Dowswell's Inn

One of the most notable of rural Scarborough's many taverns and hotels stood here at the junction of the Markham Road and the old Danforth Road, now called Painted Post Road. Here in 1850 the municipal council of the Township of Scarborough, recently incorporated with a population of 3,821, held its first meeting on the 21st day of January in Thomas Dowswell's Inn. Peter Secor, the Markham Road miller, presided as reeve; and around the council table sat two other men with mills on the Highland Creek, John P. Wheler and William Helliwell, and two farmers, Edward Cornell and Chris Thomson. The township council continued to meet here in the hall of the hotel at Woburn for seventy years. It remained the centre of municipal life in Scarborough until 1921, when new council chambers were acquired above a bank on the Kingston Road in the new urban area at Birch Cliff.