Main Street & the Clock Tower
Three blocks of independents, a bakery, and a clock tower everybody uses as a meeting point. Small enough to learn in a weekend.
Stouffville
A main street with a clock tower, a lake that turned from cottages into houses, and enough farmland still left that you can buy corn from a table with an honesty box on it.
Stock photograph. Not Stouffville.
A country town, filling in
Feels like
55 min by GO
To Union Station
A small main street on a train line
Go for
How to say it
STOH-ville. The second F does nothing. The full name is Whitchurch-Stouffville and nobody says it except the town's own letterhead.
Heads up
The Stouffville GO line runs well at peak and sparsely otherwise. The town has also grown much faster than its shops have: expect to drive into Markham for anything larger than a grocery run.
Who to go and watch
The clubs, and which ones you can actually get in to see.
OJHL junior hockey
Stouffville Spirit
Junior A in a rink five minutes' walk from the main street, which means the pub afterwards is part of the outing.
Where to actually go
5 things worth knowing about Stouffville.
Public places, parks, markets and the streets the independents are actually on. Nothing here is invented, and nothing here is a photograph of somewhere else.
Nineteen on the Park
A 150-seat theatre in an 1896 market hall behind the clock tower. Music, comedy and touring shows, and you can see the stage from every seat.
Bruce's Mill
Maple syrup demonstrations in March, treetop trekking in summer, trails all year. One of the busiest conservation areas in the region in spring.
Musselman's Lake
A kettle lake north of town that was a cottage colony a century ago and is now half year-round. Swimming, and a very particular kind of quiet.
Latcham Art Centre
A contemporary public gallery on the main street with a shop attached. Free, and it takes contemporary art seriously in a town of thirty thousand.
The year
What comes round every year.
Keyed to a month, never to a date. Dates move, and a page that prints last year's is worse than one that says “September”.
March
Maple syrup at Bruce's Mill
Tapping, boiling and a pancake tent, for about four weeks. The first outdoor thing anyone does after winter.
June
Stouffville Country Ribfest
Memorial Park, a long weekend, and a lot of smoke. Free entry, live bands, and the whole town walks to it.
July
Strawberry Festival
Canada Day weekend, on and around Main Street. Parade, midway, and a genuinely serious quantity of strawberries.
HelloGTA.com
The GTA is enormous and most of it is unknown to everybody.
Including the people who have lived here twenty-five years. That is the whole brief: twenty-nine guides, and a question a week put to the region.