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Our municipality first began as Whitchurch Township and was established in 1792 when the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, Colonel John Graves Simcoe, divided the new province into 19 counties. The fourteenth of these 19 counties was named York and included the Town of York (now Toronto) and ten townships. Originally York County stretched from Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe until 1834, when the City of Toronto first incorporated and separated from York  County.
Whitchurch Township was named after a town in Herefordshire, England where Lt. Governor Simcoe's wife was born. The township included the area bounded by Stouffville Road (Main Street) to the south, Yonge Street to the west, Davis Drive to the north and Durham Regional Road 30 to the east. It was John Stegman's township survey which was started in 1800 and completed it in 1802, that divided Whitchurch into farm lots. This survey also established a network of concession roads running north-south and side roads running east-west.
 The strip of land between the concession roads was called a concession. Concessions were divided into squares by the side roads and each square known as concession blocks. A concession block was made up of five farm lots, each 200 acres in size, except in the southeast corner of the township where the last concession is triangular in shape and includes partial farm lots of varying sizes. The original concession and side roads first laid out by Stegman still remain today: Woodbine, Warden, Kennedy, McCowan, Highway 48, Ninth Line, Tenth Line and Regional Road 30 were the concession roads and Stouffville Road, Bethesda, Bloomington, Vandorf, Aurora, St John's, Vivian and Davis Drive were the side roads.
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