The Toronto skyline viewed from Centre Island in Lake Ontario, featuring the CN Tower and the Rogers Centre (the domed structure), home to baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays.
27 August 2021
The name of the city in which I used to live is from the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka (Mohawk) word tkaronto / Aterón:to, meaning “trees standing in the water.” The name is a good example of how place names can shift geographically. It is not unusual for a name to start in one place and, over time, move to eventually become associated with a different place entirely. The name Toronto also has a long-standing false etymology attached to it.
Toronto was originally a reference to Native-American fishing weirs consisting of pilings (the so-called “trees standing in water”) with nets strung between them, driven into the narrows between Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching, a location that is about 85 miles (137 km) north of the present city. Samuel de Champlain described the weirs in 1615 but did not record the Indigenous word. But a 1703 English translation of Louis Armand de Lom d'Arce Lahontan’s New Voyages to North-America refers to what is now called Matchedash Bay, an arm of Georgian Bay, as the Bay of Toronto. And a map accompanying the book shows the location of the fishing weirs and labels it Torontogerõn.
The name gradually drifted south, following a trade route from the interior to the shores of Lake Ontario. What is now the Humber River, which runs somewhat west of what is now the city center, began to be called Rivière Toronto. Eventually, the French built Fort Rouillé, also called Fort Toronto, located on the shore of Lake Ontario in what is now Exhibition Place. The French garrison abandoned and burned the fort in 1759 during the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War), but the name Toronto stuck to the site. The French fort and the name Toronto for the site are mentioned in the journal of Robert Rogers, an officer in the British army during the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War) in the entries for the period 30 September to 1 October 1760:
There is a track of about 300 acres of cleared ground, round the place where the French had a fort, that was called Fort Toronto. The soil here is principally clay. The deer are extremely plenty in this country. Some Indians were hunting at the mouth of the river, who run into the woods at our approach, very much frightened. They came in, however, in the morning, and testified their joy at the news of our success against the French. They told us “that we could easily accomplish our journey from thence to Detroit in eight days: that when the French traded at that place, the Indians used to come with their poultry from Michlimakana, down the river Toronto: that the partage [sic] was but twenty miles from that to a river falling into Lake Huron, which had some falls, but none very considerable: they added, that there was a Carrying-place of fifteen miles from some westerly part of Lake Erie, to a river running without any falls, thro’ several Indian towns into Lake St. Clair.
I think Toronto a most convenient place for a factory, and that from thence we may easily settle the north-side of Lake Erie.
We left Toronto the 1st of October, steering south, right across the west end of Lake Ontario. At dark we arrived at the south-shore, five miles west of Fort Niagara, some of our boats now become exceeding leaky and dangerous.
In 1787 the British bought a thousand square kilometers of land from the Mississauga Indians in what was known as the Toronto Purchase. But in 1793, when the British constructed their first settlement on the site of what is now the city, they called it York, after the Duke of York, Frederick Augustus, who had just won a military victory in Flanders against the French revolutionaries. The name York was an unpopular choice, because many preferred the native name they were familiar with and because it could be confused with New York or any of a number of other Yorks, but it remained official until 1834 when the city was incorporated under the name Toronto. Vestiges of the York name remain, for example the neighborhood I used to live in is known as North York.
There is a story that the name Toronto is from a Native American word meaning “place of meeting,” supposedly a reference to a grouping of native villages on the shores of Lake Ontario. This origin is incorrect. This false etymology was first promulgated by historian Henry Scadding in his 1873 book Toronto of Old, in which he assumed the name comes from the Huron toronton, defined by Gabriel Sagard in his 1636 Dictionnarie de la Langue Huronne as “il y en a beaucoup” (there are many). Scadding mentions the “trees rising out of the water” explanation, but dismisses it as a misinterpretation by Europeans, who upon hearing the word assumed it applied to the tall trees in the area around the native settlements.
Sources:
Champlain, Samuel De. Voyages of Samuel de Champlain 1604–1618. W.L. Grant, ed. Original Narratives of Early American History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907, 288. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.
Lahontan, Louis Armand de Lom d'Arce. New Voyages to North-America, vol. 1 of 2. London: H. Bonwicke, et al., 1703, 182 Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
Pearce, Margaret Wickens. Coming Home to Indigenous Place Names in Canada (map). Canadian-American Center, University of Maine, 2017.
Rayburn, Alan. Oxford Dictionary of Canadian Place Names. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford UP Canada, 1999.
Rogers, Robert. Journals. London: J. Millan, 1765, 206–07. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
Scadding, Henry. Toronto of Old. Toronto: Adam, Stevenson, 1873, 3,73–75. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credit: Aaron Davis, 2020. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.