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We would like to acknowledge this sacred land on which we stand. It has been the site of human activity for thousands of years. This land is the territory of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Haudenosaunee and most recently, the Anishinaabe peoples. Toronto is in the ‘Dish with One Spoon Territory’. The Dish with One Spoon is a treaty between the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land. Subsequent Indigenous Nations and peoples, Europeans and all newcomers have been invited into this treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship and respect.
This web map has been developed as a pilot project for Geohistory/Géohistoire, the Canadian Historical GIS Partnership Development Project geohist.ca.on behalf of the Lost Rivers of Toronto Project lostrivers.ca.
The 1882 McMurrich “Plan of the City of Toronto” used here as the historical map overlay, is neither as precise topographically as the later Department of Military and Defence series, nor as detailed as Goad’s “Atlas of the City of Toronto” series, nor as old as Tremaine’s “Map of the County of York, Canada West” (1860) or the Miles & Company “Illustrated Historical Atlas of the County of York” (1878). McMurrich’s map is a compromise between these poles. Its advantages are its accurate portrayal of Ashbridge’s Bay from a time before this water body was altered by urban development, and its inclusion of creeks that flowed to the bay. Within a decade after the McMurrich map’s completion, the Don Improvement Project kicked off a half century of landfilling and altering that have left Ashbridge’s Bay unrecognizable and east end creeks almost entirely buried. Of additional interest to us is its suggestive, whimsical illustration of the broken landscape of the area north of the eastern Beaches.