A wood-frame historic core and a very new north
Oakville has the sharpest old-new divide of any town we work in, and it is drawn on a map. The historic core dates from William Chisholm’s purchase at the mouth of Sixteen Mile Creek in 1827 and the first town survey in 1833, and the census figures make its construction unmistakable: 130 frame houses against four brick in 1851, and 228 frame against forty-five in 1861. That is wood framing over plank subfloor, the most squeak-prone assembly there is. Bronte was founded as a fishing village in 1834 and came into Oakville with the 1962 amalgamation, which brought in thirty-one thousand people of former Trafalgar Township about to be subdivided. Then the modern line: the North Oakville East secondary plan was approved in January 2008 and the zoning by-law passed in November 2009, so essentially everything north of Dundas Street is post-2008 construction.