The Germans, who were once Toronto’s biggest ethnic group (that is, not British or French) are rarely noted in this town’s modern multicultural mosaic. Some, led by William Moll Berczy (later known as a painter) helped hack Yonge Street through the bush, to found the town of Markham, but more settled further west around Kitchener, (pre W.W.I called Berlin.)
Here at 116 Bond we see St John’s Lutheran, later German Lutheran, now First Evangelical Lutheran. The present Victorian Gothic structure replaces an earlier wooden meeting house, built by its congregation in 1851. A 1998 plaque tells us that they wished “to have their own church and to use German as the language of service to the Glory of God.”