Prior to 1850, the intersection of the Lansing Road (now Sheppard Avenue) and Markham Road was known as Malcolm’s Corners. John and Robert Malcolm operated the Speed the Plough Inn and a harness shop adjacent to their home on the southwest corner of the intersection. Later known as Malvern, the community also included the neighbouring farming community north of what is now the 401 and east from Bellamy Road to the Rouge River.
Senator David Reesor saw future potential at this major crossroad community and acquired land on the northeast corner. In 1857, Reesor registered a plan of subdivision and advertised 50 foot by 150 foot residential lots, proclaiming that “by its being in the centre of Scarborough, Malvern Village will form the capital, where business of the township must be, in time, mainly transacted”. Reesor carefully chose the name for ‘his’ village, naming after the popular town of Malvern in England where the pure water was said to cure the sick. Reesor had learned from local residents that similar medicinal waters existed nearby.
Reesor’s plan for Malvern in Scarborough included: a Grammar school (which was never built), a church (built in 1864), Whyper’s boot and harness shop, a fair ground and a large community hall. The hall, known for more than a century as Mammoth Hall was first built in the 1860s but was gutted by fire and rebuilt in 1879. A large multipurpose, two storey frame building, it had a curling rink at ground level, and a meeting and dance hall upstairs. The Hall was used for political meetings and community events right into the 20th century. Former Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier spoke to large gatherings here on more than one occasion during his campaigning in ther early 1900s. Fire again struck Mammoth Hall in 1988 when the century old designated historic landmark was destroyed by arson.
Malvern had one church, a Primitive Methodist Church built in 1864. Demolished in the 1970s, the wainscotting and flooring from the church were reused on the interior of the Kennedy Discovery Gallery at the Scarborough Historical Museum.
For many years there were at least two general stores, operated by a succession of merchants including: Duncan Malcolm, William Burton, Smith Thomson, John Lowther, George Baxter, William and David Purdie, Edmund Jacques, John Lennox and William Cowan. In addition to Mammoth Hall, Whyper’s Harness shop, the church and the general stores, the village also included blacksmith shops, a waggon shop, a large woollen factory (operated by the Badgerow family on Sheppard Avenue east of Markham Road), and two hotels, Thomson’s Temperance Hotel and Callender’s Standard Hotel. Malvern was also home to the Scarborough Independent Telephone Company’s switchboard.
In 1856 a post office was established at Brown’s Corners, Finch Avenue and Markham Road, but was relocated in 1865 to Smith Thomson’s Temperance Hotel and General Store in the village where it remained until the building was destroyed by fire in 1929. It reopened in Cowan’s store in 1930 and remained there until 1956.
School Section # 3, which served the northern part of the community, was established in 1847 and operated until 1851 from an old log school where Alexander Muir began his teaching career. A frame school was built on the Stirling farm in 1851 and it was replaced in 1872 by a one room red brick structure which still stands, and in 2003 was operating as a private school. However, the children of Malvern village were required to walk over a mile and a half to reach this school, certainly not what Senator Reesor would have planned back in 1857.
Business was good in Malvern until the 1880s when a second railway was built through the neighbouring community of Agincourt, encouraging the development of that community. Business revived slightly in 1911 when the Canadian Northern Railway built a station at Malvern but the railway went bankrupt in 1917 and although taken over by Canadian National, passenger traffic ceased by 1926. Today, medicinal springs are just a memory, as are the church, the railway, the general stores, the hotels, the harness shop (which was moved to the Markham Museum and restored), and Mammoth Hall.
In the 1950s, a new Malvern began to take shape. Vast amounts of farmland north east of the old historic village were expropriated and eventually transformed into a densely populated and thriving modern community. New schools, shopping centres, industry and recreational facilities have seen the new Malvern develop far beyond the dreams of Senator Reesor more than a century earlier.
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Malvern – Historical Image Gallery:
