This walk tells the story of water in the North Toronto neighbourhood, from the earliest settlement, a Huron tribe (Wendat), to the British Era when this was farm country, to 100 years ago when North Toronto was a bedroom community at the edge of urban sprawl, to the present, when North Toronto has become Midtown, and is square in the geographic centre of the GTA.

This neighbourhood has an abundant supply of fresh water from underground aquifers. We will be exploring one hill (a drumlin) which has many springs that still flow, and also the valley of the now-buried Mud Creek (hence the term ‘lost river’). The Wendat tribe settled and farmed here in the 1400s. Much later, in the 1800s, Europeans also established a farming community on this land. which soon grew into a bedroom suburb.

As North Toronto grew, the local ground water supply was quickly outgrown and polluted prompting a shift in the 1900s to an engineered water supply that tapped into the waters of Lake Ontario. Today, urban sprawl is threatening the headwaters of Toronto’s rivers in the
Oak Ridges Moraine.