Mary Allen Stories...

The future of St. Louis Catholic School, located at the corner of Willow Street and Allen Street, has been a topic of considerable discussion since the City of Waterloo moved to purchase the building from the Separate School Board in early 2012. As the first Catholic school in Waterloo, St. Louis is located on what was once referred to as the "Allen Street Sand Hill." At the time the hill was seen as having little to offer, and an early twentieth century historian mused: "One who looks at the site now can not realize what an unsightly hill it was, nor wonder that many would have preferred another place." (Spetz, 1916, p.181) The school, which opened in 1891, originally consisted of two rooms in the basement of the St. Louis Catholic Church. School lessons were taught to 70 children by the Sisters of Notre Dame, who commuted from Kitchener (Berlin) by train until a convent was built beside the church in 1895. In 1905, a separate four-room school building wa...

In Waterloo Region, the story has often been told of how a group of Pennsylvania Mennonites bought a 60,000-acre tract on the Grand River that today contains much of the Kitchener-Waterloo urban footprint. In 1806 two of these Mennonites, Abraham and Magdalena Erb , came north to take up their land purchase: hundreds of acres that would eventually become the Waterloo city core.   Click to enlarge. Erb-Kumpf House , 2012. The oldest section is the back of the house, built c.1812 by Abraham and Magdalena Erb. Within ten years Abraham built a sawmill and gristmill on Beaver (Laurel) Creek, and the Erbs had established Waterloo's first settler homestead. Today, the former mill site lies along King Street , between the railway tracks and Erb Street, while the c.1812 Erb home still stands as the rear section of the landmark Erb-Kumpf House at King and George streets in the Mary-Allen neighbourhood. The original front of the house faced north, towards ...