[URBAN NOTE] "When Mississauga Was “Toronto”"

[rfmcdonald]

insauga.com explores how Mississauga stopped being Toronto. Literally.

Were it not for the population growth in what's now Mississauga, this website might have been named something else. Why? From 1806 to 1968, the majority of Mississauga was known as "Toronto Township".

Rewind to Samuel de Champlain's explorations of this area in 1615, and you'll find maps using "tkaronto", a Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk) word, to mark a waterway up at Lake Simcoe, past Barrie.

Over the next years, variants of "Toronto" were used for a wetland on Lake Simcoe, Lake Simcoe itself, a canoe route along the Humber River, and even the Humber River itself (Riviere Taronto). Eventually, a fort named Toronto was established on what are now the grounds of Exhibition Place. Also known as Fort Rouille, it was the earliest permanent non-Aboriginal settlement in the area.

[. . .]

According to an account of the story by Peel warden and Toronto Township reeve Mary Fix, Simcoe was partial to the name Toronto for the new capital of Upper Canada. His associates, though, were cold to the option, preferring to use British names as aspirational goals for the new colony. When the community was finally laid, a ceremony was held on August 27, 1793, to announce the name of "York" for this "temporary" capital of Upper Canada. (Similarly, the settlement of Niagara was renamed Newark, and Cataraqui became Kingston.) In the words of an Irish map-maker working in Canada, "It is to be lamented that the Indian names, so grand and sonorous, should ever have been changed for others."

A little west, what became Toronto Township was being drawn out. Following the "Mississauga purchase" of land from the local Aboriginals, the name Toronto was given "legally and officially" to the area in 1805. (Alexander Grant, a member of the Executive and Legislative Council of Upper Canada wanted to call two other Townships "Alexander" and "Grant", but was overruled.) It's thought that Grant would have been familiar with the name from Fort Toronto, and perhaps even Simcoe's preferences, when he named the township. Surveying of the land, which would allow settlement, began in 1806, the year Simcoe died/>b;pclqipte?