ETOBICOKE HISTORY CORNER: West Dean Park home harbours rich architectural secret

Our history is always fascinating, true life events of real people from another time and era. How different it must have been in Etobicoke in 1822, Pre-Confederation, about 60 years before the flush toilet, and still about 100 years before electricity. You would have to live it to really know.

This historic home is about 3 kms south of Self Stor Kelfield

ETOBICOKE HISTORY CORNER: West Dean Park home harbours rich architectural secret

Coulter House

Courtesy/Etobicoke Historical Society

Andrew Coulter House at 59 Beaver Bend Crescent, built before 1852, as it looked in 1929.

Etobicoke Guardian

By  Denise Harris

The house at 59 Beaver Bend Cres. in the West Deane Park area is harbouring a secret. On the outside, it looks like a Classical Revival mansion, but hidden inside it’s a red and yellow brick Georgian house built sometime prior to 1852.

Andrew and Martha Coulter emigrated from Northern Ireland and bought a 100 acre lot in Etobicoke in 1822. Accompanying them were their two oldest children. The couple would have seven more offspring. Their property lay between Hwy. 27 and Martin Grove Road, halfway between Rathburn Road and Eglinton Avenue, in an area known as Richview. In addition to farming, Andrew built a saw mill on Mimico Creek which ran through his property. As the family prospered, they bought 150 more acres of land. By 1852 they had built an elegant 11-room, five-bay Georgian house of red brick with yellow brick quoins and lintels. All interior partitions were made of brick as well. After Andrew died in 1857, four of his sons operated different sections of the farm. Eldest son Robert’s house also still stands at 112 Ravenscrest Dr. Many family members are buried in Richview Methodist Church Cemetery, which now sits in the middle of the Hwys. 427/401 interchange.

The property was sold out of the Coulter family in the 1880s. In 1939, construction magnate Percy F. Law bought the west 50 acres, including the house, for $16,000. Law covered the brick with white clapboard siding (now yellow vinyl) and added a two-storey classical portico on the front, with four Corinthian columns supporting a large pediment. The front door is surrounded by sidelights and a “spiderweb” fanlight.

Law called his property Elmbrook Farm and raised prize-winning shorthorn cattle and racing horses. In 1956, he sold the property on either side of the house and Edmund Peachey developed it into the West Deane Park subdivision. The house and 11 acres around it were kept by the Law family until 1981 and then sold to Mason Homes. Most of the 11 acres were developed, but this beautiful house with its secret interior remains in private hands, occupied today by the Neurological Rehabilitation Institute of Ontario. It is protected by a listing on Toronto’s Inventory of Heritage Properties.

Denise Harris is the Heritage Officer of the Etobicoke Historical Society, and she has been researching, writing, leading walking tours and giving lectures on local history for over 15 years. She can be reached at denise.harris@sympatico.ca . Her column appears every second week in The Etobicoke Guardian.