Walmer Road Baptist Church
College in Toronto

Walmer Road Baptist Church has been here facing the little park on Walmer Road since 1889 when the Annex (as this area is called) was a new Suburb spilling over the northern Bloor Street boundary of Toronto into what had been farm land below Spadina hill. The halcyon years at Walmer, to spread to suburb after suburb, and you had to be here early to get a seat for the Sunday evening service! But then Toronto began to grow, minister of the Church from 1906 to 1930 when the membership became 2000, were in the days of John MacNeill, so they tell us, and people became mobile and the Annex began to change. And Elmore Harris, in this building, for, was no small dreamer, the first minister here, he founded a Bible College that is now what is known as Tyndale University. It was a church attending era. Located in the centre of a residential district, it was not unreasonable for a church community of 250 to build a house of worship which would seat 1200 people in a magnificent sanctuary. until, family dwellings and high-rises, international community of apartment buildings and rooming houses, by the 1960s Walmer stood in a diversified, and most of its members commuters.