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Ontario Tourism Region : York, Durham and Hills of Headwaters
Description From Owner:
- Pop. 5,639. In the Reg. Mun. of York on the Black R. 3 km S of Jackson's Point on L. Simcoe and C. Rd. 8A, just NW of Hwy 48, 86 km N of Toronto.
- The first settler was James O'Brien Bourchier who built saw- and grist mills on the Black R. He was appointed postmaster in 1831 and called the place Bourchier's Mills.
- The post office name was changed in 1885 to Sutton West, likely after Sutton-on-Hull in East Yorkshire, England, but the West disappeared in common usage.
- Nearby is York County Park, the location of Sibbald Memorial Museum, built before 1820 and home to a large collection of Scottish and English Georgian silver.
- It also houses early Canadian, English, and Scottish furniture and early 18th-century portraits and enamels by Henry Bone.
- Canadian historian and humourist Stephen Butler Leacock (1869-1944), head of McGill University's faculty of political science, spent his summers at nearby Old Brewery Bay at the north end of Lake Simcoe.
- His grave is beneath a rare umbrella-elm tree in the cemetery of St. George's Anglican Church on Sibbald Point Provincial Park Rd., 5 km. NE of Sutton.
- Leacock's best-known humourous novel is Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, in which he parodied many of Orillia's leading citizens.
- In 1957, Leacock's home and library were bought by the Town of Orillia and turned into a museum, the Stephen Leacock Memorial Home.
- Canadian novelist Mazo de la Roche is also buried in the same cemetery.
Address of this page: http://www.stirling.ruralroutes.com/sutton