Main Street, Downtown Orillia

Incorporated as a town in 1875, Orillia was originally founded as a village in 1867, and has an Indigenous history that dates back over 4,000 years ago.

In 2010, a study was conducted to determine if downtown Orillia should be designated a Heritage Conservation District, an area of special character, combining older buildings and their settings that, together, make up a district that has an identifiably distinct “sense of place”. The findings were summarized as:

…contains representative elements of the key phases of Orillia’s development, from the early 19th century aboriginal and European settlement period through the era of major growth in the “Golden Years” and into the periods of decline and revitalization that characterized the city in the 20th century. During this time, the downtown has remained compact, expanding only slightly from its original concentration within a four block area just inland and uphill from the waterfront. Thanks to the solid reconstruction of the main street’s buildings following major fires in the mid-19th century, the downtown core has retained much of its early architecture and has a generally unified appearance.