Toronto Is Hiding Something Nobody Talks About

The name on your map says Toronto, but it belongs to a row of wooden fishing stakes more than 100 kilometres north, driven into the bottom of the Atherley Narrows more than 5,000 years ago. The Crown's claim to the land under the city began with a deed that left the boundaries blank. The CN Tower stands on what used to be lake bottom, and in 2017 the lake rose to its highest level on record and shut the island park for 88 days. What's beneath YOUR town? Personalized 15-page report — the rock, the name, the vanished places, your town's oldest map → https://hiddenprovinces.com This documentary follows the name Toronto down the Toronto Carrying Place from the Mnjikaning fish weirs at Lake Simcoe to the Seneca towns of Teiaiagon at Baby Point and Ganatsekwyagon on the Rouge, the French Fort Toronto, and John Graves Simcoe, who took the word off the map at both ends of the trail in 1793. Then the paperwork under the city: the 1787 Toronto Purchase with its blank deed, the 1805 redo for ten shillings, the gunshot lands, and the settlements of 2010 and 2026. The Battle of York in 1813 and its link to the scorch marks on the White House. The first parliament found under a car wash. The lakefill that put Front Street hundreds of metres from the water and left Fort York and the Queen's Wharf lighthouse stranded inland. The Toronto Islands, the storm of 1858, the Gibraltar Point lighthouse murder, and the 11,000-year-old footprints found 21 metres under the harbour in 1908 and destroyed. Lake Ontario as a closed basin with no outlet, the Scarborough Bluffs, the last Atlantic salmon, the straightened Don and the oil company's bend, Hurricane Hazel and Raymore Drive, the ravines, the Leslie Street Spit, the floods of 2017 and 2019, and the Don's new mouth at Ookwemin Minising. Sources include Parks Canada, Natural Resources Canada, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and Talking Treaties, the 1805 treaty text, the White House Historical Association, Heritage Toronto, Waterfront Toronto, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, the Ontario Heritage Trust, the International Joint Commission, the Insurance Bureau of Canada, Eamonn O'Keeffe's research on the Radelmüller case, and Anderson and Lewis in the Journal of Paleolimnology (2012). Where sources disagree, on the name, the footprints, the Raymore Drive toll and the 2019 lake level, the narration says so. Subscribe to The Hidden Provinces — beneath the map.