Newcastle
Newcastle is a community in the Ontario province of Canada that is part of the Clarington municipality. The community receives the old name of the municipality to which it currently belongs, rather than the current name.
Newcastle is located on Highway 401, approximately 80 kilometers east of Toronto and approximately 18 kilometers east of Oshawa and Bowmanville. It also serves as the southern terminus of Highway 35 and Highway 115, among other things. Comfort Life, a website dedicated to retirement life in Canada, has selected it as one of the best little towns in the province of Ontario.
Newcastle was officially established as a town in 1856. There were only about 100 people living there in the early 1990s, when new residential development began, and the population grew rapidly. In the late 1800s, Newcastle was home to a jail. There are no maps of Newcastle from those years that have been discovered so far. Many people have attempted to locate the location of this jail, but it is believed that it was either demolished or destroyed by the elements during a storm. The Newcastle Community Hall contains a number of detention cells.
Newcastle is bordered by farms where cattle, pigs, apples, grain, and corn are raised, among other things. There is a community hall, which was built with the help of a donation from the Massey family, one public high school (Clarke), two public elementary schools (Newcastle Public School and The Pines Senior Public School), one Catholic elementary school (St. Francis of Assisi), a post office, churches, a few plazas, several small parks, six restaurants (including a Tim Hortons), a recreation complex, an ice rink, a new fire hall, two (Newcastle Golf Course).
The municipality that is presently known as the Municipality of Clarington was previously known as the Town of Newcastle from 1973 to 1994. The name was changed in 1994 in order to eliminate long-standing confusion between the municipality as a whole and the community of the same name in the surrounding area.
In order to distinguish between the two, the community was usually referred to as Newcastle Village. It was also a confusing fact that Bowmanville had a larger population than Newcastle Village, and it also housed the former Town of Newcastle’s municipal offices, causing some to believe the town should have been called Bowmanville instead of Newcastle during that period.
