harbours an advantage over the little coves and lagoons. Towns selected as district and later county administrative seats grew larger.
Still, transportation remained difficult. Lake travel was seasonal, while roads were usually muddy quagmires. Simcoe opened roads to Lake Simcoe and the Thames River in the 1790s while Asa Danforth gamely carved out a winding road from York to the Bay of Quinte. His trail proved to be poorly located and unpopular with settlers, and was replaced with a straighter Kingston Road in 1817. Still, stage travel between Kingston and York could take anywhere from three to five days.
Much changed with the arrival of the railways. While such projects had been proposed as early as the 1830s for Hamilton and Cobourg, the first steam-powered rail operation did not commence until the early 1850s. The Grand Trunk Railway (GTR) and Great Western Railway (GWR) followed the shore of the lake, while resource lines like the Cobourg and Peterborough, the Central Ontario, the Kingston and Pembroke, the Bay of Quinte, and the Midland railways tapped into the hinterland. Communities that acquired a rail link added foundries and factories to their roster of industries. By this time the lumber industry was losing its supply of logs, but farming and fishing became more specialized.
Canals also altered the industrial landscape: the Desjardins Canal linking the lake with Dundas opened in 1837; the Welland Canal linking Port Dalhousie with Lake Erie opened in 1828; the Rideau Canal opened between Bytown and Kingston in 1832; and the Murray Canal connected the Bay of Quinte with Wellers Bay in 1889. Locks were improved along the St. Lawrence, permitting ever larger vessels to enter the lake, and forcing many small ports to close. During the Prohibition era of the 1920s, many of these hidden coves returned to life, as fishermen made their late-night runs, carrying boatloads of whisky and beer to the thirsty Americans.
As cities and towns grew, so did the workforce. Seeking respite from their smoky urban environs, city dwellers sought out bucolic lakeside retreats, even if just for the day, and the tourist boom was underway. Beaches and waterfronts soon became the haunt of amusement parks, pleasure grounds, and “casinos” or dance halls. Places like Port Dalhousie and Hamilton Beach, along with Sunnyside, Hanlan’s Point, and The Beach in Toronto, all hosted major amusement parks, while smaller grounds were common nearly everywhere.
By this time, the many sturdy forts that protected Ontario against possible American attacks had either been downgraded or had fallen into outright ruin. Some were rebuilt or restored as Depression-era make-work projects, while Fort Henry and Fort York housed prisoners of war during the Second World War. The end of that conflict ushered in the auto age, one that would once more transform the towns and cities along the shore. In addition to the shoreline railways, there were now high-speed highways, with the Queen Elizabeth Way becoming North America’s first limited-access freeway in 1939. By 1955, the Toronto Bypass was on its way to becoming the 401, and piece by piece connected Toronto with Kingston and beyond.
As railways changed from coal to diesel, the coal boats no longer called, and tracks were lifted from most of the lake’s port lands. Kingston, Deseronto, Belleville, Trenton, Cobourg, Port Hope, and Whitby all lost their rail links to the lake. New industries preferred truck-friendly locations by the highway and away from the antiquated harbour sites. The fishing industry all but vanished, with only a handful of fishing boats still operating in the Prince Edward County area. Many municipalities were pondering the fate of their waterfronts, and several undertook major overhauls, ripping up old wharves and replacing them with marinas. Warehouses and grain elevators made way for hotels and condominiums — Kingston and Toronto being the main culprits here. In many locations, public access was restored and rebuilt, allowing for a renewed era of waterside recreation. Cobourg, Hamilton, Toronto (despite its wall of condos), and Burlington are prime examples of such concerted efforts. Others, such as Port Darlington and Deseronto, await their turn.
Despite the waves of sweeping change that have altered the Lake Ontario shore, its heritage lingers today; some well-known and heavily promoted, some known to only a few. In these pages, I hope to open a modern-day window on the evidence of Lake Ontario’s hidden heritage, all the way from Queenston to Kingston.
Niagara: it’s a word that brings to mind different images. To movie buffs it’s a classic 1953 Marilyn Monroe film of the same name; to history buffs it’s the many battles that raged across the torrential river; to tourists it’s the foaming falls that leap from a limestone precipice; to wine lovers it’s the home of the latest VQA; and to comedians it’s the age old joke about the falls being the second biggest disappointment on a new bride’s honeymoon.
But beyond the tour buses and the neon cacophony of Clifton Hill, Niagara hides a treasure trove of Ontario’s lesser-known heritage features — the vestiges of a strange buried gorge, the ruins of an ancient fort, a forgotten ghost road, some of Ontario’s oldest surviving homes and churches, as well as a tale of heroism, and a long forgotten camp movement. For this Lake Ontario adventure, only that portion of Niagara that links to the lake is explored, mainly the area north of Queenston.
To get the whole picture, it is necessary to return to the ice age. As noted earlier, for an estimated two hundred thousand years, mighty glaciers came and went across the landscape that today is Ontario, the latest finally beginning to release its icy grip around twenty thousand years ago. Even as the ground of central Ontario began to emerge from the ice, a mighty lobe remained lodged stubbornly against the stone ramparts of the Niagara Escarpment. Before doing so, it had disgorged a massive deposit of sand and gravel that completely submerged a preglacial gorge that had served as an outlet for what had been an earlier version of the Niagara River.
When the ice lobe finally receded from the escarpment, Lake Erie once more began to empty northward. With its old outlet now sealed, the waters sought another path, and began to carve a new defile, creating today’s Niagara Gorge. Flowing northward, the waters entered a lake that was much higher than the Lake Ontario we know today (Lake Iroquois). As the waters lapped against the escarpment’s cliffs, they left behind a series of gravely beach ridges and sandy lacustrine deposits, both of which would define the history of Niagara.
With the glaciers finally gone, early animals and humans began to filter onto the landscape. In Niagara, however, there were two major impediments blocking their easy movement. One was the craggy cliff-lined ridge of the escarpment, which in the Niagara area is at its steepest. This left only one feasible route, that which followed the buried gorge wherein once flowed the preglacial river. The second impediment was that posed by the raging new river itself. Thus, movement both north–south and east–west was severely restricted.
Once the first aboriginal populations were gone, either by annihilation or assimilation, the tribe known as the Neutral moved in to occupy much of the western side of the river. The various nations of the mighty Iroquois Confederacy roamed the forests to the east, and eventually the Neutrals succumbed to Iroquois supremacy and disappeared from history.
Next came a parade of Europeans, beginning with the French: La Salle, Father Hennepin,1 and Champlain all trouped through Niagara, each awestruck by the mighty falls, but also by the strategic importance of the river and the high cliffs. The British were next. In 1763, having gained much of North America from the French during the French and Indian War, they constructed important military outposts on both sides of the Niagara River at its Lake Ontario outlet — Fort Niagara on the east, and Fort George on the west.
More war was to follow. In 1776, England’s thirteen American colonies decided they had had enough of England’s domination and declared their independence. Seven years later they achieved it. The east side of the river became American, the west side stayed British. While the falls remained the focus above the Niagara Escarpment, two key towns began to take shape below — Queenston and Butlersburg, which later went on to become Newark and then Niagara (and now Niagara-on-the-Lake).
