Bracondale Village: (Established 1884)

Hillcrest was first settled in the 1840's by Robert John Turner, a reformer from England. The Turner house, named "Bracondale” stood where Hillcrest Park is today. By 1884, a small village grew up on the edge of the Turner estate, at the intersection of Christie and Davenport. This settlement became known as Bracondale Village. The Village consisted mostly of farmers and a few stores. Its first postmaster was Frank Turner, the son of Robert Turner. In 1909, Bracondale Village was annexed by the City of Toronto. Shortly thereafter, Frank Turner's heirs subdivided the Bracondale estate and turned it into an exclusive subdivision named " Bracondale Hill Park". The Turner family retained ownership of the Bracondale house until 1937, when it was sold to the City and demolished in order to make room for Hillcrest Park.


Wychwood Park: (Established 1891)

Wychwood Park was founded by Marmaduke Matthews, a landscape painter who purchased land here in the 1870's with the hope of establishing an artist colony at Wychwood Park. Matthews named Wychwood Park after Wychwood Forest, located near his childhood home in Oxfordshire, England.
In 1874, Matthews built the first house in the community, at number six Wychwood Park. The second Wychwood Park house, at number twenty two Wychwood Park, was built in 1877, by Matthews' friend Alexander Jardine. Matthews and Jardine jointly bought the land that abutted their estates and in 1891, registered a plan of subdivision for what is now the Wychwood Park neighbourhood.
Wychwood Park is historically significant for the architecture of its homes, and for being one of Toronto's earliest planned communities. The Wychwood Park neighbourhood was designated as an Ontario Heritage Conservation district in 1985.


Wychwood Park Residents:

Marmaduke Matthews: [Canadian Painter, 1837-1913]

Marmaduke Matthews was born in 1837 at Barcheston, Warwickshire, England. He was educated at Oxford, came to Canada from England in 1860, and settled in Toronto. Matthews was a charter member of the Ontario Society of Artists, and in 1894, he was elected its president. In 1880, he was chosen as a charter member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and was appointed its first secretary by the Governor General, the Marquis of Lorne. Matthews is best known for his landscape paintings, and he was one of the earliest and most successful artists to paint the Rocky mountains. William Van Horne, one of Canada's greatest art collectors and president of the Canadian Pacific Railway, commissioned several artists, including Matthews, to follow the construction of the railway west, and draw the landscape along the way. This project began in 1888, and every summer for a period of ten years, Matthews would return to the Rockies to paint the landscape. Like many of the artist visitors of the late 19th century, Matthews painted romantic landscapes in the Victorian tradition specializing in exhibition watercolours. These paintings brought Matthews acclaim as an artist, but they never brought him wealth.

In 1873, he bought ten acres north of Davenport and built his home at the crest of the hill with forest behind, naming it Wychwood for woodland close to his childhood home. In 1877, Matthews and Alexander Jardine bought the adjacent twelve acres to the west, where Jardine built his home, Braemore Gardens. Matthews and Jardine envisioned a cooperative artists' colony on the property and filed a plan of subdivision in 1888 which was later revised to include smaller lots, building restrictions and provisions for a trusteeship. At the centre was a private park for residents, through which Taddle Creek flowed; later dammed for a pond.

Important Moment in the History of Canadian Visual Culture: 1891
Marmaduke Matthews, a watercolourist and photographic retoucher, turns a small farm on the edge of Toronto into an early artists' co-op called Wychwood Park, outside of Toronto.

Construction of other house started in 1906 with the building of the George Reid home, a Tudor home with stuccoed half-timbering and natural gardens. Architect Eden Smith, who designed many houses in the Park, built his own dwelling there in 1907. Marmaduke Matthews died in 1913. The lapsed 1891 trust deed was reinstated in 1917, and since that time an elected board of trustees has maintained roads, lighting, tennis courts, and other communal concerns. Matthews's daughter Alice lived in the family home until 1960. Subsequent owners have restored and carefully maintained it. In 1985, Wychwood Park became the first residential area to receive heritage designation under the Ontario Heritage Act. The Pond was restored in 1998.


George Reid: (Canadian Artist, 1860-1947)

George Reid, an Ontario farm boy from Huron County, became one of the best-known Canadian genre painters of his generation. He received his first instruction from the Notman artists and teachers at the old Ontario School of Art and Design in Toronto, and then studied under Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia.

He also won a number of medals at the World's Fair, Chicago, the Mid-Winter Exhibition, San Francisco, at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition at St. Louis, and represented Canada on the Jury of Awards at the Pan-American Exhibition at Buffalo. Reid has consistently opposed the "taboo" placed on the subject picture, and in various ways has declared his belief in art for life's sake as opposed to "art for art's sake". On this account and because he believed in the subject and its elevation toward the "Grand Manner" he began to depart from realism, with the result that he became one of the pioneers in mural painting in Canada. As a public benefaction and encouragement to others, he made decorative panels for the entrance and main corridors of the City Hall, Toronto, taking as a subject The Pioneers, and he did much work of a similar character for private houses. He never tired of imparting whatever knowledge he could to others, and that disposition led naturally to his place at the head of the Ontario College of Art. His influence, therefore, on art and artists, especially in Ontario, was widespread. He was as well a leader in the artistic life, of Toronto, and in Wychwood Park, where he lived; he was able to give expression to his idea of artistic residential environment. In this respect he was ably supported by his first wife, Mary Hiester Reid, who was an artist, and later by his second wife, Mary Wrinch Reid, who was also an artist of much distinction.

The Group of Seven regarded Reid as a significant figure in the development of Canadian art, one of their "pioneers and encouragers," according to J. E. H. MacDonald. "Reid's City Hall Murals meant much to us," wrote MacDonald. Reid painted his City Hall murals in 1897-99 at his own expense to promote mural painting in Canada.


Mary Hiester Reid: (Canadian Artist, 1854 - 1921)

Reid met her husband, prominent Canadian painter George Reid, while studying with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. The Reids later made their home in Wychwood Park in Toronto, which became the subject of many of her paintings. Mary Hiester Reid was acclaimed by critics and collectors alike for her poetic colour harmonies and sense of composition. A well-known painter and teacher, she played a central role in the city's burgeoning visual art community. She was a member of both the Ontario Society of Artists and the Royal Canadian Academy, and she was only the second woman elected to the executive of the OSA.

Reid's life was a duality that many female artists of her time experienced. Although she was a respected and commercially successful artist, her social role was to remain private and demure. Hiester Reid was arguably the more talented of the pair. But social conventions relegated her to second place. She was influenced by late 19th-century figures like Whistler and the French Post-Impressionists, bringing the landscape and figure studies she created from her bourgeois home in Wychwood Park into line with the international avant-garde.


Herbert Marshall McLuhan (Canadian Visionary Educator 1911 - 1980)

Herbert Marshall McLuhan is the world-renowned visionary educator of mass media. He was once labelled "the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov". McLuhan also wrote works such as Understanding Media, and coined the terms ‘The medium is the message’ (perhaps his most often quoted phrase,) and ‘the Global Village’ which have become such a part of our daily language that we tend to forget the original voice.

Born July 21, 1911 in Edmonton, Alberta of Scottish-Irish Episcopalean heritage. Educated in Winnipeg and Cambridge, UK, McLuhan became Professor of English Literature at St. Michael's College, the University of Toronto. He taught a program in Culture and Technology, a concept that was light years ahead of its time. He spent 33 years here and abroad watching, listening, reading, researching and hypothesizing about the impact of media upon the world around him and advising others how to connect with that world. As a Canadian educator in mass communications he probed many concepts about media and society stimulated by his observations of American advertising. He was a professor of English literature, who all of a sudden at the age of 40 started writing a series of profoundly modern books about media, technology, and communications.

As a consequence, in 1970, Governor General Roland Michener honoured McLuhan as a Companion of the Order of Canada, the highest lifetime achievement award for Canadian citizens. McLuhan's citation reads, "For his contribution to the understanding of the relationships between media and society."

For an important part of his life McLuhan resided at a spacious home in the wealthy Toronto suburb of Wychwood Park, where he lived with his wife, Corinne, and five of his six children.

Marshall concluded we are emerging as a world-wide society electronically connected in a global village where our personalities exist at the speed of light.