Meadowvale sits in northwest Mississauga, split between two places that share a name but tell very different stories. Meadowvale Village, a small cluster of streets along the Credit River, is one of the oldest surviving settlements in the city. Modern Meadowvale, the much larger residential community built up around it, dates back only to the 1970s.
The story starts in 1819, when a caravan of Irish immigrant families set out from New York State under John Beatty, a total of 54 adults and 33 children travelling in roughly 26 wagons. Most of the group, led by John and his brother David Beatty, settled along the Credit River in what became Meadowvale, while a smaller party continued on to found what is now Derry West. Land grants of 200 acres each went to the Beatty brothers, William Wheeler, and Joseph Carter.
The settlement grew into a formally recognized village by 1836, with James Crawford, John Simpson, and Francis Silverthorn establishing the milling tradition that came to define the community. By the 1860s, Meadowvale Village had a general store, post office, blacksmiths, a cheese factory, two sawmills, and a large grist mill. The Toronto distilling family behind Gooderham and Worts moved in starting in 1860, and their grist mill was turning out as much as 300 barrels of flour a day at its peak.
Meadowvale’s fortunes as a milling centre faded after 1879, when the Credit Valley Railway was built through the region and bypassed the village entirely. Several buildings from that earlier era still stand today, including the 1840 Hill House, one of the oldest homes in the village, and the 1863 church at Derry Road and Second Line, now a United Church. In 1980, the City of Mississauga designated Meadowvale Village as Ontario’s first Heritage Conservation District, a status that today protects 63 structures along Second Line West and Old Derry Road, 23 of them recognized as individually significant.
The much larger neighbourhood that carries the Meadowvale name today grew up separately, starting in 1970, when developer Markborough Properties began building a planned community on former farmland west of the historic village. Meadowvale Town Centre, the development’s shopping hub, opened on January 25, 1978, with 21 stores including what was then the largest Dominion supermarket in Canada, and grew to 51 stores within two years. A major redevelopment in 2002 tore down most of the enclosed mall and rebuilt it as the open-air shopping centre that stands there now.
Meadowvale GO Station, on GO Transit’s Milton line near Derry Road West and Winston Churchill Boulevard, mainly runs weekday, rush-hour focused train service rather than all-day or weekend rail, the same pattern as the rest of the Milton line through Streetsville and Erin Mills. Off-peak and weekend travellers typically rely on GO buses or MiWay buses instead. See our transit guide for the wider picture.