On Jan. 1, 1974, Georgetown, Acton and the surrounding hamlets took their first steps together as a unified municipality called Halton Hills.
As the community celebrates its 50-year milestone, local residents are looking back at the municipality’s enormous evolution.
Cathy Brown is one such witness to the changes. Her family has been in the area for five generations ever since her ancestor, Ninian Lindsay, moved here from Scotland.
She has mostly lived in Georgetown and also spent some time in Limehouse, but she's originally from Esquesing - one of the rural municipalities to be absorbed into Halton Hills.
When Ontario gave birth to Halton Hills, Brown was employed as a postal worker. Overall, she says she was happy with the change, but she remembers several challenges it created with the local mail.
“People would write Halton Hills on their envelopes instead of Acton or Georgetown. Then we got onto the whole thing about there being two Elizabeth Streets, two Queen Streets, two King Streets. People just went back to using Acton or Georgetown,” Brown said.
The creation of Halton Hills was not without its controversies. A divide existed between its two largest towns - one that often resembled the intense soccer rivalries of the United Kingdom.
Historians and longtime residents of both locales all agree that some took hometown pride a little too seriously, leading to violence.
“The majority of the people were raised their whole life in Acton or Georgetown. You have a pride and a rivalry, which things like hockey perpetuated,” local historian Mark Rowe - who grew up in Acton - told HaltonHillsToday.
“Now I live in Glen Williams. And Glen Williams was notorious in their own right for starting fights and having a rivalry with Georgetown,” Rowe added.
In this environment, there was a real fear that these communities would lose their identities if the pair was to merge.
Though the civically-minded Rowe has changed his opinion on the matter since then, he was initially not on board with amalgamation. He found his political north star in Les Duby, the final mayor of Acton.
“He said, basically, that it (amalgamation) was just a nice vehicle to make things easier for the province,” Rowe remembers.
But in recalling newspaper polls done at the time, Rowe concluded that the average person on the street had “mixed feelings.”
Acton historian Scott Brooks believes the concerns mostly came from politicians who had a fear of the unknown.
“They didn't know what the province was sending down initially (with the amalgamation)," Brooks said. " And of course, from their perspective more so, they had fear because that could mean the loss of their jobs.”
Former mayor Marilyn Serjeantson believes that rivalry never completely left Halton Hills - albeit far less intense now. During her political career, a debate raged about where to locate the new, and current, Town Hall building constructed in 1989.
Serjeantson, who was elected to council in the '70s after amalgamation, remembers being impressed by the area when she moved here in 1968. Her Halton Hills was the stereotypical small town, where everyone knew everyone and finding out what was happening in town was easy.
She also recalls a time before the bridge was built on Mountainview Road South in Georgetown. Ninth Line used to go right down into Hungry Hollow in a very steep incline. Drivers had to traverse a small, precarious bridge over Silver Creek. As Ninth Line was one of the gateways into Halton Hills, and the road was dangerous - especially during winter - getting the bridge built was a priority for her tenure.
“Some of the people along Mountainview didn’t want a double-lane bridge,” Serjeantson said. “They felt that traffic would be too great if you made it double lane.”
The Town also secured land for what would later become Dominion Gardens Park during her time on council. The property in the heart of Georgetown was once home to the famed Dominion Seed House - a booming mail order seed business with its iconic mock-Tudor building that was also a tourist attraction as it was featured in the company’s catalogues.
Cathy Brown’s mother worked in the seed house. She would often make her way there after school and get a ride home at quitting time.
“They had a little alarm bell that went off at five to five because you didn’t want to get caught in the stampede going out,” Brown said.
The property was sold for development, but members of the Canadian Federation of University Women, Georgetown chapter successfully lobbied to have a public garden included within the designated eight-acre park block as a nod to the land’s horticultural history.
The famous Seed House building was demolished in 1999, with remnants of its stone foundation remaining to shape the sunken garden that’s on the land today, thanks to the efforts of the garden’s steering committee.
Mayor Ann Lawlor and fellow council colleagues will be throwing a celebration of the community's golden jubilee on Jan. 10 at 6:30 p.m. in the Halton Hills Cultural Centre. This event will be followed by Mark Rowe’s now sold-out lecture on the history of the municipality in the John Elliott Theatre. For more information, visit the Town’s website.
