[URBAN NOTE] "A Look Inside the Buried Huron Village in the Heart of Toronto"

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist's Erin Sylvester reports on a now built-over Iroquoian settlement in Toronto's Forest Hill.

Around 950 years ago, the summer sun would have risen over a settlement in what is now Forest Hill. The approximately two-hectare site would likely have been surrounded by a wooden palisade, encircling several longhouses. It’s unknown how many people would have lived there, but they were probably a southern branch of the Huron, or Wendat, people. According to Tales of North Toronto, a 1948 history book by Lyman B. Jackes, there was also a fresh water spring flowing by the village. He also claims that the hills in the area are more recent and were created by covering old sites where food was stored.

Today, children play in a schoolyard where longhouses once stood. There’s no indication of what used to be: a tall, brick building houses young students, a Canadian flag flaps in the wind out front, and children and teachers go about their days.

What we know about the site from the few artifacts and from what Jackes writes is probably as much as we will ever know about this settlement and the people that lived there. The Jackes or Eglinton archaeological site, so named because it was on the land of Lyman Jackes’s family near Eglinton Avenue West, where the village once was, has been erased, buried under the Allenby Public School.

The artifacts that were found at the site have been dated from anywhere between 1450 and 1475. In Tales of North Toronto, Jackes writes that some human remains found at the site seemed to have been burned, possibly when a longhouse caught fire and collapsed.