Toogood Park, Natural park in Unionville, Markham, Canada.
Toogood Park is a 33.3-hectare park in Unionville, Markham, centred on Toogood Pond, a body of water formed on Bruce Creek. The pond and its shoreline support Canada geese, ducks, fish and plants such as cattails, weeping willow and white ash. The City of Markham owns and maintains the grounds.
A grist mill, the Union Grist Mill, was built around 1840 at Carlton Road and Main Street Unionville. A dam across Bruce Creek, a tributary of the Rouge River, formed the mill pond that powered its flat mill wheel. A flash flood in the 1930s washed away the mill race, and the mill burned down in 1934 and was never rebuilt. The Toogood family bought the property around 1939, and the City of Markham acquired it in 1980.
The pond was first called Willow Lake and is still often just "the pond". In 1953 local service clubs founded the Unionville Swimming Club after Mr. Toogood worried children might drown swimming there; it provided supervised swimming and Red Cross water safety lessons.
The park covers 33.3 hectares at Carlton Road and Main Street Unionville, with paths around the pond and through the surrounding trees. Skating on the frozen pond is not supervised: the city council dropped its monitoring plan in November 2016 and users skate at their own risk.
The pond was created by a dam across Bruce Creek that fed a mill race for the Union Grist Mill, built around 1840 at Carlton Road and Main Street Unionville. The race was washed away in a 1930s flash flood, and the mill burned in 1934 and was never rebuilt.
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