
ROADS AND TRANSPORTATION IN UPPER CANADA BEFORE 1800
5
the U.S. and settled in southern Ontario following
the American Revolutionary War, which ended in
1783. About 9,000 loyalists had come to nd a new
life in Upper Canada by 1784.
A group of the rst loyalists came from the
north-
eastern 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. e latter, called Cataraqui at the time by
the Mississauga First Nations who had rst settled
there, was a prime beneciary of the inux of loyal
ists,
and it quickly became the major military and eco-
nomic centre of Upper Canada at the time. Cataraqui
had the highest population in Upper Canada until
the 1840s. It was also the rst 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 allow-
ances for roads. e rst major section of road in
eastern Ontario was built in 1783 between Cataraqui
and Bath to the west.
Another inux 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. ey built their rst road
from
Newark to Ancaster in 1785. A third wave of loyal-
ists and some early settlers from Europe chose not to
proceed along the St. Lawrence River to the Great
Lakes water system, choosing rather to branch o to
begin settling 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 just part of the British holdings in North
America. It ocially 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. Most of
its settlers were 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 the 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. e homeland was constantly at war with one nation or another
in the eighteenth and nineteenth 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
Fresh beaver and other
pelts are packaged and
waiting for shipment in
the stock room at a
remote trading post.