Photo: The Old Old Mill in 1907

Here's a photo I like so much, it's on my wall at home. It's a photo of what the Old Mill looked like in 1907. It was originally built way back around 1793 as a sawmill on the banks of the Humber River, about the same time that the tiny town of York was first being carved out of the forest a good number of kilometers to the east. It was more than a century later, in 1914, that it was re-opened in its current incarnation as a hotel and tea room.

I came across the photo on Torontoist as part of an article by Kevin Plummer about Robert Home-Smith. He was a Conservative businessman/developer type person who opened the new Old Mill, and was also responsible for developing a lot of the neighbourhoods along the Humber River — as well as helping to ensure that it, unlike most of the rest of our waterways, would be lined with parkland. You can read that whole article here.