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The Market Town
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Newmarket has always been a market town. That’s why its Main St. is considered the heart of the community. The Town was founded as a trading post and milling centre in 1801 where the river cuts the old native trail (Water and Main Sts.). Within a few years three powerful and well-connected trading factions developed in the little frontier community. The fur trade added extra profit to the business they did with the Quaker settlers who cleared farms along Yonge St. |
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The three were Elisha Beman and his stepsons, Peter and William Robinson –all with strong ties to the colonial government known as the Family Compact; John Cawthra, the son of one of Toronto’s richest merchants; and William Roe, who started trading in 1814 under a huge elm just west of Main St. and also had powerful government friends. All three built permanent trading posts at the south end of Main St.
The community got its name from the “new market” thus established for local settlers and transient fur trappers.
It’s impossible to say now when regular trading days developed in Newmarket where area farmers would sell their produce and livestock to local shoppers, butchers and vegetable buyers from Toronto and other communities. We know a farmers’ market was operating in 1855, just two years after the railroad arrived and three after the founding of the newspaper. It brought a lot of money into the village and much of it was in turn spent by visiting farmers in Main St. stores.
Residents could see they had better provide improved facilities or risk having the markets move to another community. By the 1860s the need had become pressing and land was purchased between Timothy and Botsford Sts., where a shed was erected. By the 1880s new facilities were again needed and a two-story town hall and market building costing $6,000 was built. It opened on July 1, 1883.
Newmarket had maintained its position as THE MARKET TOWN north of Toronto.
The farmers’ market operated in what we today call the Old Town Hall until the 1940s. By then Newmarket was fully established as the area’s commercial centre.
- Terry Carter
