Down in the Glen: the CPR Station at Glen Major

Conrad Boyce

A fascinating village, now largely vanished, once thrived down in the southeast corner of Uxbridge township. The only visible vestige of that old village is the United Church, built as a Methodist congregation in 1873. But thanks greatly to the research done by local writer Jonathan Corbett, who moved to the area in 1982, a lot of the fascinating stories of the old Glen Major survive. Here is the story of the railway station that once served the community.

Three members of the Glen Major Angling Club wait on the station platform, 1916. Pickering Township Historical Society/Pickering Public Library, HS-Bal008

Glen Major began as a mill town in the 1850s; there were two sawmills and a grist mill (grinding grain into flour) that took advantage of the ample flow down East Duffins Creek. About three miles south of the main village, in what is now Pickering, the Grand Trunk Railway built a busy line along the base of the Oak Ridges Moraine to Peterborough. It brought supplies to the village, and took flour and lumber away, but there was no station for the first quarter century. It wasn’t until the Canadian Pacific Railway bought the line in the late 1870s that all that changed.

In 1881, the CPR built a little station just southeast of the junction of the tracks and the road (the Seventh Concession in Uxbridge, Sideline 4 in Pickering). It was certainly not on the grand scale of Uxbridge’s lovely “witch’s hat” station. It was just a small rectangular wooden shed, about 15 x 30 ft., that provided shelter for passengers. In a photo taken in the 1940s, one can see a bridge crossing the tracks just east of the station. That’s not for cars or wagons, or even a foot bridge. Because the same farmer owned pasture on both sides of the tracks, the railway had to build the overpass to allow his cows safe passage. Long after the station vanished, the bridge remained, until the 1990s when the pasture ownership situation changed, and it could be torn down.

Until the station was built, Glen Major had a simple economy built around the mills. The station meant that local dairy farmers could more easily send their milk to the city. And now, with the ability to drop off passengers from the city, tourism arrived. Those visitors were primarily interested in downhill skiing, at the Toronto Ski Club (later Skyloft) just north of the village. There was a similar tourism-focussed station just a bit farther east at Dagmar. Wagons would greet the visitors at the station, take them to get settled at one of two hotels in the village, then transport them and their skis to the hills.

For the first while, the tourist traffic was seasonal. But within a decade, the mills had closed, and the ponds, created by dams on East Duffins, remained, so a number of well-heeled visitors soon found a reason to come to the village in the summer as well. The Glen Major Angling Club was founded in 1895, and still thrives today.

With the dwindling of the village, and the improvement of the roads, passenger traffic on the railway eventually diminished to the point where the station was no longer necessary. It was sold in the late 1950s, and moved first to Claremont, then to Tottenham, where it’s part of the South Simcoe historical railway facility. The railbed was cleaned up to the point where not even the station’s foundations can be distinguished. The Glen’s traditional southern boundary, like much of the village itself, vanished without a trace.