Many of the first European settlers to arrive in Downsview came from Ireland in the 1830s. They cleared fields, built homes, and farmed on large parcels of land in the area that would now be known as Sheppard and Dufferin but, at the time, was called Dublin Village.



The Boakes and Bull-Perkins families established themselves in the area over several generations. Edward and Sarah Boake built a solid house, ‘Locust Lodge’, so called for the grove of locust trees surrounding it. Here, four generations of their family lived and prospered until the land was expropriated by the military in 1951 to expand the airfield.
When Downsview Park was being planned, the design team preserved a single row of maple trees along the Boake’s southern property line, marking the last remaining traces of the family farm’s fields. Downsview Park’s preserved woodlot is called Boake’s Grove (seen below). This is where Locust Lodge once stood and still features a healthy stand of black locust, silver maple, and walnut trees.

The name Downsview was conferred on the neighbourhood by another Irish family, John and Caroline Bull, who settled in the area in 1830 with their young children. The view, looking down the fields towards the city, was distinctive, earning the 200-acre farm the name ‘Downs View’.

Their son, John Perkins Bull, stuck around and became the local Justice of the Peace, earning him the nickname Squire Bull. He became quite involved in community and religious affairs, adapting his spacious home to accommodate services of the Wesleyan Methodists, and to function both as a modest courthouse and, in the basement, a temporary lock-up for convicts. In the 1960s the Perkins-Bull house was transformed into the North Park Nursing Home which is still in operation today.
More Stories

Jewish Life in Downsview
There were fewer than 50,000 Jewish people living in Toronto in the 1930s when a group of visionary and optimistic community leaders got the idea to build a large Jewish cemetery on Wilson Ave, between Dufferin and Keele Streets. Most of the city’s Jewish residents lived south of Harbord St. and east of Bathurst.

Downsview’s First Synagogue: Beth Am
You may recognize that line from the 1989 hit movie Field of Dreams. The central character, played by Kevin Costner, hears a voice instructing him to build a baseball field in the middle of an Iowa cornfield. If he did, the disgraced ballplayer Shoeless Joe Jackson, would magically appear. And he did.