road 3-4) to the east.
In 1870, Joseph Lund opened Lund’s General Store on the 2-acre plot of Lot 27, Concession 4, that he bought from John Hawden five years earlier. The store was built using vertical wooden planks and later with the then-in-fashion red insulbrick. It’s currently covered with grey vinyl siding.
Lund’s store earned the nick-name “Spite Store,” a nod to the fact that Lund opened the store in response to the owner of the only other general store in the village charging too much for coal oil. Lund’s General Store was later turned into a feed mill, run by R. Cooper & Sons.
Lund also owned a wagon making shop and a blacksmiths forge and in 1868, an undertaking business. At one point, the village also boasted a school, hotel, and even a beer shop.
The first church was built on the south side of Teston Road, halfway between the present-day Keele Street and Jane Street, was known as Hadwen Chapel, named after the first minister, Reverend Thomas Hadwen. The adjoining cemetery is the final resting place of some of the earliest settlers in the area.
The original church was replaced in 1872 by a new Wesleyan Methodist church at the corner of what is now Jane Street and Teston Road. Nothing remains of the church today, including the tombstones in the cemetery. A small stone marker sitting in the middle of an empty plot is all that remains.
The new church would go through various renovations over the years. The decaying foundation was repaired in the 1930s; the interior of the church sanctuary was renovated in the 1940s; an addition that was added to the church in the 1950s, and in the basement was renovated in 1960s. The church eventually became known as Teston United Church.
A second Methodist Church, founded the Primitive Methodists, was built on Keele Street, north of Teston Road, in 1870. Joseph Lund was one of the parishioners at this new church, the Hope Primitive Methodist Church. When he died in 1875, Lund was buried in the adjoining cemetery.
By 1965, the chapel was gone and the cemetery was abandoned and in poor state, with many of the remaining tombstones knocked over and scattered around the property. The tombstones were gathered up and mounted on a flag stone monument in the shape of a cross.
Teston remained a sleepy village for much of the 20th Century, but progress and the future were slowly marching northward from the Toronto border. The farm fields of Vaughan Township were cleared to provide for residential and commercial development. This transformation was kicked into high-gear in the decades after the opening of the Canada’s Wonderland theme park, just to the south of Teston, in 1981.
Today, the northward-progressing residential and commercial development of Vaughan has reached the south side of Teston Road. The fate of the few remaining original village buildings is unknown, some of which have been recognized as historic structures, a designation that may or may not save them from the urbanization of the remaining rural areas of Vaughan. Some newer homes were built around the 1960s, but these too could fall to re-development.
All buildings on the west side of Jane Street, north of Teston Road, are long gone except for one, which is boarded up and awaiting demolition.
Teston United Church, which stood on the north-west corner of Jane Street and Teston Road for 132 years, was demolished in 2004 to allow for the widening and re-alignment of the non-symmetrical intersection of Teston Road as it crossed Jane Street. Unfortunately, the small, white, wood-frame church was in the way of the altered road allowance. Plans to save the church by moving it to a new location had to be abandoned as the aging structure was in such poor condition that moving it was impossible.
In 2010, road construction crews discovered an aboriginal burial ground just east of Jane Street, on the south side of Teston Road. The remains were reburied in a new Ossuary by members of the First Nations. An unmarked stone sits atop the new burial mound, which is enclosed by a black fence.
Kirby Road area, Side Road 30-31.
Sources: Teston – Ghost Towns of the GTA | Hiking the GTA, Teston, Vaughan – Wikipedia, Vaughan – Wikipedia, A little church’s big collision with progress – The Globe and Mail, Digital Collections – Search Result, PROPOSED LISTING UNDER SECTION 27, PART IV OF THE ONTARIO HERITAGE ACT OF 10967 JANE STREET.
