Named for a coastline in Yorkshire, England
Scarborough
From a rural township of 3,000 people to a district that tripled its population between 1955 and 1970 — the deep history behind the part of the city locals just call "Scarbs."
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Our slang-focused Toronto Slang By Neighbourhood page covers why Scarborough matters to this dictionary specifically. This page is the wider story: the actual history of the place itself, the largest of the six former municipalities that merged into Toronto in 1998.
Where the name comes from
The first European settlers arrived in 1791, and the area was initially referred to informally as Glasgow. It was Elizabeth Simcoe, wife of Upper Canada's first Lieutenant Governor, who renamed it Scarborough — the dramatic Scarborough Bluffs along the Lake Ontario shoreline reminded her of the cliffs at Scarborough, a coastal town in Yorkshire, England.
A century of farmland, then explosive growth
The Township of Scarborough was incorporated in 1850 with a population of just 3,000, and stayed mostly rural — farms, mills along the Rouge River and Highland Creek — for the following century. That changed abruptly after the Second World War: Scarborough's population doubled from 48,000 to 110,000 between 1950 and 1955 alone, then roughly tripled again by 1970, one of the fastest sustained growth rates of any part of the region.
The Golden Mile
A stretch of Eglinton Avenue East became the Golden Mile, one of Canada's first model industrial parks, after Scarborough township reeve Oliver Crockford negotiated the purchase of a former military munitions site from the federal government in the late 1940s for a bargain $350,000 — turning it into a major manufacturing corridor that anchored the local economy for decades.
From township to city to borough of Toronto
Scarborough was reconstituted as a borough in 1967 and became a city in its own right in 1983, before amalgamating with Toronto in 1998 along with East York, Etobicoke, York and North York — see our full amalgamation history for the wider context.
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Sources
- Wikipedia — Scarborough, Ontario
- Heritage Toronto — Golden Mile Industry & Manufacturing
- City of Toronto — Scarborough Before the Civic Centre