Under the Royal Proclamation of 1763, European settlement could not proceed without a formal treaty with the aboriginal proprietors of the land. In 1805 the Mississauga agreed to surrender all the lands from Etobicoke River to Burlington Bay. Since the fishery was important to them, the Mississauga insisted on reserving for themselves the lower portions of the rivers, including Sixteen Mile Creek, together with the flood plains where they had their camps and small cornfields. These reserved parcels were ceded to the Crown in 1820. The Mississauga moved out of the area in 1847. Their...

Brantford Brantford is a city located on the Grand River in Southern Ontario. Brantford is connected to Woodstock in the west and Hamilton in the east by Highway 403 and to Cambridge to the north and Simcoe to the south by Highway 24. Brantford is known by the nickname The Telephone City as former city resident Alexander Graham Bell conducted the first distant telephone call from the community to Paris, Ontario in 1876. It is also the birthplace of hockey player Wayne Gretzky. Iroquoian-speaking people lived in the Grand River valley area before the 17th century; their main village and seat...

Mount Forest Mount Forest is located at the junction of Highways 6 and 89 on a height of land near the headwaters of the Saugeen River. In 1871, eighteen years after the town was surveyed, it had ten hotels, eight churches and eighteen stores; the first train came into Mount Forest later that year. Prior to European settlement, present day Mount Forest was prime hunting ground for the Saugeen Ojibway peoples due to its location on the Saugeen River. Originally known as Maitland Hills, its name was changed to Mount Forest in 1853. The name change came about because it was discovered that the...

Orillia is located in Central Ontario between Lake Couchiching and Lake Simcoe, 135 kilometres (84 miles) north of Toronto. Both lakes are part of the Trent-Severn Waterway. Travel north on Lake Couchiching, then through three locks and the only marine railway in North America leads to Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. Travelling south-east across Lake Simcoe, through many locks (including two of the highest hydraulic lift locks in the world) eventually leads to Lake Ontario. From either of these Great Lakes one can connect to the St. Lawrence and then to the Atlantic Ocean. The history of what is...