The 1st school on the Don, built on the corner of John Hogg's farm. John Hogg donated land for the construction of the 1st school in Don Mills. It was just a log cabin, but it filled a need for the community, with it's growing families. It was on the corner of his farm on Lot 7, Conc. 3, where it adjoined William Grays farm, with it's Grist Mill. This school was built in 1837 and was used until 1853, when a new one room brick school was built to replace it, at which time the log school became a storage shed. As well as all the Hogg children, the children of all the Gray brothers, James, George, John, William and Alexander would attend school here.
The New (2nd) Don School was built in 1853, with builder Thomas Gray, son of William Gray, laying the cornerstone and directing construction. This was your typical early Ontario one room schoolhouse. It was built on the southeast corner of Lawrence Ave and the Don Mills Road. This school was used until 1924-25. When the students left the log school for the opening of the new schoolhouse, they paraded south from the old school to the new school with Timothy Gray and his cousin Robert Alexander carrying a flag at the head of the procession. The new school also had a library in it. People that went to school there recall being distracted in class by the horses in the field next to the school.
Class of 1902/1903 with Edward Diefenbaker, Harold Gray is one of the students, though the picture quality isn't great, I'm fairly certain, from his posture and another photo I have of him from the same year, that Harold is the 4th boy in from the right. I'm sure that some of the other children are his 1st cousins, but I have not way of identifying them, at least not yet; but there were several children of the right age in the expanding Gray family to have been at the school at the time. Gladys Gray, granddaughter of William through his son George was one of the teachers in later years; she might well be in this photo as a young girl.
Aggie Hogg's Store, Post Office and Library
Aggie's store was next to the old log schoolhouse and the children had to pass it on the way to the new schoolhouse. Grampa (Harold) Gray had some fun memories of Aggies store, writing that he spent many a copper and dime there when he was a boy. You could get a couple of Bull's Eyes or a colored sugar stick for a penny, or when he or his friends Gordon Duncan and Milton Johnson had a dime, that meant a large bottle of pop for the 3 of us. He also wrote that Aggie openly displayed her goods, one of which was a big box of icing sugar that sat on the counter. A favorite trick of the local boys would be to have one of them distract Aggie, which another would grab a handful of the sugar and hightail it out of the store. Aggie finally had enough of that nonsense though and got even with the boys by replacing the icing sugar with epsom salts. What a shock the boys would have gotten on tasting the epsom salts. In later life, Harold would run his own store for a while in Malvern, I wonder what tricks would have been played on him in turn.
In 1896 Aggie rearranged her store to make room for a public library with books provided by the local literacy society that did various fundraisers to make money to buy books. The library would remain here until the new postmaster decided he wasn't interested in having the books in the store in 1918. At this point James Muirhead, on an adjoining lot offered an abandoned WW1 communications hut on his farm for use for the library and so the library lived on.
Aggie's store was also used as a meeting place and sometimes even a dance hall, with the Hogg's all being talented musicians, sometimes the music would go on all night.
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