NEW AND OLD
by Robert A. Given

 North Kipling Public School opened in September 1999 at 2 Rowntree Road. There is a television, a video cassette recorder and overhead projector, computers with printers and a phone in every classroom. The school's televison studio broadcasts the morning announcements as well as offering many curriculum uses for the camcorders. The office computers are networked with the classroom computers for a paperless flow of communications.  A university research partnership is being developed to study the effect of this technology on student learning and staff development.  North Kipling Public School has about 820 boys and girls living in seven apartment or condominium buildings speaking many languages.
 
Incidentally, Islington has had a public school since 1832.  Now it has over 700 boys and girls; many of them are living in the nearby apartments, and they speak forty- five languages.
 
Rowntree Road runs east from Kipling Avenue about half way between Finch and Steeles Avenue. The story about the road began in 1832 when John Rowntree brought his family to Canada and soon bought the farm on the north side of Rexdale Boulevard between Islington and Kipling Avenues.  In 1843 he bought 32 acres for a mill on the Humber.  More land was acquired and soon he had a roadway of sorts extending from Kipling Avenues across the Humber River with a sawmill on the east bank and then a grist mill on the west bank. In the early days Islington Avenue north of the Albion Road was called the Pine Grove Plank Road with a toll gate at Steeles Avenue.  Michael O'Rourke lived at Pine Grove north of Woodbridge and every Monday morning walked to Rowntree's for a week's work building the mills.

 The Mills on the Rowntree Road were known as the Greenholme Mills.  John's son Joseph was the proprietor.  In the early days men had to spend days working on the roads so he asked the township councils of Etobicoke and York for permission for his employees and himself to work on the Rowntree Road between Kipling and Islington Avenues. The mills operated into the 20th century although the dam was washed out in 1878 and had to be replaced.  The saw mill was more profitable. John Smithson was the cooper and he produced 120 flour barrels a week. Half a century ago on the east bank there was a street of homes called Riverbank Park but unfortunately Hurricane Hazel in October 1954 washed away twelve of the dwellings.

North Kipling Public School offers great views of the Humber Valley. It was built on to the back of the North Kipling Community Centre at 2 Rowntree Road in Etobicoke.  East of the Humber in North
York, it is still called Rowntree Mill Road. The roads do not connect now, but there is a foot bridge for nature lovers. Rowntree Mills Park was created by Metro Council in 1959 following the Watershed Conservation Scheme of the Metro Toronto and Region Conservation Authority.  It was a program to acquire floodplain lands for recreational uses. It covers 102 hectares including 12.8 acres purchased from the Finnish Society where they had steam- baths, saunas, a bandshell and a field track.

Downstream, nearly to the intersection of Islington Avenue and Finch Avenue, there was another grist and saw mill on the Etobicoke side of the Humber River.  William Kaiting went bankrupt and the Honourable Henry John Boulton acquired the property in 1851. Boulton built Humberford House near the mills and Henry John Boulton, Junior, hired tenant farmers like Thomas Page Wadsworth, son of William Rein Wadsworth, to manage the mills.  The young Boulton began to use tiles to drain some of his fields and improve agriculture, an innovation at that time.  About 1875 George Rowntree, a farmer, bought the Humberford property and later built a new home north east of Islington Avenue and Finch Avenue, which was demolished in 1960 to make way for the Italian Gardens subdivision in North York.

The old Kaiting/Boulton/Rowntree property on the north west corner of Islington Avenue and Finch Avenue was purchased by the Hospital for Sick Children in 1926.  The Thistletown Branch Hospital was planned to replace the 1883 John Ross Robertson Lakeside Home for Little Children at Hanlan's Point on Toronto Island. The new hospital was specially designed to take full advantage of the sun and had a verandah large enough to accommodate all 112 cots for which the hospital was designed. The heating, ice- making and other facilities were large enough to supply a hospital three times the original and present size. The hospital was designed for children who required Helio--

Therapy hospitalization for long periods, for rheumatism of the heart, osteomyelitis, and for children who required buildup periods between a series of operations.

Premier Howard Ferguson laid the cornerstone on the 4th of July, 1927, and the first forty-four patients were welcomed fifteen months later on October 10, 1928, having arrived in a convoy of John Ross Robertson Motor Club members' cars and a new ambulance. The old Toronto Board of Education held classes in the hospital for Kindergarten to Grade 10 and the old Toronto Public Library system provided a hospital branch. In February 1957 it became the Provincial Government's child psychiatric centre under Dr. John Bell.  Since then cottages for patients and a recreation facility have been added. At one time there were beautiful gardens but even now its ninety-two acres are a park-like setting for naturalists, with car parking off Panorama Court Road and a walking pathway from the north west corner of Finch and Islington Avenues.

CORRECTION
 
The story "New and Old" featured the new North Kipling Public School and Joseph Rowntree's old
Greenholme Mills both located midway between Steeles and Finch Avenues on the Humber.  Regretfully there was an error about George Rowntree's Humberford Mills downstream at Finch and Islington Avenues.
 
William Kaiting had a mill near Finch and he became bankrupt after Britain repealed the Corn Laws and adopted free trade.  The Honourable Henry John Boulton acquired the mill in 1851 and four years later built Humberford House on the adjacent farm NW of Finch and Islington Avenues. His son Henry John Boulton began to use tiles to drain his fields. George Rowntree became the mill proprietor in the early 1880s and it was to this farm he brought his bride in 1883.  It was his brother William Henry Rowntree's farm NE of Finch and Islington Avenues which became the Italian Gardens subdivision. Much of the information for the story came from "The Rowntree Book" researched and written by Ann Crawford, Betty McQuillan and Marion Russell. They began the project in January 1979 and the book was published in 1985...over two hundred 8" X 11" pages with documented stories and pictures.