Erected by the York Pioneer and Historical Society and the Toronto and York Roads Commission in 1948
The plaque reads:
"Near this spot ran the Indian Trail to Lake Huron called The Toronto Carrying Place (Le Portage de Toronto) traversed by Étienne Brûlé 1615, Robert Cavelier de la Salle on his way to the Gulf of Mexico 1680-1681 and many other explorers, missionaries and traders. It was surveyed by Deputy Surveyor General John Collins in 1785 and was included in the purchase from the Missisaugas of the land between Matchedash and Toronto by Lord Dorchester Governor of Canada 1787. This road was explored as a military highway by Lieut. Governor John Graves Simcoe Founder of York 1793. A portion of the trail was widened and opened as a road by the settlers about 1811. It was planked and operated as a toll road by the Weston Road Company 1841 then taken over by the Toronto and York Road Commission in 1911." (
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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.
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