4 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
By claim, the oldest pub in Ontario is the Olde Angel Inn at Niagara-on-the-Lake, which its owners believe was founded as the Harmonious Coach House around 1789. By evidence the same building is the answer at a later date: it was rebuilt by John Ross in 1815 after American forces destroyed the town, then called Newark, in 1813, and its hand-hewn beams and plank floors date from that rebuild. The Mansion House in St. Catharines claims Canada's longest continually held licence, with hotel use recorded from 1826.
Ontario's old pubs are the product of two things: a war and a canal. The War of 1812 wiped out the province's first capital — American forces burned Newark, now Niagara-on-the-Lake, in 1813 — which is why the oldest inn there dates its surviving fabric to 1815 rather than to its founding. The Welland Canal did the opposite, creating towns and trade: the Mansion House in St. Catharines was built as a home and store by William Hamilton Merritt, the canal's promoter, before becoming a hotel in the 1820s. Add the garrison and lake-port towns of Kingston and Toronto and you have the whole shape of the list. What Ontario also has, uniquely in this collection, is a live heritage process attached to one of its pubs: city staff found that the Wheat Sheaf Tavern in Toronto met six provincial criteria, and designation under the Ontario Heritage Act advanced in 2025. That is a rare thing — a pub's age being formally tested by a public body rather than asserted on a wall.
The Olde Angel Inn is a low timber-framed building on a side street of a town that was rebuilt from nothing after 1813, and it is the most convincing pre-Victorian pub interior in the province: beams cut by hand, floorboards of 1815, a cellar with a ghost. The Mansion House is the canal-town survivor, refitted during the pandemic into a more upscale bar and kitchen, and open late from Wednesday to Saturday.
The Queen’s Inn in Kingston dates itself to 1839 and Martin Staley of Wolfe Island, and its own website carried a reopening notice when we last looked, so hours are worth checking before you go. The Wheat Sheaf is the province’s tidiest case and its most public: a brick corner tavern with a name, a founder, a date and a heritage file, now a sports, live-music and whisky bar. The national list is at the oldest pubs in Canada, the colonial taverns across the lakes are at the oldest bars in the USA, and our grading rules are on the methodology page.
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Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario
The inn says it is 'believed to have been founded' as the Harmonious Coach House about 1789, and offers nothing to support the year. What is documented is the rebuilding by John Ross in 1815, after American forces burned Newark in 1813, and the hand-hewn beams and plank floors of that rebuilding are what a drinker sits among. No heritage designation for the property has been traced, although the town's old core is a
St. Catharines, Ontario
The bar brands itself since 1806 and calls itself the oldest continually licensed bar in Canada; its own account says William Hamilton Merritt, promoter of the Welland Canal, built the place in the early 1800s as a home and store and that it became a hotel in 1826, where other accounts give 1828. Neither date has been traced to a record. The city's own heritage layer, published through the Niagara open data portal
Kingston, Ontario
The inn says it was established in 1839 by the Wolfe Island businessman Martin Staley and is one of Canada's oldest continually operating inns. A record for the trade has now been traced, and it names somebody else. The Kingston local-history project STONES, working on the city's Black history, sets out the career of George Mink, who announced in May 1838 that he had taken extensive premises at the head of Brock
Toronto, Ontario
The City of Toronto's designation report for 667 King Street West sets out the paper trail: the 1845 assessment rolls show John and Bernard Short holding four lots at King and Bathurst, Bernard being an innkeeper and baker; the city directories show the lots tenanted by 1848 and the Wheat Sheaf built and let to Daniel Patterson by 1849; the building first appears on Goad's atlas in 1858, gaining a southern addition
The photographs above are other people's work, used under open licences. Every photographer, licence and source page is named in the image credits. A pub with no licensed photograph shows an illustrated façade instead.
