Discover Toronto's history as told through its plaques

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Toronto Carrying Place

Photos by Alan L Brown - Posted August, 2011

This Story Circle, the second of 13 story circles on the "Discovery Walks - The Shared Path", can be found on the east side of the path just south of the Gardiner Expressway. Here's what the plaques say:

Coordinates: 43.633091 -79.472271

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.

Shared Path Story Circles Information and Map
Discovery Walks - The Shared Path

Related Toronto plaques
The Toronto Carrying Place
Weston Road
Yonge Street 1796

Links to all the other Story Circles
  #1 Discover the Humber River's Ancient Past
  #3 Railways Over the Humber
  #4 Roads over the Humber River
  #5 Boating on the Humber River
  #6-1 The Beginnings of French Toronto
  #6-2 The Rousseaux Family and Early Toronto
  #6-3 Jean-Baptiste Rousseaux 1758-1812
  #7 Humber River Marshes and Oak Savannah
  #8 Huron-Wendat Villages on the Humber River
  #9 Hurricane Hazel
#10 The King's Mill
#11 Teiaiagon and the Aboriginal Occupation of Baby Point
#12 Dundas Street Crossing and Lambton Mills
#13 Mississauga Settlements on the Humber River

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