Church of St. Jude

About

The Church of St. Jude is an historic church in the Scarborough area of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. St.

Jude's was originally built in what was the small rural village of Wexford, Ontario in 1848. The original church building survives today, being used as the cemetery chapel, making it one of the oldest surviving churches in Scarborough. The land for the church was donated to Bishop John Strachan and the Anglican Diocese of Toronto by Patrick and Ann Parkin.

They had used this corner of their farm as a family cemetery. The church was built atop a small hill, so that it dominated the surrounding landscape. The still operational cemetery surrounds the church, and has graves dating back to 1832.

Local farmers built the church with lumber milled from nearby trees. The Gothic Revival structure was designed by Reverend William Darling, the Anglican minister for Scarborough township. It is a replica in miniature of a church he remembered from his native Scotland.

Keeping the proportions of the original while greatly shrinking the structure explains why the sacristy entrance is only five feet high. Darling's son, Frank Darling, would later become a prominent Toronto architect himself. The small...