Jack's Brampton history

Posted by Melissa Vinden

Fellow Rotarian Jack Corney shared his thoughts, memories and pictures with us in his talk about the Brampton of the past. He talked about the multiple greenhouses and boiler houses that used to adorn the Brampton landscape.

The biggest and most well known greenhouse was on the Dale estate, which was located at Vodden & Rosedale. The boiler house was used to generate steam heat to keep plants alive in the wintertime and was operated 24 hours a day. The steam was transported from the boiler house to the greenhouses on the estate via tunnels that ran under the ground. The tunnels were also used by school children on winter days to walk to school without having to go into the cold.

Jack also talked about the "Million Dollar Ditch" that was a river by pass built downtown Brampton to stop the river from flooding Main Street.

In addition to these bits of Brampton history, we found out that there were originally 4 hotels in Brampton, only 2 newspapers and at that time there were only 4 high schools in the region, which were located in Orangeville, Brampton, Port Credit and Weston.

Furthermore Jack shared with us details of the first couple of part time jobs that he had. At one of his first jobs, age 10, he earned $0.10 per hour (girls $0.12 per hour) and his wage grew at a steady pace to $0.25 per hour by age 13.