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Buffy’s Corners

Brampton’s centre is the crossing of Main and Queen streets, which the city still calls the Four Corners. By the city’s own history, Martin Salisbury opened a tavern on Main Street in 1822 and William Buffy another at the crossroads in the early 1830s, so that for a time the settlement was known as Buffy’s Corners. John Elliott and William Lawson, Primitive Methodists from Brampton in Cumberland, gave it the name of their English home in 1834. It was incorporated as a village of about a thousand people in 1853, the Grand Trunk Railway reached it in 1856, it was made the seat of Peel County in 1867, and it became a town in 1873.

The Flower Town

The city dates its flower industry to 1860, when Edward Dale started a nursery here. By the turn of the century hundreds of acres were under glass, growing orchids and roses for export, Dale’s was the town’s largest employer, and Brampton was known as the Flower Town of Canada. In the late 1950s Bramalea was laid out to the east as a planned community for 50,000 people, promoted as Canada’s first satellite city, and in 1974, when the Region of Peel was created, Brampton became a city of 88,820. The 2021 census counted 656,480 residents.

The churches at the Four Corners

Several of the city’s oldest congregations still worship within a few minutes’ walk of the crossroads:

• Grace United Church on Main Street North, which dates its congregation to 1822 and has worshipped in its brick church since 1867
• St. Paul’s United Church on Main Street South, the congregation Elliott and Lawson’s Primitive Methodists began, in a church of Credit Valley brownstone opened in 1886
• Christ Church, the Anglican parish at Queen and Elizabeth streets, founded in 1851, whose church was built for the Methodist Episcopal congregation in the 1870s and bought by the Church of England in 1884
• St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church on Church Street East, dedicated in 1881, where an afternoon service gathers Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi speakers
• St. Mary’s, the Catholic parish on Main Street South, whose present church was dedicated in 1964 and which keeps a Sunday Mass in Spanish

Across the city

• Kennedy Road Church, formally Kennedy Road Tabernacle Ministries, north of downtown, and Peel Pentecostal Tabernacle, New Life Community Church, Champion Life Centre and Hope City Church further out
• The Catholic parishes of St. Anne’s and St. Marguerite d’Youville, and St. Patrick’s at Wildfield, which calls itself the second-oldest parish in what is now the Archdiocese of Toronto; Our Lady of Fatima is the city’s Portuguese parish and St. Eugene de Mazenod its Polish one
• In Bramalea, Emmanuel United, St. Paul’s Presbyterian, Bramalea Alliance, Hope Reformed, and Bramalea Baptist Church, which holds Sunday services in English, in Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi, and in Arabic
• St. James the Apostle in Peel Village and Holy Family in Heart Lake, both Anglican; Augsburg Lutheran on Mill Street South; CrossPoint Christian Reformed on Steeles Avenue West; The Salvation Army Brampton Citadel; Brampton Gospel Hall on Beech Street; and the Coptic Orthodox Church of Archangel Michael and St. Tekla in Snelgrove
• Grace Canadian Reformed Church on Creditview Road at Mount Pleasant, instituted in 1956, whose morning service is translated live into Hindi and Punjabi

Visiting on a Sunday

The downtown churches are a short walk from one another and from the Brampton GO and VIA station. Most of the congregations listed here meet between nine and eleven on Sunday morning, after the Catholic parishes’ first Masses at eight. The afternoon brings a second round of services: Grace Canadian Reformed and St. Mary’s Spanish Mass at two, and the South Asian and Reformed afternoon services between one and four. Several Catholic parishes also keep a Saturday vigil Mass at five and a Sunday-evening Mass, and many of the churches stream their services online.

Grace Canadian Reformed Church meets twice each Sunday, at 10:00 and 2:00, a ten-minute walk from Mount Pleasant GO station.