List of Ontario Colonization Roads - History

History

During the early-1800s, the government of Upper Canada, a majority of which is now Ontario, appropriated settlers to various lots which had been surveyed along the lake shores of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. The townships established along these fronts contained generally fertile land composed of glacial till and clay-rich loam. As these townships filled up, business opportunities presented themselves for investors to purchase native lands and open them to settlement. The Canada Company was the most successful of these ventures, and attracted settlers to vast areas of land in Western Ontario by building routes such as the Huron Road and the Toronto–Sydenham Road during the 1830s and 1840s. As these areas too filled, the government came under pressure to open up the unforgiving terrain of the Canadian Shield to settlement, and sought to establish a network of east–west and north–south roads between the Ottawa Valley and Georgian Bay. This area was known as the Ottawa–Huron Tract.

In 1847, an exploration survey was carried out by Robert Bell to lay out the lines that would become the Opeongo Road, Hastings Road and Addington Road. The Public Lands Act, passed in 1853, permitted the granting of land to settlers who were at least 18. Those settlers who cleared at least 12 acres (49,000 m2) within four years, built a house within a year and resided on the grant for at least five years would receive the title to that land. The government subsequently built over 1,600 kilometres (1,000 mi) of roads over the following 20 years to provide access to these grants.

However, the promises of fertile land in this new northern tract of wilderness proved false. Beneath thin layers of sparsely spread soil was solid granite. Where this granite descended deeper, valleys formed and filled with muskeg. Despite an early influx of settlers, the vast majority of grants were abandoned by the turn of the century; only 40% remained. During the first half of the 1900s, many of these colonization roads were incorporated into the growing provincial highway network. Some sections were improved to modern highway standards, while others were subsequently bypassed or abandoned. The roads that were not incorporated as highways either became local roads or were consumed by nature.

Though many other roads in the province can be considered "colonization roads", such as the Provincial Road (Highway 2), the Talbot Trail (Highway 3), the Garafraxa Road (Highway 6) and the Penetanguishene Road (Highway 93), they were either constructed for military purposes, or by private investment.