In 1911, when Grace Church on Elm Street moved north to ‘the hill’, its first building was the former Christ Church, Deer Park. The photograph below shows the building in transportation by horsepower to its new location.
This building went on to house a third Anglican congregation in the city of Toronto, the Church of the Incarnation, which was located on the west side of Victoria Park Avenue, just north of Danforth.
The first vestry meeting of the Church of the Incarnation was held in February 1922 in the home of Mr and Mrs E. Atkins. Ten people were present. Later that year, two lots were purchased at the corner of Victoria Park and Colson Avenue (now named Sutherland Avenue). Grace Church, which had by now built a new building, offered their former building to the new parish. This time the building was dismantled and reassembled on its new site. Originally built in 1870, this versatile building served its third congregation until 1973.
Only two photographs of the Church of the Incarnation are housed in the Diocese of Toronto archives.
They show how the original building had a narthex and vestry added on to it, and that it had been re-sided.
St. Bede’s, Scarborough was a mission parish of the Church of the Incarnation in 1924, becoming an independent parish in 1965.
The Church of the Incarnation celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1972. The priest-in-charge, R.V. Campkin, reflected on the history of the parish observing “[o]ur Church is not a large one, and many times there was a possibility that we would have to close our doors.” Not many months later, in April 1973, the vestry of the Church of the Incarnation took the decision to amalgate with its daughter parish, St. Bede’s.
The site today is the location of the Seicho-No-Ie Toronto Centre. I have no information about when the Church of the Incarnation was demolished, but given it had served valiantly in three locations for over one hundred years, I’m assuming it was demolished shortly after the parish closed.
lostanglicanchurches 