One-Room Schoolhouses Still Serve Community

They were the centers of education in Mississauga for six generations. At a time when most of the isolated villages of Toronto Township had fewer than 50 families, one room was more than enough to accommodate the students whose parents even bothered to send their children to school.

For many pioneer farm families, any lessons that had to be taught were taught beside the hearth or at church – lessons in life and the afterlife.

A school in Clarkson and another in Sheridan were built after the passing of the first Common Schools Act – an 1816 act to provide funding for construction of rural schools. But residents had to build these schools and, since the act did not allocate regular funding for books or teachers, the families who sent their children there paid the costs out of pocket.

Elsewhere in Mississauga, one-room schools only started to pop up at concession road intersections after 1846 with the passing of an updated Common Schools Act which divided townships into “school sections” and made education mandatory for all children aged seven to 12.

Thirteen one-room schools were built in Mississauga between 1846 and 1877. Each of these was cast aside as the city grew until finally the last two closed 50 years ago this month.

Meadowvale Village Public School opened in December 1959 with room for 350 students. Standing two blocks west was the one-room schoolhouse it replaced. Old School Section #15 had room for about 40 students – 20 girls on the right side, and 20 boys on the left. The new Meadowvale school also took in the students from Mississauga’s other one-room school closure. “SS #12” was built on Hurontario Street, south of the Britannia Sideroad, in 1876.

Meadowvale Village Public School has doubled its enrollment in the 50 years since it was built – an assertion of just how rapidly Mississauga has grown and just how outdated the one-room school has become in our time.

Or perhaps not. Both historic schools are still standing and still in use. And one of these is a school once again.

Old SS #15 is a community meeting hall. It hasn’t got all the up-to-date amenities of the city’s newer community centers, but has an historic charm that the others lack.

John Simpson operated a mill on the Credit River just south of the village and sold land at the southwest corner of Derry and Second Line West in 1837 for a church and a school, but when the first school was finally built in Meadowvale in 1851, it was at a site north of here (at what is now 7140 Second Line West) on land donated by another mill owner, Francis Silverthorn.

The present historic building replaced the smaller school in 1871. After the students were sent off to the new Meadowvale school in 1959, the old school served briefly as a church and occasional meeting hall, but otherwise stood vacant until 1981 when it was restored and used as a City facility.

As for Britannia’s old schoolhouse, it stood forlorn after it closed during the Christmas break in 1959, until students from Streetsville Secondary School formed the Britannia Restoration Club in 1968 to raise money to give the building a much-needed facelift. In 1982, the Peel School Board established school programs specific to SS #12’s historic setting and hired James Potter as “schoolmaster.” The Friends of the Old Britannia Schoolhouse – a community group formed at the time Potter greeted his first students – has helped keep SS #12 running ever since. Dennis Patterson is the present schoolmaster.

Britannia and Meadowvale are the only remaining one-room schools in Mississauga although three later multi-room elementary schools are still standing.

School Section #19 (otherwise known as Port Credit) had Mississauga’s first four-room schoolhouse, but all that remains of the original Riverside Public School is the bell in the modern school’s lobby. The oldest surviving four-room school is SS #1 Dixie. It opened in 1927 and was used until 1961. Residents may remember getting their license renewed there from 1966 to 1983. It’s now a meeting hall for St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Church.

A familiar sight on Mississauga Road is Erindale’s former SS #4. This Neo-Classic classic    was built in 1923 as a two-room school but was enlarged to four rooms in 1952. The school was home to Visual Arts Mississauga from 1981 until 2005 when the building was purchased by the University of Toronto.

Like Erindale’s school, SS #7 Lakeview Park was built as a two-room school, but has been enlarged since opening in 1923. Now it’s two floors. Elementary students attended Lakeview Park until 2001 when they moved to other Lakeview schools. But SS #7 is still a centre of education in Mississauga for secondary students with special education needs.