Windmill MillStone - Distillery District - Toronto, Ontario, Canada
N 43° 39.008 W 079° 21.573
17T E 632292 N 4834322
This plaque is located at the Distillery District at Mill Street in Toronto.
Waymark Code: WM8GZC
Location: Ontario, Canada
Date Posted: 04/01/2010
Views: 8
Text from the plaque:
This millstone, brought from England on the schooner 'Kingston' to the town of York 1832, was used for grinding grain in the historic windmill of Gooderham & Worts. The windmill stood 20m southwest by south of this point. It was the eastern limit of the famous 'Old Windmill Line' on which the original plan of the city of Toronto was based
The Gooderham and Worts Factory Complex
The Gooderham and Worts Distillery (Trinity and Mill St. in the Parliament and Front St. vicinity) is without a doubt the best preserved 19th century factory complex in the country. What rescued its unparalleled Victorian Industrial grandeur from being demolished, during the riotous heyday of urban renewal in the 1960's, was the fact that it kept functioning as a distillery up until the 1990's. Its walls and cobblestone paths do not only encapsulate the surrounding neighborhood’s lustrous history, but that too of Toronto, Canada and the British Empire.
The first mill to be erected on that site was back in 1831, when James Worts, a Yorkshireman, built a windmill with a millstone to grind wheat into flour on the shores of what was then our waterfront. That first mill-stone is today displayed prominently on a pedestal on the grounds of the complex with a bronze plaque detailing its history. In 1832 William Gooderham, also arriving from Yorkshire, brought with him money and 54 family members to help his brother-in-law expand the business, to be known then as Worts and Gooderham. One of the first things they did was to replace the wind-powered sails on the windmill with a steam engine after realizing the breeze off the lake wasn't powerful enough.
Information taken from: visit website