Todmorden Mills Heritage Site

This guide to Todmorden Mills Heritage Site in Toronto starts with an unlikely wartime scene: in 1942, a camp on the Don River held German merchant sailors who were marched out each morning to work at the neighboring brick works. It reaches back further, to 1795, when Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe granted this land to brothers Aaron and Isaiah Skinner to saw lumber for the new town of York, and to their partner Parshall Terry, the river's first watermaster. The mill later turned to brewing beer in 1820, under Thomas Helliwell and John Eastwood, and then to papermaking.