Copies of the tours will be available at the Palermo Schoolhouse on Heritage Day.
The village was established in 1805 by Lawrence Hagar, a settler to Upper Canada from Pennsylvania at the intersection of Bronte Road and Hwy. 5, (Dundas Street). The village was named Hagartown until 1836 when it was renamed to Palermo in honour of Horatio Nelson, Lord of Palermo for the opening of the post office.
Palermo boasted, at one time, 300 residents and a foundry that rivaled the Massey Ferguson Plant. It was part of the Underground Railroad, had one of the first grammar schools in the province and had one of the first public schools to include music as part of its curriculum,” said Gordon Kaitting of the Trafalgar Township Historical Society.
“Palermo has the largest concentration of heritage buildings this close together outside of Old Oakville. You’ve got the two churches, the one-room school house, the two cemeteries, the doctor’s house, the store keeper’s home, the blacksmith’s shop, the parsonage and its barn.”
Palermo’s history dates back 200 years, two decades before the ports of Oakville and Bronte were in operation. The village was clustered around Dundas Street West and Bronte Road, an arterial intersection for east-west traffic travelling between Toronto and western Ontario, as well as north-south traffic moving between Bronte to Milton. Come the 1870s, it was a charcoal supply link for factories in Hamilton. By 1920, the village boasted 30 houses, a community hall, school, foundry, sawmill, church, cemetery, and two corner stores. Wolves, bears, and deer roamed the surrounding wilderness.
But, in one of history’s ironic twists, Palermo was besieged by its own advantages, and it began to crumble in the 40s. The Province wanted to speed up Bronte and Dundas, and construction consumed stores and homes were relocated. Meanwhile, fire destroyed the foundry. The Bronte Bypass was built to make traffic even more efficient, and the trend continued right into the new millennium, with a recent realignment of Dundas Street West causing further disturbance.