Keeping Ontario Moving: The History of Roads and Road Building in Ontario

2014

Roads and Transportation in Upper Canada Before 1800

Before the New World was discovered by Europeans in the 17th century and recognized for its commercial potential, Ontario wasn’t a part of any new world at all. For at least 12,000 years, the dense deciduous and pine forests and pristine lakes and rivers of Ontario were home to Aboriginal people. They took their living from the forests and lakes and they spread throughout Ontario on the waterways. They moved on land between hunting grounds and water access points on networks of centuries-old trails through the forests, and they established their settlements at the intersections of their trails.

Many different Aboriginal nations inhabited their own parts of the province in the 1600s and 1700s. In the southern parts, the Iroquois Nation, which had migrated north from its traditional lands in New York State, inhabited areas around Lake Simcoe and north. They included the Hurons, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and the Seneca. The Algonkian tribes, which became the Six Nations, included the Cree, Ojibwa, and Algonquin peoples. Aboriginal people also travelled deep into the north of Ontario to settle in places where some dwell today and which modern civilization still has not reached.

Then the Europeans came, first the French and later the British, who coveted the virtual fine fur factory that Ontario represented. The Native furs — beaver was the most coveted but bear, sea otter, ermine, and deer pelts were also prized in Europe — were worth a small fortune and became symbols of wealth and entitlement on the streets of Paris and London. The Europeans brought common manufactured goods with them to trade with the Natives for furs; iron ax heads, brass kettles, factory-made blankets and other products manufactured in the newly-industrialized European factories. The commercial potential of the province to the early Europeans was so valued that wars and local battles were fought off and on for over 100 years, before the British finally established control of what would become Ontario under the Treaty of Paris in 1763.

Being the start of the supply chain, many of the Aboriginal groups worked as partners with the fur traders and often aligned themselves with either British or French trading companies. Some were even politically allied to either side and fought alongside the European regular militiamen in the battles for control of the market. And given that the Aboriginal nations were the polar opposite of a homogenous ethnic entity, there were often bloody disagreements and battles between nations through the early history of the province to secure their own interests in the fur trade.

Before the European settlers arrived, Ontario was home to Aboriginal nations that hunted, fished, and foraged for food.

The coming of the European fur traders and establishment of trade routes was naturally followed by military protection for territories and routes, leading to strategic development of both French and British fortified posts that also served as trading centres in the 1600s and 1700s. With the commercial imperatives of supply and transport in place and some degree of safety in the military presence, the first settlers followed. Over time they branched out from and between the fortified bases along the major waterways, gradually establishing an agricultural base to support the lucrative fur trade.

To provide some very basic historical context for the chapters to follow that document the history of road building and road builders in Ontario, a very brief overview is useful at this point to look at the beginnings of European exploration and the development of the modern-day province.

Henry Hudson, an English-born explorer and trader employed by the Dutch East India Company, was likely the first European to see Lake Ontario and the new lands of the future Upper Canada in 1609. Hudson brought Dutch goods to New York State to trade with the Iroquois, and some of these commodities made their way into southern Ontario.

A fur trader’s cabin.

Between 1610 and 1615, Étienne Brûlé, an emissary for the explorer Samuel de Champlain, was the first European to travel among the Huron Iroquoians in Huronia (the present-day Midland area). He travelled through the Niagara Peninsula on his way to New York and may well have been the first European to see Niagara Falls. In 1615 the first French missionary, Father Joseph Le Caron, travelled among the Huron and Petun Iroquoians in the Midland area. At the time the territories that would later become Upper Canada were governed by the French and Ste. Marie was a major trading post as well as a self-sustaining Jesuit mission.

The famous coureurs des bois (runners of the woods en anglais) Médard Chouart des Groseilliers and Pierre-Esprit Radisson did some extensive exploration and mapmaking (Radisson was a cartographer) in the Upper Great Lakes, as far as Green Bay, Wisconsin, around 1654. In 1679, after discovering Kingston, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle built a 45-ton sailing boat, Le Griffin, on the Niagara River and sailed it from Niagara through Lakes Erie, St. Clair, Huron, and Michigan to Michilimackinac and Green Bay.

Fresh beaver and other pelts are packaged and waiting for shipment in the stockroom at a remote trading post.

The French explorers and fur traders in the 1600s found new water transportation routes that opened up vast new territories, and this set the stage for establishing fortified military posts throughout Upper Canada in the late 1600s. For the next 150 years, the English and French battled for control of the fur trade. In 1720, French trading posts were established in modern-day Toronto (near the mouth of the Humber River) and Niagara. But by then the British were also getting pretty interested in the new territories in Upper Canada, and they began to flex their muscles from their western outpost at Oswego, New York, on the south shore of Lake Ontario.

On gaining control of the province in 1763, the British began to build a strategic network of forts along the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes network, beginning with Fort Erie in 1764. Quick to follow were Forts George, Niagara, York, and Amherstburg. By the 1780s, the British were offering grants of land to British-born loyalists, the United Empire Loyalists, many of whom bolted from the U.S. and settled in southern Ontario following the American Revolutionary War, which ended in 1783. About 9,000 Loyalists had come to find a new life in Upper Canada by 1784.

A group of the first Loyalists came from the northeastern American states to Montreal and made their way by barge and portage along the St. Lawrence River to settle along the river between Montreal and Kingston. Kingston, called Cataraqui at the time by the Mississauga First Nations who had settled there first, was a prime beneficiary of the influx of loyalists and it quickly became the major military and economic centre of Upper Canada at the time. Cataraqui had the highest population in Upper Canada until the 1840s. It was also the first settlement surveyed in Upper Canada. Under the direction of surveyor-general, Major Samuel Holland, deputy John Collins divided up the lands west of old Fort Frontenac into townships of 175 lots of 120 acres each, with allowances for roads. The first major section of road in eastern Ontario was built in 1783 between Cataraqui and Bath to the west.

Another influx of loyalists crossed the border at Niagara Falls and Fort Erie to establish a settlement at Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake) and spread across the Niagara Peninsula. They built their first road from Newark to Ancaster in 1785. A third wave of loyalists and some early settlers from Europe chose not to proceed along the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes water system, opting rather to branch off to begin settling along another major water artery: the Ottawa River. By about 1800 they had established a settlement at the current site of the city of Ottawa and were pushing further up the Ottawa River, the feeder rivers of which were gateways to the North and transport routes for the timber trade that would dominate the early history of the Ottawa Valley.

Until 1791, what we know as Ontario today was all part of the British holdings in North America. It officially became a geographic entity in that year by an Act of British Parliament that created two provinces. Lower Canada represented the modern-day province of Quebec, with most of its settlers descendants of the original French explorers who began to colonize the area in the early 1600s. Upper Canada would later be called Ontario, but at the time the map did not include vast territories of the northern and western parts of modern Ontario. Educated estimates put the population of the province at about 6,000 in 1783, growing to 14,000 in 1791, and reaching 44,000 by 1806.

While the fur trade continued to fuel settlement and territorial expansion in Upper Canada in the mid-1700s, there was a growing demand in Europe for wood products, especially to support the shipbuilding business in England. The homeland was constantly at war with one nation or another in the 18th and 19th centuries, and at the same time as they were losing a lot of ships in battle, their traditional sources of lumber in Eastern Europe were drying up. It was only natural that forestry would become an economic mainstay in a colony virtually covered in thick forest but for the myriad of connecting lakes and rivers that provided the means of moving timber from the woodlot to market. The first settlements were developed along the major water routes, and a sawmill was usually one of the first commercial establishments in a new settlement, after a grist mill and along with a general store and a post office. The timber trade grew steadily and did eventually become the number one economic engine in Upper Canada as the demand for fur began to decline in the early 1800s.

Upper Canada in 1800.

Courtesy the David Rumsey map collection, www.davidrumsey.com.

Early Roads and Transportation

Europeans found the water transportation routes established by the Native peoples centuries ago — navigating the rivers and lakes by canoe in the summer and following the frozen waterways in the winter — to be practical and effective so they set up their communities on the shores of the water highways and continued to embrace that mode in settling the province. Water was not only the best way to travel and move heavy goods and timber in the 1700s — it was virtually the only way. In a province where six percent of the territory consisted of networks of rivers and over 250,000 lakes, initially there was little need for land roads.

The St. Lawrence River, Great Lakes, and Ottawa River were the superhighways of the system, which explains the patterns of early settlement in Upper Canada, with major settlements along those water routes. From Niagara, water routes took the Natives and early European explorers to Lake Erie via the Niagara River, leading to establishment of communities at centres such as Port Colborne, Port Dover, and Port Stanley along that lake. Spotty settlement then continued on to Amherstberg at the entrance to the Detroit River and then Windsor at the other end. Windsor was an early economic powerhouse, situated as it is directly across the river from Detroit, which was an important American economic hub at the time. The route then traversed Lake St. Clair and on to a settlement at Sarnia, where the St. Clair River meets Lake Huron. Continuing up the east coast of Lake Huron to the Bruce Peninsula and into Georgian Bay, early settlements were established at places like Goderich and Port Elgin. Posts in Georgian Bay were an ideal gateway to lands further north and west.

Early settlers adopted most of the Aboriginal ways of travel. For centuries they had travelled by canoe in the water or by foot on land, using well-established trails to move between hunting grounds and water access points and later to enable their fur trading activities. For winter travel on land and on the frozen waterways, the Aboriginal peoples had developed snowshoes to get around on foot in the winter snow and toboggans, pulled by dogs, to move their belongings. Early settlers followed suit. Dogs as pack animals were invaluable to Aboriginal land travel and they would not shift to horses until the 1700s, when the animals were introduced by Europeans. The ox was the beast of burden for the early settlers, and later horses when they became available. Sleighs became the common conveyance for people to travel in the winter over the ice roads and frozen waterways, as well as to move timber from the bush.

The Aboriginal peoples had created many paths through the forests to link water access points, and these also served the early trappers and fur traders. Notably, there was an inland network of paths and trails stretching from Montreal to the Niagara Peninsula. Far from being simply a collection of random paths, collectively, Aboriginal trails represented a practical network of interconnected major roads and arteries that joined water access points and settlements.

The Aboriginal roads were little more than footpaths through the bush where the vegetation had been beaten down and eliminated over time, and perhaps some direct obstacles removed from time to time — generally only wide enough for human single-file passage. Heavily travelled trails were regularly worn six inches or more below grade, some up to a foot deep. Early settlers on horseback often used these Aboriginal trails in the absence of any other land conveyance, spawning the term bridle path because they were just wide enough to accommodate a horse and rider.

When Frances Anne Hopkins painted this scene of travellers on the Ottawa River system almost 150 years ago, the waterways were Ontario’s primary roads and canoes were the main vehicles of conveyance over any significant distances. The artist was married to the Chief Factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company and is likely the woman in the canoe.

Frances Anne Hopkins fonds, Voyageurs franchissant une cascade en canot, 1869, Library and Archives Canada, reproduction copy number C-002771.

But for early settlers in the 1700s who brought their horses, oxen, and wagons, the journey to their new homesteads couldn’t be made exclusively on the water routes. The last leg over land was always an arduous and dangerous ordeal that meant somehow transporting all of their worldly goods and supplies they would need to survive the winter by land. Invariably that meant hacking new trails in the dense bush and days on end searching for a way to get across a river or stream in their path.

The first family to settle the Ottawa area was the Billings family. In 1813, Lamira Billings, the family matriarch, described her journey as a new bride from the village of Merrickville to Gloucester. Following are excerpts from her recollections of the trip, which at the time could not be accomplished on land:

On the 24th (October, 1813) started the move to Gloucester, came 9 miles and was detained by the rain. 26th we started in a bark canoe, our loading consisted of Mr. Billings and a Frenchman and myself, 6 chairs, one trunk and a bed and a bundle of bedclothes. We went 18 miles and camped in an old shanty — it had a door, no window, no chimney but a large hole for each. The next morning it rained till 4 in the afternoon then we started and went 4 miles and came to another shanty of the very same kind. Remained that night, the 28th we started again and we found the water so shallow that the canoe would not swim; the men had to unload and carry the things on their backs some distance and then carry the canoe and load again. Three different times they had to load and unload again before we reached home 9 miles … and when we arrived, it was of a good sound log house and a good chimney and 4 windows, a floor made of split logs for there was no plank there in them days. We had about 6 acres chopped and planted to corn and potatoes and turnips … 40 miles from any house on one side and 7 on the other, no road either way, not one house in the town but our own. L. Billings¹

Footpaths in the forest were the first roads in Ontario. The Aboriginal nations developed a network over thousands of years, and some went for hundreds of kilometres.

The life of early settlers was a daily struggle to survive. Farming was an exhausting vocation that provided a meagre existence at best and consumed every waking moment. Oxen made the work a little easier, if you had one or two, but tools and farm equipment were rudimentary and there was no substitute for gruelling manual labour. The lack of roads or any nature of reliable transportation on land was one of the greatest aggravations of life in the 1700s and a problem that would become more critical as settlements began pushing out to areas without direct water access. Settlers on remote homesteads were virtually housebound for months at a time for the lack of roads to take them to the nearest village.

Agriculture was the mainstay economic activity for settlers, with wheat and grains being the main cash crops, along with corn, potatoes, turnips, and other food staples. A grist mill was the key to the success of any new settlement because access to a means of processing their grain was critical to local farmers. A grist mill was useless though without a local road or path to get to it. At the time Upper Canada was created just before the turn of the 18th century, land roads were of minor importance bordering on irrelevance as a means of transportation. While they grew in importance with the growth of internal trade and the establishment of new settlements without water access through the 1800s, until the introduction of the motorcar, roads were usually an afterthought in a new land where the lakes and rivers were the established means of travel and transportation. Ontario’s main highways up to the advent of the railways in the mid-1880s, and later the introduction of the motorcar at the end of the century, were liquid.

But while land roads became necessary to support and expand settlement, where they existed they were unreliable and often unusable in the spring and fall and much of the summer, when rain made them too muddy to traverse by horse and buggy. Seldom more than a bumpy dirt path cleared wide enough for a horse and wagon, local roads were usually built by local farmers and loggers when they needed them and seldom maintained in any fashion thereafter. Winter, though, provided a virtually continuous road network on the frozen rivers and lakes. Timber was moved over land exclusively in the winter months on the ice roads leading to the ports.

There was no collective funding mechanism to build or maintain early roads, nor any organized approach to their planning, design, or construction. Though essential to expanding and sustaining settlement, land roads would play second fiddle to the water highways, then the railways, until the beginning of the 20th century.

Road Building in the 1700s

Building a road in the 1700s was not rocket science, although some fundamental tools were applied to basic engineering parameters such as distance, direction, and elevation. The design and construction technology was simple and the labour was intensive. Workers cleared the path for a new road with axes and logging chains. Preparing a roadway, workers used hand tools like rakes and hoes and, where available, sometimes rudimentary wooden scrapers drawn by horses or oxen.

The most difficult part was clearing the right of way. Almost always through thick forest and often over swampy lands or muskeg and permafrost in the North, trees and brush were cut, then stumps, boulders, and other obstacles removed by hand or with the help of horses or oxen. Stumps in finished roadways were sometimes burned after the fact but were more usually just left as an obstacle on the road. A big gain in productivity came just at the turn of the 18th century with the invention of the stump puller, which, with a team of seven horses, could pull 40 stumps in a day. When rock outcroppings were encountered, especially in the tough granite of the Canadian Shield, the road would be routed around them.

Levelling of the road came next, and this stage represented the difference between a decent road and a crude footpath or trail. The work was done by hand and there were no specifications for how level the road should be. The work would be considered complete whenever the surveyor deemed it was fit for travel by wagon, and later, stagecoach. After levelling, the new road could be declared complete, although it would likely not stand up to traffic for very long. Drainage ditches were sometimes added to forestall the erosion of the road, because even at this infant stage of road building technology the principle of draining water from the surface was understood.

Corduroy roads were an improvement on dirt roads and they became popular because timber was the cheapest and most readily available option for covering the road at the time. It was the only option for building across swampy areas when getting down to a solid dirt base was not possible. The trees that were cut to make way for the road ended up as part of its surface, laid side by side horizontally across the road bed and chinked with mud, stone, or whatever was available. Corduroy roads could also be built as a foundation for other surfacing such as stone where it was available.

Though they served their purpose at the time, corduroy roads were not durable. They decayed and broke up under the wet conditions of the summer, and even when the spaces between the logs were plugged with sand and mud, travelling on them was slow and bumpy and the footing was dangerous for horses and oxen. Most often, after they were built there was no maintenance whatsoever on the corduroy roads and many of them simply became unusable over time.

The rough-and-tumble of a trip by stagecoach over a corduroy road in eastern Ontario is described in an 1850s poem by a female traveller who was obviously not impressed with the comfort of public transportation over log roads.

Half a log, half a log

Half a log onward,

Shaken and out of breath,

Rode we and wondered.

Ours not to reason why

Ours but to clutch and cry

While onward we thundered.²

Local historian Christina Hermer describes the construction of a corduroy road in her This Was Yesterday history of the Townships of Denbigh, Abinger, and Ashby. Her reference is to the Addington Road, one of the first Colonization Roads that was surveyed in 1847 and constructed by contract labour beginning in 1854. The road was to connect the established settlements in the south of Lennox, Addington, Frontenac, Prince Edward, and Hastings Counties to the established lumbering centres on the tributaries of the Ottawa River.

The road was constructed through rocky highlands and swampy lowlands with only the crudest of tools at their disposal. A path was hacked out of the forest and the trees dragged into the woods to rot or used on other sections of the road. Many times the stumps were left standing in the middle of the road and travelers had to pick their way around them. The swamps posed another problem. Where possible they used the corduroy method to build over lowlands and swamps… Wherever possible the dips and valley of the road were filled with stone, but many times none was available, or workers were not able to break it apart so sand and other things had to be used. Huge rock cuts were broken apart as best as possible, but many times the road was built right over top.³

It was understood in the late 1790s that stone provided the best cover for roads, and a few of the best early Upper Canada roads were covered this way, but not many, because stone was very expensive, often not available close to where it was needed, and the price and convenience of wood road options often won out over quality. All stone at the time had to be broken manually with sledgehammers.

As reported by writer Dallas Bogan, in 1799 an anonymous writer published an essay titled Directions for Making Roads in the Philadelphia Magazine and Review. This early road expert was well ahead of his time and explained exactly how a good road with a good stone cover should be constructed:

The stones should be spread equally over the surface and settled with a light sledge. In this operation such stones as are too large must either be broken or carried away; over this a layer of small stones, not larger than eggs, should be a scattered, and settled with hammers between the interstices of the largest. Over this a small quantity of any hard clay, just sufficient to cover the stones, should be spread; if mixed with gravel it will be better.⁴

The unknown writer went on to recognize that once the road had carried traffic, men should return with hammers to break up any of the larger rocks that had come to the surface and that this should be done every couple of months, up to four times before the road could be deemed complete — a process that was virtually never followed once a stone road was initially laid in early Upper Canada.

As was the case with early road technology, bridges were simply designed and crudely constructed in the 1700s. By the middle of the next century, bridges on major roads would begin to take on some complexity and require more skilled workers than road building — carpenters and stonemasons in particular.

With the need for roads and bridges, and their importance to the settlement and the economy of Upper Canada becoming established, governments of the time weren’t quick to get in the game by any means. It was still a British colony, but the British had their own problems in their vast empire, and worrying about roads in Upper Canada did not make the priority list. The fur trade didn’t need roads to flourish. The first Parliament of Upper Canada in the 1790s lacked both the funding ability and organizational capacity to be of much help in developing roads and besides, was still much more focussed on building Upper Canada’s future based on military and trading outposts connected by water transportation routes.

The first European settlers in Ontario arrived to find a land of lakes and forests — over 71 million hectares from the deciduous hardwoods in the south to the coniferous boreal regions of the north.

The First Road Crews: Labour and Statute Labour

Next to money, the major impediment to getting roads built in the 1700s was labour — more specifically, the lack of it. There was no government funding so there was no way to pay workers for building roads or hire contractors to manage the work. Military personnel were used to build the major roads in the late 1700s, but only when they were not mustered at a fort, anticipating attack. Some contract labour was also employed in building the military roads that had funding attached to them. After the military work crews, labour was a volunteer proposition, but unless a road was going to specifically make their life rosier, very few were willing to build them out of a sense of civic duty. Farmers could scarcely clear their own land and keep their farms going on their own without taking weeks out of the planting and growing seasons to build community roads.

One of the commonest ways to find workers to build new roads in the 1700s was to make it a condition of a land grant. Settlers with grants had to meet a series of requirements before they actually got the title to their property. Within the first year a specified number of acres of farmland had to be cleared and planted and a permanent dwelling constructed. Some public road building duty was also a requirement of finally attaining property owner status.

It was obvious that something had to be done to put the availability of road building labour on a stable basis. The solution embraced was the formalization of the system of statute labour that had been used in an ad hoc manner through the 1700s. The province’s road building would still be dependent on unpaid civilian workers but going forward it would be an enforceable legal responsibility as opposed to a volunteer service.

The first highway legislation was passed by the first Parliament of Upper Canada in 1793. As well as formalizing statute labour, it also set up the Justices of the Peace as highways commissioners in their own districts. The commissioners were in charge of elected overseers from the community, or Pathmasters who were responsible for delivering the local road program of the time, superintending new work, and ensuring that repairs were made to roads, bridges, and streets. The Justices of the Peace were also empowered to appoint surveyors in each county who were to lay out the public highways. Public highways were defined by the Act as those roads laid out by surveyors, designated by Acts of Parliament or built with public money, roads on which statute labour was performed, and all roads running through Native lands.

It was also the Pathmaster’s duty to enforce the dictates of statute duty. This system required all citizens of parishes or townships to provide their own tools and equipment and contribute their labour to the building of roads. At first, in 1793, (male) citizens of age were required to work 12 eight-hour days per year on the roads to pay their civic dues. If a man had a team of horses or oxen and a cart or plough, he could reduce his time commitment by up to six days if he provided an able man to operate the team and equipment for the other six days. If they had some money, which few settlers did, a man could have his statute labour commuted by paying a fine for each day of commutation, although a minimum of three days labour was required of everyone. The money paid to escape statue labour would be the first form of regular funding for road building materials and equipment — essentially the first form of road taxes.

Statute labour may have been the primary means of getting local roads built in the Upper Canada of the 1700s but it was also a primary irritant to the people who had to travel considerable distances from their homes to do the work, often at just the time their own farms required ploughing, planting, or harvesting. This objection was somewhat addressed by changes in 1810 that declared statute labour could not be required between May 10 and June 10 each year, or between July 1 and October 1, but even those considerations did not make early settlers any happier with the civic labour requirements. Few did their stints willingly and most avoided the duty if they could find a way. Their local politicians and civic leaders heard their complaints loud, clear, and often.

Statute labour was often a flashpoint for political debate, being as it was essentially an early form of taxation, except that if you couldn’t pay the tax you had to do the work. The laws changed often over the early 1800s, with many variations on the rules for commutation and a discernible shift over time away from requiring the labour and simply looking for the money. Nevertheless, the statute labour system was essential to the building and maintenance of Upper Canada’s local roads and public highways until the latter half of the 1800s and the advent of the toll roads, when it had become unrealistic to expect that groups of settlers doing unpaid public service could any longer build and maintain the reliable, better-quality roads and bridges that the growing province demanded.

John Graves Simcoe and the Military Roads

John Graves Simcoe was the first lieutenant governor of the newly created province of Upper Canada, appointed to the post in 1793. A British army officer who had made his name in the American Revolution, history recalls him at the same time as a bit of an eccentric with a big ego and as a visionary planner and builder of Upper Canada. Arising from his visions of transforming the wilderness of the new province into a replica of England, there is a good argument for calling Simcoe the first significant road builder in Ontario.

Simcoe’s grand plan for Upper Canada was to move the capital to London from its first home in Newark. Moving the capital made sense to him since Newark was on the American border and susceptible to attack from enemies just across the Niagara River. In relocating to London, Simcoe’s strategy included connecting London by road to major points in Upper Canada and ultimately a continuous highway from London to Quebec. Such a road already existed between Kingston and Lower Canada, to which Simcoe would build from the west.

For Simcoe, who first and foremost had military responsibilities, the development of new roads was imperative to the protection of Upper Canada at a time when the British hold on its North American colony was still tenuous, and conflict with American invaders was a real and constant threat. At the same time, though, Simcoe wanted to build new roads to further his larger plans for encouraging settlement and economic development in the province. Settlement was important to the British for providing an agricultural infrastructure to support the fur trade and later the logging industry, but not important enough to allocate money to build roads. On the other hand, if a road had a demonstrable military purpose there was usually funding available. The roads built by Simcoe and others at the end of the 1700s and well into the next century were known as military roads and were built for military objectives, but at the same time they were instrumental in facilitating settlement and supporting commerce.

Simcoe’s superior, Governor-General Lord Dorchester, rejected the idea of moving the capital of Upper Canada to London but accepted Simcoe’s second choice of York, and the move was accomplished in 1793. That didn’t dampen Simcoe’s enthusiasm for continuing to open up the province to the west with major new road projects or the hope that his London capital idea might yet one day become a reality. With the seat of government now in York, Simcoe’s first project was construction of the first piece of what he envisioned as a highway eventually connecting London with York and straight through to Montreal. It was officially called Dundas Street after British Secretary of State Henry Dundas, but this section is still known today as the Governor’s Road. It was completed by 100 of Simcoe’s Queen’s Rangers in 1793 to connect the thriving community at Dundas to settlements west and around Lake Ontario in the Niagara area. The next year the road pushed on to the forks of La Tranche, which he renamed the Thames River, accomplishing at least part of his plan to connect London to Quebec.

An eastern extension of Dundas Street to connect York at the mouth of the Humber River with the Town of Dundas was contracted to an American road builder, Asa Danforth, who undertook the contract for the equivalent of $90 per mile. He completed the road in 1796, and by 1799 Dundas Street from Burlington Bay to York had been improved considerably. Plans were announced to extend it 120 miles from York to the head of the Bay of Quinte.

The longest road for which Simcoe is given credit is the Kingston Road connecting York to Kingston along the north shore of Lake Ontario. This was often called the York Road at the time, and Asa Danforth also carried out this contract, completing the 63-mile (101 km) road from York to Port Hope in December 1799. Danforth’s specifications required a road 33 feet wide, of which 16 and a half feet had to be smooth and level and as close to the middle of the right of way as possible. But the project didn’t go smoothly by any means. Danforth claimed the government didn’t pay him as they had promised and had reneged on promises of land grants to his workers. One suspects his main concern, though, was the land grants promised to him that did not materialize. In its defense, the government suggested his work was not acceptable given that large sections of the corduroy road had washed out in the first year, several bridges had collapsed, and there were still many rotting stumps and underbrush impeding passage in many places.

The inspector on the project was senior surveyor W. Chewett, and his report is a little less political but revels some of concerns about the final product. He found there were knowls and hillocks that needed to be levelled and hollows that needed filling. There were rotten logs, stumps, and underbrush to be removed, and although bridges and causeways were not too bad a few could be improved. Chewett assessed the new road as acceptable for winter use and figured an ox could make 16–18 miles a day with a loaded sled. Horses, he said, could likely travel 35–40 miles per day in the winter. Spring, fall, and much of the summer, though, were a different story. The road would not be usable much of the time, he wrote, and there was zero chance it would be maintained at all because there were only four settlers along its length at the time.⁵

Simcoe’s greatest achievement as a road builder was also planned to serve military purposes, but in serving those objectives it also provided the impetus for settlement of Simcoe County. In planning to build Yonge Street, Simcoe was looking for a short cut to Georgian Bay, the jumping off point for the most western British fur trading post at Michilimackinac, where lakes Michigan and Huron meet. Such a land link between Lake Ontario and Lake Simcoe would then allow easy access to Georgian Bay via water and would avoid a much longer water passage on Lakes Erie and Huron. Writing to Secretary of State Henry Dundas in October, 1793, Simcoe advised that I have ascertained by a Route hitherto unknown but to some Indian Hunters, that there is an easy Portage between York and the Waters which fall into Lake Huron of not more than thirty miles in extent, and through a County perfectly suited for agricultural Purposes.⁶

By the time he wrote the letter in October, Simcoe was already on his way with a group of soldiers, surveyors, and Native guides to follow the old Carrying Place Trail north from the mouth of the Humber River to Lake Simcoe (originally named Lac aux Claies by the French and renamed by Simcoe after his father, although some say after himself). This route followed the marshy areas along the Holland River and did not meet Simcoe’s expectations but on the return trip to York he found the route that his new military highway would take: south from Holland Landing via Bond Lake and the branches of the Don River. According to military tradition, the 33-mile (53 km) road was carved through the bush in a straight line from York to Holland Landing.

Surveying and clearing started at Holland Landing early in 1794 but Simcoe had to send his work crews, his Queen’s Rangers, to Niagara in 1795 to meet the threat of an American attack, and the project was delayed. The road was completed by February of 1796, after Simcoe contracted with renowned surveyor Augustus Jones to get it finished. He also relied on assistance from each settler along the route, who was required to clear six acres of land within a year and provide some road building labour. Simcoe also had convicted petty criminals removing tree stumps. The Stump Act of 1800 would formalize the practice of using convicts, alcohol offenders mostly, to remove stumps on public road projects.

As was typical, as soon as it was built maintenance became an issue for the new link to the northern districts. On its completion it was a stretch to call Yonge Street a road, with many stumps not removed and sections sinking in the marshy areas. Trees, brush, and other construction debris remained unburned. There was no public money to maintain the road and no early settlers on the route to do the work for free. Fortunately, some nominal maintenance was made possible by the North West Company, major competitors with the Hudson’s Bay Company in the fur trade until they merged, which used Yonge Street as a main thoroughfare for moving trading goods to the north and furs back to the shipping ports. The company invested £12,000 ($60,000) between 1799 and 1812 toward keeping the road open and as useable as possible.

The First Road Builders

While Simcoe may have been the visionary planner of the new roads in Ontario, the architect of many was Augustus Jones, a farmer, militia officer, and surveyor born in New York State in 1757. In 1787 Jones and various family members settled in the Niagara Peninsula in Saltfleet Township. Jones was appointed a Crown surveyor the same year and became a deputy district surveyor.

No surveyor of the time could claim close to the number of extensive tracts of Upper Canada surveyed by Jones in the 1790s. By his own account they include most of the Townships from Fort Erie to the head of Lake Ontario, lands along the Grand River, the north shore of Lake Ontario from Toronto to the Trent River, Dundas and Yonge Streets, and many town plots and township boundaries around Newark and York. Jones also dabbled in land speculation and used the grant system to acquire many tracts of prime land that he sold off to support his family in his later years.

Augustus Jones was an enigma, a true wilderness explorer who was instrumental in laying out large parts of the province for settlement. He lived as equally comfortably as a farmer as he did in the wilderness with the Native people he employed in his survey teams. In 1898 he married the daughter of a Mohawk chief and at times served as an agent to perhaps the most famous Mohawk leader, Joseph Brant, for land purchases. Jones was employed by Brant for many surveys of Native lands along the Grand River.

Jones left the public service in 1800 and farmed for many years. In his 70s, he moved north to Cold Springs, where he died in 1836 on his 1,200-acre estate on Dundas Street, east of Paris.⁷

One of the most colourful and notorious characters of the late 1700s who finds his way into road building history is the aforementioned Asa Danforth. Born in Massachusetts in 1768, Danforth was a salt miner/manufacturer who appeared in Ontario to take up residence in 1797. After building the Ancaster to York section of Dundas Street, Danforth became embroiled in a battle with the Simcoe government. Danforth had been involved in promoting settlement in new townships in Southwestern Ontario and would seek land and compensation from the government over claims that he had been promised more than the 1,200 acres for his role in organizing and attracting settlers. Danforth was eventually accused of fraud and an investigation ensued in 1799.

History doesn’t describe how he pulled it off, but in the midst of all these legal and political wranglings in April 1799, Danforth somehow managed to convince the government to give him a contract to build another road. It would be a major route to connect the mouth of the Humber River at York with the mouth of the Trent River to the east. And it was a construction project that went from bad to worse from the start. Completion of the road, including causeways and bridges, was to be by July 1, 1800, allowing for little more than a year of construction. Danforth was jailed briefly in the U.S. after he ran into financial problems but returned to Upper Canada in May 1800. Granted an extension, he completed the project by December and then the arguments began about his full payment for the job. A disgruntled Danforth left the province to work his salt leases again and spent the next few years trying to rally political support in the U.S. to overthrow the British in Upper Canada — a dalliance that never amounted to anything.⁸

Possibly the first organized road crews available for hire were former members of Butler’s Rangers, a militia of irregulars formed in the United States in 1777 by John Butler. The Rangers were involved in many bloody battles on the British side. After they were disbanded in 1774, many of the Rangers stayed together and came to Upper Canada to live. Available in crews, they were mainstays of most of Simcoe’s visionary road projects including Dundas Street, Yonge Street, and the Road to York, where some contract labour was used.

Post Roads

In support of his obsession with moving the provincial capital of Upper Canada to London, which Simcoe never abandoned even after Dorchester made him locate it in York in 1793, he also established a post road from Burlington Bay to the Thames River, at the current City of Woodstock.

Post roads were common in early Upper Canada. The road between Kingston and Montreal was a post road, as was Simcoe’s Dundas Street. Post roads were simply roads that featured a regular line of post houses along their route where travellers could eat, rest, and change horses and vehicles for the next leg of their trip. Like the toll roads to follow, post houses were operated by the private sector. The post master had exclusive rights to supply and charge for carriages but was obligated under the threat of penalty to have conveyances ready when they were demanded. Each post master had to have a specified number of carriages and would often have subcontractors called aides de posto to provide additional ones if they were needed. Travellers of the day would often complain that the quality of the carriages kept by the post master was questionable, and they were often wanting of repair.

The post roads enabled the introduction of the stagecoach to Upper Canada, making it possible for the common traveller to take longer, multi-day trips by land that would previously have been virtually impossible.

Steamships to Steam Engines: H²O Highways and the Rail Roads

As Upper Canadians awoke to the 19th century, roads were barely a blip on the radar as infrastructure needed to support further settlement and economic development of Upper Canada . As settlement necessarily pressed inland, the need for roads to serve local needs and to connect settlements was established, but their development was still a slow and agonizing one. The British Parliament was far more interested in continuing to improve water routes to support far northern fur trading profits and the growing timber trade along the St. Lawrence and Ottawa River routes than in how settlers were to get grain to the mill or their children to school.

So in the early 1800s London embarked on an ambitious strategy to build canals in Upper Canada, signalling that for the foreseeable future, transportation would continue to be water-based and the development of land roads would continue to be a distant afterthought, although, in the broader sense of the definition of roads, the canals were the roadways of the day. In 1832, government loans and debentures for the Burlington and Desjardins Canals and Cobourg Harbour alone were £10,478. For roads they were able to find but £75. By the mid-1800s the threat of attack from the United States or foreign powers was greatly diminished and military roads were not the priority they were 50 years earlier.

The canals were built to provide continuous water connections between the major settled areas of Upper Canada on the main water routes, and they were ideal for developing steamboat travel on the inland waterways. By extension, the canals became commercial corridors along which settlement could and did occur. Despite the subdued threat of war from the U.S., the canals were also built to serve the same purposes as the military roads, as secure supply lines and for troop movement. The fascination with canals was not limited to Upper Ontario, which embarked on a flurry of construction between about 1824 and the latter part of the century. Lower Canada was building canals too, as were the Maritimes.

Ontario counties and municipalities in 1867.

Even before the British government launched its canal expansion strategy, explorers and fur traders were building crude early versions of them to connect waterways and to bypass rapids. Governor Haldimand had ordered a small section of locks at the rapids in the Soulanges section of the St. Lawrence River as early as 1779. In 1819, the North West Company engineered a rudimentary lock to manage the rapids on the St. Mary’s River to allow them to push their western explorations forward from Lake Superior. Three early canals were built (1819–34) on the Ottawa River. Then came the government money for canals and the engineering masterpiece of the day, the Rideau Canal, which was completed in 1832 by Colonel By and the British military to connect Ottawa by inland waterways to Kingston. Smaller canals were completed at Cornwall and Williamsburg to manage sections of rapids on the St. Lawrence between Lake St. Louis and Lake Ontario.

In 1895, the rapids at Sault Ste. Marie were tamed for shipping north into Lake Superior, with completion of the locks at the Sault that operated in conjunction with four locks on the American side.

Colonel By and the Rideau Canal

Like most other early roads, whether land or water-based, the Rideau Canal was envisioned first and foremost as a military defense after the War of 1812 to maintain the vital links between Montreal and Kingston, should the Americans threaten the province from the St. Lawrence River. Work started on the canal in 1826, and when it was completed six years later, the Royal coffers were lighter in the amount of £822,000. The Rideau Canal was also an important commercial corridor until 1849, when the rapids on the St. Lawrence River had all been conquered by locks and provided a more direct route. The Rideau Canal delivered tens of thousands of immigrants to their new settlements in the interior of Eastern Ontario and allowed timber and grain to be moved from the farms and forests to Kingston and Montreal.

In February 1817, the lieutenant governor posted a tender advertisement in several of the larger Upper Canada daily newspapers. It called for design and construction of a canal system and asked for proposals to build a navigable water route from Kingston to Ottawa, for opening the communication in the direction of the Rideau Lake, and the waters communicating from thence to Mud Lake [Newboro Lake] and from thence to Kingston. No bids were received. Perhaps the project was seen as too risky by the contractors of the day and/or their financial backers. Also likely is the fact that commercial interests were more focussed on the St. Lawrence River systems as the preferred choice for shipping.

In 1825 the job of designing and building the Rideau Canal was given to British Colonel John By, who had done his military service with the Royal Engineers. The colonel has earned legendary status in engineering history for managing to complete a project many believed impossible. It stands as the most impressive civil engineering and construction project of its time: a continuous water super highway running 125 miles (202 km) through forests, swamp, and the hard granites of the Canadian Shield, with 52 dams and 47 masonry locks.

Colonel By had been retired early from his military career with the Royal Engineers and was enjoying a nice pension in England when he got the call back to active duty to take charge of the Rideau Canal project. We aren’t sure how he felt about being roused from a life of leisure to build a canal in the backwoods of the colony but the next year he landed in Quebec City. He soon moved to Montreal and set up offices, then to Wright’s Town (Gatineau) in September 1826 to get the project underway. Some small contracts were called that winter for clearing trees, site preparation, and stone masonry.

Tomas Burrows’s sketch from 1830 shows the upper lock at Brewer’s Mill (part of modern-day Ottawa) under construction.

He would use local contractors to complete smaller sections of the project, but Colonel By was able to get about 150 sappers and miners from the Royal Engineers to handle what would be some of the more difficult construction work. The sappers and miners were a special division of the Royal Engineers experienced in construction and particularly in excavation and blasting. The Royal Engineers, and the colonel himself, were to design the work and the Engineers would act as project managers in overseeing the work of the contractors.

Colonel By divided the project up into 23 sections, each of which he thought a contractor could complete in two years. Contracts were let for each section and the work was done by thousands of unskilled labourers, roughly half Irish immigrants and half French Canadian. Skilled tradesmen included the carpenters, blacksmiths,