Toronto's Historical Plaques

at torontoplaques.com

Learn a little of Toronto's history as told through its plaques

The Humber River Shared Path Discovery Walk

Photos by Alan L Brown - Posted August, 2011

Along the Humber River, from its mouth north to the Dundas Street Bridge, you will find a new Discovery Walk called The Shared Path. It's Toronto's first historical park and was made possible by the joint effort of Heritage Toronto, The City of Toronto, The Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, The Canadian Heritage Rivers System and La Société D'Histoire de Toronto. The park consists of 12 Story Circles spread along both sides of the Humber, each containing 2, 3 or 4 plaques. On this page you will find all the plaques from all of the Story Circles. Here's the first.

Discover the Humber River's Ancient Past

Photos by Alan L Brown - Posted August, 2011

This Story Circle can be found on the west side of the path just north of the Humber River pedestrian bridge: Here's what all the plaques say:

Plaque coordinates: 43.63250 -79.47124

You now stand at the intersection of two ancient "shared paths", each thousands of years older than the nearby modern highways. One route travelled along the shifting shoreline of Lake Ontario. The second, a roughly 50 kilometre-long footpath known today as the Carrying Place trail - an ancient forerunner of Yonge Street and Highway 400 - ran north along the banks of the Humber River to Lake Simcoe.

Following natural contours, these trails were perhaps in use shortly after people first arrived in this area, about 11,000 years ago. Much later, ancestors of today's Huron-Wendat Nation, Six Nations of the Grand River, and Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation established communities along the Humber path.

In the late 1500s and early 1600s, fur-trading with newly arrived Europeans gave the Humber path even greater strategic significance. After 1649-1650, the Huron-Wendat lost this area to the Five Nations Iroquois, who built a well-defended village near today's Bloor Street crossing. By 1700, the Mississaugas had replaced the Five Nations village with their own. French trading posts at the mouth of the Humber River followed, the first being built in 1720. While people of Aboriginal, European and Métis descent continued to use the trail, a new era of European settlement began with the British founding of the Town of York (now Toronto) in 1793, not far from the mouth of the Humber.

In the 1800s, the river became a hub of water-powered industry, and agricultural and residential development followed. The Humber watershed was dramatically altered, with deforestation changing its water levels, pollution destroying its fishery, and landfill changing its river banks - including here at the river's mouth.

Fortunately, archaeological remains have survived to tell us of the river's vibrant, ancient history. Pollutants have been gradually reduced since the 1940s, causing natural ecosystems to regenerate in areas along its banks. In recognition of the Humber River's rich human history, it was declared a "Canadian Heritage River" in 1999.

Critical to our history, the Humber River is enjoyed today by people from all over the world. Walk or bike north along the Shared Path to discover the river's rich history.

Toronto Carrying Place

Photos by Alan L Brown - Posted August, 2011

This Story Circle can be found on the east side of the path just south of the Gardiner Expressway. Here's what all the plaques say:

Plaque coordinates: 43.63309 -79.47221

For perhaps thousands of years before modern highways, overland trails connected the lower and upper Great Lakes. One of those trails began near here, at the mouth of the Humber River. The trail's Aboriginal names are forgotten, but early Europeans called it "le Passage de Toronto" and the "Toronto Carrying Place."

The Toronto Carrying Place trail followed the east crest of the Humber Valley, avoiding its swampy lowlands and water crossings to connect with the Holland River as it entered Lake Simcoe. An alternate route to Lake Simcoe followed the Rouge River watershed, while still more footpaths from Lake Ontario's north shore followed other major river systems. Their routes varied according to the seasons and according to the interests of the traveller.

In the 1600s, the route up the Humber became increasingly import due to the lucrative fur trade with newly arrived Europeans. The Huron-Wendat First Nation, traders with the French, lived at the trail's north end. In the 1670s, their rivals, the Five Nations Iroquois, established villages near the Lake Ontario trailheads to control the flow of goods. This included the village of Teiaiagon here on the Humber River. By 1700, the Anishinaubeg-speaking people known as the "Mississaugas" had taken control of the area.

Beginning in the 1670s, the government of New France, stationed in Quebec, established trading posts on the Great Lakes to convince First Nations to trade with them, and not with the British further to the south. Le Portage de Toronto became a key supply route for French posts on the upper Great Lakes and, in 1720, the French built their first trading post here as a branch of their larger post at Niagara.

After the French lost this area to the British in the Treaty of Paris (1763), a French trader, Jean-Bonaventure Rousseaux and his son, Jean-Baptiste, came here to trade with Aboriginal peoples using the trail. In the late 1780s, the British acquired the land along the Carrying Place trail from the Mississaugas, and planned the Town of York (now Toronto) east of the Humber River's mouth.

Vital to so much of the history of this area, the Toronto Carrying Place was used less by Europeans after Yonge Street reached Lake Simcoe in 1796. While much of this ancient trail has been lost to modern development, it can still be traced along city streets and country paths that follow portions of its route.

Related Toronto plaques
The Toronto Carrying Place
Yonge Street 1796

Railways over the Humber

Photos by Alan L Brown - Posted August, 2011

This Story Circle can be found at a crosswalk just north of the railway tracks on the south side. Here's what all the plaques say:

Plaque coordinates: 43.634695 -79.472759

Ancient trails have long merged where the mouth of the Humber River meets the shore of Lake Ontario. In the 1850s, footpaths and wagon roads were joined by railway tracks.

Toronto's first railway, the Ontario, Simcoe and Huron Railway served the same purpose as the Carrying Place trail, the ancient portage route up the Humber River - they both carried trade goods and people overland to connect Lake Ontario with the upper Great Lakes.

Only a few years later, the first railway tracks along the lakeshore were laid here, in 1855 for the Hamilton and Toronto Railway. As a result, the landscape at this location was again altered by the construction of a viaduct to carry trains over the river.

The railways on the viaduct above have carried generations of passengers, and tonnes of freight, to and from such places as Windsor, Niagara Falls, and New York City. Since 1967, they have also carried GO Train passengers. Today, this rail corridor - near the beginning of an ancient portage route - is one of the busiest in Canada.

Related websites
The Humber River
Great Lakes

Related Toronto plaque
The Toronto Carrying Place

Related Ontario plaque
Ontario, Simcoe and Huron Railway

Roads over the Humber River

Photos by Alan L Brown - Posted August, 2011

This Story Circle can be found just before the trail heads north under the Queensway. Here's what all the plaques say:

Plaque coordinates: 43.634481 -79.474086

The array of traffic lanes at the mouth of the Humber River began with an Aboriginal footpath, formed along the lakeshore thousands of years ago. By 1798, a wider wagon path had been cleared to become the Lake Shore Road - a vital link between new settlements along Lake Ontario.

In the early 1800s, travellers along the Lake Shore Road crossed the Humber River by ferry. A log viaduct was constructed in 1824, then replaced by a swing bridge in the 1840s. With the decline of shipping on the river in the 1850s, the swing bridge was replaced by a fixed bridge. In 1893, an adjacent second bridge allowed electric streetcars also to cross the river.

Automobiles changed the landscape yet again. The vehicular crossing here was widened in 1931, then dramatically altered in the 1950s with the construction of the Gardiner Expressway and The Queensway. As in ancient times, the lakeshore continues to be one of Toronto's most important travel routes.

Boating on the Humber River

Photos by Alan L Brown - Posted August, 2011

This Story Circle can be found 50 m north of the Queensway on the west side. Here's what all the plaques say:

Plaque coordinates: 43.634912 -79.475157

The Humber River's first rapids, at Bloor Street, have long kept boats from navigating far up the river. Below those rapids, however, boating has been an important aspect of the Humber's history. For centuries, Aboriginal peoples approached the beginning of the Toronto Carrying Place near here in bark canoes - their remarkable craft that were quickly adopted by early Europeans. In the late 1670s, canoes were joined by French sailing ships that unloaded goods to be transported along the portage or, after 1720, to supply the French trading post at Toronto.

In the 1790s, with British settlement and the establishment of water-powered mills, a growing number of vessels were moving supplies and produce up and down the river below the first rapids. Around 1800, a shipyard existed on this side of the Humber, just south of Bloor, that produced sailing ships - including one named Toronto.

After the mid-19th century, commercial shipping was gradually replaced by recreational boating. Boathouses and marinas were built on the Humber's lower banks, and crowds would gather along the shore to watch boat races.

Today, boats can still be launched near here, perhaps just a few steps from where Aboriginal peoples and European traders used to push their canoes into the river.

Related websites
The Humber River
Bloor Street
canoe

Related Toronto plaque
The Toronto Carrying Place

The Beginnings of French Toronto
The Rousseaux Family and Early Toronto
Jean-Baptiste Rousseaux 1758-1812

Photos by Alan L Brown - Posted August, 2011

This Story Circle can be found on South Kingsway at the top of a paved boat launching ramp at the south end of a gas station. Here's what all the plaques say:

Plaque coordinates: 43.635904 -79.474821

The Beginnings of French Toronto

Between the 1660s and 1759, the Humber River gained importance in the struggle between France and Britain for control of the fur trade with Aboriginal peoples. That struggle led the French to establish a presence in what is today Toronto.

In the 1670s, French trading posts opened at Kingston and Niagara to intercept Aboriginal traders paddling fur-laden canoes along the shores of Lake Ontario, en route to British outposts to the south. In 1720, a less significant post or magasin royal was built by the Sieur Douville near the former site of Teiaiagon, just up the river from here, to further attract Aboriginal fur traders coming down le passage de Toronto along the Humber. The post was staffed by a clerk and perhaps two soldiers, and lasted fewer than ten years due to British competition.

In 1750, the French returned to the south end ofle passage de Toronto, and a new trading post, Fort Toronto, was built by the Sieur de Portneuf near here, closer to the mouth of the river. Within a year, that building was replaced by the more substantial Fort Rouillé (also known as Fort Toronto) on the site of today's Exhibition Place. It was burned and abandoned in 1759 after the British took control of Lake Ontario. The fort's remains were still visible to the first settlers in the Town of York (now Toronto) in 1793.

Some of the French soldiers and traders stationed here - Toronto's first year-round European inhabitants - may still lie in undiscovered graves near the former French forts.

The Rousseaux Family and Early Toronto

As the nearby Provincial plaque indicates, a French trader named Jean-Baptiste Rousseaux (known as St. John to the British) provided a valuable link among the great powers that shaped what is now Toronto: the First Nations, the French, and the British. In 1770, 11 years after the last French trading post in this area was abandoned, Rousseaux's father began to trade with the Mississaugas at the mouth of the Humber. Perhaps reusing the site of the French fort built by Portneuf, Jean-Baptiste Rousseaux carried on trade here until 1795 - long enough to help the British establish the roots of the modern City of Toronto. Other francophones then arrived to shape the new settlement, including the prominent merchant Laurent Quetton St George.

The exact location of the Rousseaux home and store has not been discovered. In Rousseaux's day and well into the 20th century, the east bank here sloped gently to the river's edge, allowing for travellers to disembark from their boats, engage in trade, and begin the ancient Portage de Toronto or Carrying Place portage along the ridge now occupied by Riverside Drive. Since the 1930s, landfill has dramatically altered this area, filling in marshland and significantly changing the profile of the river bank.

Jean-Baptiste Rousseaux 1758-1812

Rousseaux was the first European to settle in the Toronto area. He and his father were interpreters for the Indian Department and were licensed to trade in this region. In 1787 Jean-Baptiste married Margaret Clyne, a ward of Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, and by 1791 he had built a trading post here at the Toronto Carrying Place. When Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe arrived by schooner to establish the provincial capital of York in 1793, Rousseaux piloted him into harbour. He served Simcoe's government as an interpreter thereafter. Intent on expanding his business activities, Rousseaux moved to Ancaster in 1795, where he prospered as a merchant and landowner. He fell ill and died while serving at Fort George during the War of 1812.

Related Toronto plaques
Fort Rouillé
Carrying Place portage

Humber River Marshes and Oak Savannah

Photos by Alan L Brown - Posted August, 2011

This Story Circle can be found along the path in South Humber Park on the west bank of the Humber River just north of the Queensway just as path turns west. Here's what all the plaques say:

Plaque coordinates: 43.636601 -79.478807

Urban development, including the creation of grassy public parks, has left us few places to experience the Humber Valley in its natural state. You are now standing between two such places: a marsh and an oak savannah.

When humans first walked into the Toronto region as early as 11,000 years ago, they likely found a spruce parkland and open tundra landscape. The local climate and vegetation had changed by approximately 7000 years ago to resemble today's conditions, although the shoreline of Lake Ontario was about 500 metres south of its current location.

The marsh at the mouth of the river was first formed perhaps 5,000 years ago, when the water level of Lake Ontario approached its current elevation, and the Humber River slowed here to meet it. The marsh's wide range of plants, fish, waterfowl, and mammals made it a vital seasonal hunting, fishing, and gathering site for Aboriginal peoples.

Further up this path, a black oak savannah is a rare remnant of an ecosystem that once flourished around the lower Humber River area on the dry, sandy soils of the bottom of former Lake Iroquois (which preceded Lake Ontario 12,000 years ago). Oak, white pine, and sassafras trees grew in small groups across a savannah of grasses and low shrubs. This vegetation was subject to frequent fires, helping to maintain the ecosystem.

Though significantly reduced in size and altered by both the loss of some species and the introduction of others, the remnants of both the marsh and the oak savannah have survived pollution, landfill, residential development, a previous golf course, and the construction of the adjacent Humber Wastewater Treatment Plant. Efforts continue towards the protection and regeneration of these remnant native ecosystems.

Huron-Wendat Villages on the Humber River

Photos by Alan L Brown - Posted August, 2011

This Story Circle can be found in Humber Marshes Park where the car road ends and the pedestrian path begins. Here's what all the plaques say:

Plaque coordinates: 43.643766 -79.492701

In the late 1800s, Aboriginal artifacts, perhaps Huron-Wendat in origin, were found up on the edge of the valley, not far from here. The Huron-Wendat lived for centuries along the waterways flowing into Lake Ontario, including along the Humber River. The remnants of their villages have often been identified by their distinctive ceramic vessels, tobacco pipes, stone axes, and bone tools, dating to between 1200 and 1580. The Huron-Wendat then moved north to land between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay (still known today as Huronia) to consolidate their communities into a confederacy.

The Huron-Wendat were accomplished traders with extensive networks throughout northeastern North America and beyond. They made contact with the French in 1609, and welcomed the first of many French visitors, Étienne Brûlé, to southern Ontario in 1610.

Approaching a Huron-Wendat village, French travellers encountered well-tended fields of corn, beans, and squash. Agriculture, supplemented by fishing, gathering, and hunting, allowed some Huron-Wendat villages to grow to nearly 2,000 people. Surrounded by fields and situated near rivers or creeks, villages of longhouses were positioned to command a view over the surrounding territory, and were sometimes surrounded by a palisade to protect their inhabitants.

Huron-Wendat use of the Carrying Place trail along the Humber River likely became occasional after 1600, as this route was threatened by their enemies, the Five Nations Iroquois. Displaced from their homeland by 1650, many Huron-Wendat moved to the Quebec City area where they remain today. While urban development has since destroyed many of their former village sites on the Humber, traces of these settlements may still be found in the yards and gardens that border the river.

Related Toronto plaque
Étienne Brûlé

Related Ontario plaque
Étienne Brûlé (c. 1592 - c. 1633)

The King's Mill

Photos by Alan L Brown - Posted August, 2011

This Story Circle can be found in King's Mill Park on the west side of the westside parking lot. Here's what all the plaques say:

Plaque coordinates: 43.650035 -79.492513

For thousands of years, the Humber River served as a corridor for Aboriginal settlement and trade. In late 1793, only a few months after British officials founded the Town of York (now Toronto), the river began to be converted into a corridor for water-powered industry. Here, within sight of the remains of Aboriginal villages and a French fur-trading post, the British government constructed Toronto's first industrial building - a rough, low shed with a water-powered saw - to supply lumber for government purposes. It became known as "King's Mill".

Poorly managed and badly maintained, the first King's Mill burned in 1803. Other water-powered sawmills and gristmills (for grinding grains into flour) followed on this site. The last and grandest of them all was constructed circa 1848 as a key part of merchant William Gamble's expanding milling enterprise.

Burned in 1881, its stone ruins would become one of Toronto's most romantic landmarks, known as "the Old Mill" and a rare visible reminder in the late-20th century of the days of water power. The ruins were dismantled in 2000 and replaced by a hotel, loosely modelled after the mill and partly clad with its stones.

Related Toronto plaque
The Old Mill

Teiaiagon and the Aboriginal Occupation of Baby Point

Photos by Alan L Brown - Posted August, 2011

This Story Circle can be found on the path on the east side of the Humber River below Baby Point, 940 m north of the Old Mill Bridge. Here's what all the plaques say:

Plaque coordinates: 43.653117 -79.501733

Up on the nearby promontory of land is one of the best-known First Nations archaeological sites in the City of Toronto. Aboriginal peoples likely used this advantageous site for thousands of years, but between circa 1670 and 1688, a Five Nations Iroquois Seneca village was located here. Its inhabitants called it "Teiaiagon". An agricultural village of perhaps 1,000 people, it would have been surrounded by fields of corn, beans, and squash.

The Five Nations Iroquois established this and other communities along the north shore of Lake Ontario following their victory over the Huron-Wendat circa 1650. The strategic location of Teiaiagon remains obvious today. It was defended by the steep banks of the point, allowing its occupants to control the southern end of the Carrying Place trail, an important trade route linking Lake Ontario to the upper Great Lakes through Lake Simcoe.

We know of this village in part from Europeans who visited it. Father Louis Hennepin and 15 companions found refuge here in 1678 when their ship sought shelter from a storm. In 1680, the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle recorded his stay at Teiaiagon while on his way north. The village was abandoned by the Seneca when they returned to their traditional homeland in what is now New York State. Later, the Mississaugas may have occupied the site as well.

The site of Teiaiagon was first investigated by archaeologists in the 1880s. Development of the area has consistently resulted in the discovery of artifacts and grave sites.

Related Toronto plaque
Baby Point

Related Ontario plaques
Louis Hennepin 1626-c.1705
La Salle at the Head of the Lake

Dundas Street Crossing and Lambton Mills

Photos and transcriptions by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted May, 2012

This Story Circle can be found on the east side of the Humber River, 130 m south of the Dundas Street Bridge in an overlook just off a dirt path. Here's what all the plaques say:

Plaque coordinates: 43.662213 -79.504090

You are now standing on the abutment of a former Dundas Street bridge. Dundas Street crossed the Humber River here before it was rerouted in 1928 over the bridge immediately to the north.

The government of Upper Canada (now Ontario) chose this natural point of crossing for Dundas Street, one of Ontario's earliest roads, and a vital link between the fledgling settlement of York (now Toronto) and settlements to the west. Dundas Street followed the easiest (not the straightest) route across the terrain, perhaps following an earlier Aboriginal trail.

This point on the river was an excellent location for water-powered mills, the first of which was opened here by William Cooper in 1807. Much like a major manufacturing plant today, the mills became magnets for other tradesmen, including tanners, blacksmiths, and coopers, whose services were necessary for the functioning of the mill. These businesses formed the nucleus of an early hamlet called Cooper's Mills.

In the 1840s, the Cooper mills were acquired by William P. Howland, and a larger, five-storey flour mill was constructed on the south side of the Dundas highway, just behind you. In 1851, Howland changed the name of the area to Lambton Mills to honour John George Lambton, a British reformer and former Governor General of Canada. By the mid-1850s, the village of Lambton Mills was a community of 500 - a milling centre, a travel stop on the Dundas highway, and a social centre for the local agricultural community.

By the 1860s, logging and agriculture had altered drainage patterns in the Humber River watershed. The resulting fluctuations in water levels made water-powered mills increasingly unreliable. Howland's flour mill was fitted with a steam engine in the 1880s, but nevertheless closed after 1900.

Lambton also lost its significance as a travel stop when modern expressways rendered the former Dundas highway into a local street. Today, only a few structures, including this bridge abutment and the 1847 Lambton House Hotel (at 4066 Old Dundas Street), remind us of the original Humber River community.

Related Toronto plaques
Sir William Pearce Howland (1811-1907)
Lambton House

Mississauga Settlements on the Humber River

Photos by Alan L Brown - Posted August, 2011

This Story Circle can be found on the west side of the Humber River on Home Smith Park Road, 355 m from Old Mill Road. Here's what all the plaques say:

Plaque coordinates: 43.651667 -79.49965

When archaeologists in the late 19th century documented remains of Aboriginal occupation on Baby Point (just across the river), they also noted remnants of a settlement on this side of the Humber. The occupants of this site may have been Mississaugas, an Anishinaubeg people and ancestors of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation.

In the 1690s, the Mississaugas had moved from the north shore of Lake Huron to their new home in southern Ontario, displacing in the process the Iroquois who inhabited the region and who had built Teiaiagon on Baby Point. The Mississaugas established settlements along the north shores of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Their village here, at the mouth of the Humber River, was on one of the important trade and communications routes linking Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay and the upper Great Lakes.

Like other nations before them, the Mississaugas negotiated to their best advantage with the French and British governments who were competing to profit from this area. In August 1759, a few days after the British defeated the French for control of Lake Ontario, Tequakareigh, a leader from the Mississaugas village near the mouth of the Humber, negotiated peace with the British at Fort Niagara on the Niagara River.

The British eventually purchased from the Mississaugas much of the land now occupied by the City of Toronto - although some of the terms of that purchase were only finally settled in 2010. The Mississaugas continued to live in this area during the early years of the new Town of York, but then moved west in 1826 to settle at a mission under the leadership of Kahkewaquonaby (Reverend Peter Jones), near the mouth of the Credit River. In the 1840s, the Mississaugas were again under pressure to relocate. They accepted an offer from the Six Nations of the Grand River to settle on their reserve near Brantford, Ontario, where they have resided since 1847.

Related Toronto plaque
Baby Point

Related Ontario plaque
Reverend Peter Jones 1802-1856

More
Rivers and Waterways
More Etobicoke plaques

Here are the visitors' comments for this page.

Posted October 24, 2011
There are several maps along this route which number each of the Story Circles, 1 through 13. However, Circles 9 and 12 seem to have not been installed as of this date, perhaps pending completion of other construction. Circle 9 will be located near the Bloor Street bridge; 12 will be near Old Dundas Road. Also, if you're walking along the east bank of the Humber, north of Old Mill Bridge, you'll find a circle of markers speaking about Champlain. These were erected by the Ontario Heritage Foundation in 2004, and are NOT part of The Shared Path panels erected by the City, though they look similar. They could be confused as being Story Circle 11, from the maps. -Wayne

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