As railways changed from coal to diesel, the coal boats no longer called, and tracks were lifted from most of the lake’s port lands. Kingston, Deseronto, Belleville, Trenton, Cobourg, Port Hope, and Whitby all lost their rail links to the lake. New industries preferred truck-friendly locations by the highway and away from the antiquated harbour sites. The fishing industry all but vanished, with only a handful of fishing boats still operating in the Prince Edward County area. Many municipalities were pondering the fate of their waterfronts, and several undertook major overhauls, ripping up old wharves and replacing them with marinas. Warehouses and grain elevators made way for hotels and condominiums — Kingston and Toronto being the main culprits here. In many locations, public access was restored and rebuilt, allowing for a renewed era of waterside recreation. Cobourg, Hamilton, Toronto (despite its wall of condos), and Burlington are prime examples of such concerted efforts. Others, such as Port Darlington and Deseronto, await their turn.
Despite the waves of sweeping change that have altered the Lake Ontario shore, its heritage lingers today; some well-known and heavily promoted, some known to only a few. In these pages, I hope to open a modern-day window on the evidence of Lake Ontario’s hidden heritage, all the way from Queenston to Kingston.
Niagara: it’s a word that brings to mind different images. To movie buffs it’s a classic 1953 Marilyn Monroe film of the same name; to history buffs it’s the many battles that raged across the torrential river; to tourists it’s the foaming falls that leap from a limestone precipice; to wine lovers it’s the home of the latest VQA; and to comedians it’s the age old joke about the falls being the second biggest disappointment on a new bride’s honeymoon.
But beyond the tour buses and the neon cacophony of Clifton Hill, Niagara hides a treasure trove of Ontario’s lesser-known heritage features — the vestiges of a strange buried gorge, the ruins of an ancient fort, a forgotten ghost road, some of Ontario’s oldest surviving homes and churches, as well as a tale of heroism, and a long forgotten camp movement. For this Lake Ontario adventure, only that portion of Niagara that links to the lake is explored, mainly the area north of Queenston.
To get the whole picture, it is necessary to return to the ice age. As noted earlier, for an estimated two hundred thousand years, mighty glaciers came and went across the landscape that today is Ontario, the latest finally beginning to release its icy grip around twenty thousand years ago. Even as the ground of central Ontario began to emerge from the ice, a mighty lobe remained lodged stubbornly against the stone ramparts of the Niagara Escarpment. Before doing so, it had disgorged a massive deposit of sand and gravel that completely submerged a preglacial gorge that had served as an outlet for what had been an earlier version of the Niagara River.
When the ice lobe finally receded from the escarpment, Lake Erie once more began to empty northward. With its old outlet now sealed, the waters sought another path, and began to carve a new defile, creating today’s Niagara Gorge. Flowing northward, the waters entered a lake that was much higher than the Lake Ontario we know today (Lake Iroquois). As the waters lapped against the escarpment’s cliffs, they left behind a series of gravely beach ridges and sandy lacustrine deposits, both of which would define the history of Niagara.
With the glaciers finally gone, early animals and humans began to filter onto the landscape. In Niagara, however, there were two major impediments blocking their easy movement. One was the craggy cliff-lined ridge of the escarpment, which in the Niagara area is at its steepest. This left only one feasible route, that which followed the buried gorge wherein once flowed the preglacial river. The second impediment was that posed by the raging new river itself. Thus, movement both north–south and east–west was severely restricted.
Once the first aboriginal populations were gone, either by annihilation or assimilation, the tribe known as the Neutral moved in to occupy much of the western side of the river. The various nations of the mighty Iroquois Confederacy roamed the forests to the east, and eventually the Neutrals succumbed to Iroquois supremacy and disappeared from history.
Next came a parade of Europeans, beginning with the French: La Salle, Father Hennepin,1 and Champlain all trouped through Niagara, each awestruck by the mighty falls, but also by the strategic importance of the river and the high cliffs. The British were next. In 1763, having gained much of North America from the French during the French and Indian War, they constructed important military outposts on both sides of the Niagara River at its Lake Ontario outlet — Fort Niagara on the east, and Fort George on the west.
More war was to follow. In 1776, England’s thirteen American colonies decided they had had enough of England’s domination and declared their independence. Seven years later they achieved it. The east side of the river became American, the west side stayed British. While the falls remained the focus above the Niagara Escarpment, two key towns began to take shape below — Queenston and Butlersburg, which later went on to become Newark and then Niagara (and now Niagara-on-the-Lake).
In 1807, the deputy postmaster-general of British North America, George Heriot, toured the Niagara area and noted that
Queenstown is a neat and flourishing place, distinguished by the beauty and grandeur of its situation. Here all the merchandise and stores for the upper part of the province are landed from vessels in which they have been conveyed from Kingston…. Between Niagara and Queenstown the river affords in every part a noble harbour for vessels, the water being very deep, the stream not too powerful, the anchorage good, and the banks on either side of considerable altitude.2
At first Queenston was the more important of the two. Situated at the immediate base of the escarpment, it became the terminus of a key portage around the falls and the gorge. Beginning at the end of navigation on the Niagara River above the falls, at Chippewa, the portage struck inland and followed a winding route, descending through the buried gorge to the head of navigation of the lower Niagara River, namely Queenston. To this day, Portage Road in Niagara Falls follows much of that early trail.
Named by Upper Canada’s first lieutenant governor, John Graves Simcoe (who introduced Anglo-centric nomenclature to most of his domain), Queenston quickly attracted the shipping business of local industrialist Robert Hamilton.3 Here, in the dying years of the eighteenth century, he built wharves and storehouses from which he shipped flour, guns, and other necessities, offloading them from schooners and placing them onto wagons for the tiring trek up the escarpment.
But the Americans were never far away, and neither was their ambition to bring England’s remaining North American colonies into their rightful fold, namely as part of the now-named United States of America. To their surprise, most of the Loyalist inhabitants of Upper Canada didn’t share that goal. Thus began the War of 1812. Battles raged back and forth. York was burned in 1813; in retaliation, Washington was put to the torch, although private businesses and homes were spared. It is said that the White House was so named following a whitewashing to remove the smoke stains on the building. After the British took Fort Detroit, the Americans launched a series of raids throughout southwestern Ontario. One of the more decisive battles took place early in the war at Queenston Heights.
Because of Queenston’s strategic importance as the terminus of the vital Niagara portage route, it was defended by General Isaac Brock and a force of British troops. Its significant location was also the reason that the Americans wanted it. On October 13, 1812, American troops slipped across the river and surprised the British, killing Brock early in the battle. At first seeming victorious, the Americans then had to face a Native force. Although small in number, the warriors, led by