Explore the vestiges of the hamlets and villages that have been swallowed up by Toronto’s relentless growth. Over the course of more than two centuries, Toronto has ballooned from a muddy collection of huts on a swampy waterfront to Canada’s largest and most diverse city. Amid (and sometimes underneath) this urban agglomeration are the remains of many small communities that once dotted the region now known as Toronto and the GTA. Before European settlers arrived, Indigenous Peoples established villages on the shore of Lake Ontario. With the arrival of the English, a host of farm hamlets, tollgate stopovers, mill towns, and, later, railway and cottage communities sprang up. Vestiges of some are still preserved, while others have disappeared forever. Some are remembered, though many have been forgotten. In Toronto’s Lost Villages , all of their stories are brought back to life. Brown has written a book of great service... Toronto’s Lost Villages is a compendious buffet of civic history. ― Literary Review of Canada Ron Brown, a geographer and travel writer, has authored more than twenty books, including Canada’s World Wonders and The Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore . A past chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada and a current member of the East York Historical Society, he gives lectures and conducts tours along Ontario’s back roads. Ron lives in Toronto. 1. Along the Lakeshore Toronto’s First Vanished Villages TEIAIAGON AND GANATCHAKIAGON As the glaciers that covered the Toronto region melted northward, humans followed. The first were nomadic hunters searching the then tundra for roving herds of elk, caribou, and other subarctic wildlife. The growth of forests saw succeeding cultures replace the earlier occupants. The oldest prehistoric artifact found in the Toronto area is a chert spear point discovered by a school student and dated to eight thousand years ago; other artifacts of similar age have been few. By the 16th century, the sedentary Hurons and Petuns occupied the fertile lands south of Georgian Bay, away from their traditional enemies, the Iroquois Confederacy, who occupied the Finger Lakes region of New York state. South of Georgian Bay, the Hurons and Petuns established large village compounds of longhouses, surrounded by sturdy wooden palisades. They came to the Lake Ontario shores to hunt in the Rouge and Humber marshes and fish around the Toronto Islands, but established no villages on those shores. Through the 17th century as the Europeans arrived, mainly in search of the beaver, the lifestyles of the Indigenous Peoples shifted. Now they concentrated on hunting the valuable beaver pelts to trade for tools, guns, and liquor. Alliances were formed, the Iroquois aligning with the Dutch and English traders, the Hurons with the French. The main trading route between Lake Simcoe and Lake Ontario was known as the “Toronto Carrying Place,” following the Humber River and over a height of land before descending to Lake Simcoe. (At the time, the early French knew our “Lake Simcoe” as Lac Toronto.) As the fur supply became depleted south of Lake Ontario, on what is now the American side, north of Lake Ontario the Iroquois launched a string of deadly raids that either killed off or chased away the Huron and Petun populations. The missions established by the French missionaries to “Christianize” the “savages” lay in smouldering ruins. Fort Ste. Marie near Midland is a reconstruction of such a mission complex, which had lain on this site. Following their violent dispersal of the Petun and Huron in 1650, the Iroquois built a string of seven villages along the north shore of Lake Ontario. Two of these were within today’s Toronto region. Each was to protect one of the two southern termini of the Toronto Portage, one branch of which followed the Rouge River, the other the Humber. The village overlooking the Rouge was Ganatchekiagon, built by the Seneca (of the Iroquois Confederacy) on a high promontory upstream from the river’s mouth. This strategic position allowed the Seneca to control the trade routes east and west along the north shore, as well as the main route along the Rouge. Archaeologists now know the location as the Bead Hill site. The site overlooking the Humber was Teiaiagon, and is known now as the Baby Point site. Both were palisaded compounds of longhouses, in which an estimated six to eight hundred people would live. The river-mouth marshes provided ample fish and fowl. Then came the pushback. Anxious to regain control of the fur trade, in the 1690s the northern Anishinaabe tribes, including today’s Ojibwa and Mississaugas, raided the Seneca villages, pushing the Iroquois back across the lake in what are known as the Beaver Wars. By 1700 the Seneca villages lay vacant ― becoming Toronto’s first vanished villages. In 1991 the Bead Hill site was designated a National Historic Site. Excavations have unearthed a bone haircomb decorated with figures drinking from a goble