During the Summer months, with the reconstruction of Highway #5 or Dundas Street1, the core of the Village of Waterdown has been a permanent scene of potholes, construction equipment and very unhappy motorists. Few people who travel along this much used road will know this is almost certainly the oldest highway in the province of Ontario, and in 1993, the historic routeway will celebrate the Bicentennial of its opening.
York: October 1793: “Captain Smith is returned from cutting the road named Dundas. It is opened for 20 miles. They met with quantities of wild grapes, and put some of the juice in barrels to make vinegar, and Captain Smith told me it turned out very tolerable wine”.
In those few lines from her highly informative and often witty diary, Mrs. John Graves Simcoe, wife of Upper Canada’s first Lieutenant Governor, records the beginnings of this famous old Ontario road.
Although John Graves Simcoe is credited with the original idea of constructing this early highway, the first proposal actually came from his father. Prior to his appointment by the British government, Simcoe had served in the American Revolutionary War, and while there, his father had collected old French maps. Among those that he obtained, one showed a fur trading route from the vicinity of Dundas to the upper waters of the Thames River.
On his arrival in Upper Canada in 1792, Simcoe’s primary task was to initiate and supervise settlement. He was also given the responsibility of formulating plans to deal with the overwhelming fear of invasion from the recently liberated American colonies. His father presented the suggestion that a waterway dug along the fur trader’s route would provide an inland passage, well back from the border and relatively safe from a surprise attack.
After studying the suggestion, and with the expectation of imminent border attacks, John Graves Simcoe and a military party travelled through the western part of the province, from Niagara to the border at Windsor during the winter of 1793. Guided by Indians, and following their trails by foot and sleigh where possible, Simcoe came to the conclusion that a road would be superior, since it would be multipurpose, serving as a military link between Lakes Ontario, Erie, St. Clair and Huron, and as a spur to settlement. Simcoe also reasoned that the American control of shipping on the Great Lakes was certain for several years, and therefore an inland route was the only way to ensure the safe movement of troops and supplies.
The decision to relocated the capital of the province from Newark2 to a sire on the Thames River, where London stands today, initiated the start of the highway. Simcoe reasoned that this new inland capital was a safer location and could be linked to Lake Ontario by the highway he planned, the road running from the Thames to Burlington Bay. From here there would be a link with the network of trails going eastwards to York and onto Kingston, and with a north-south route joining York with Lake Simcoe.
With his Surveyor, Augustus Jones, and accompanied by a guide, Jean Baptiste Rousseau, Lt. Governor John Graves Simcoe selected the exact spot where the work would begin. They entered Burlington Bay from the lake, and proceeded through the marsh at the eastern end3, choosing a site that was a known Indian landing place. Jones began his survey immediately, using a line marked at an angle of 70 degrees west that ran from Coote’s Paradise to the upper forks of the Thames River, a distance of eighty miles.
Work on the first or western section of the route that today is often referred to as “The Governor’s Road”, went as far as the Mohawk Village on the Grand River where Joseph Brant was chief. The actual road cutting under the direction of a Captain Smith, and a company of men of the Queen’s Rangers was completed in less than a month, but opening a road in 1793 involved nothing more than clearing a corridor through the bush, leaving the bigger stumps to rot and often going around very large groups of trees.
York: September 23, 1793: “Captain Smith has gone to open a road to be called Dundas Street, from the head of the Lake to the River La Tranche. He has 100 men with him ….. I hear that they kill rattlesnakes every day, yet not a man has been bitten …… Captain Smith sent two of the snakes in a barrel that I might see them; they were dark and ugly and made a whizzing sound in shaking their rattles when I touched them with a stick”.
The second section of the highway begun in the spring of 1794 went as far as the site of the planned new capital, London. However the departure of Lt. Governor Simcoe from Canada before the road had actually reached the site, and his decision to designate Toronto4 as the official capital, caused work to almost cease completely. Within months this primitive single-lane pathway began to grow over again, and revert to forest, only Simcoe’s foresight saved the road from oblivion.
Immediately work on the trail from Dundas was begun, Governor Simcoe authorized that grants of land along its route be made to the military personnel who had opened it. Although many of these grants were not taken up as farms, enough traffic was generated to make it worthwhile for the new owners to accept the responsibility of keeping their portion of the road open. Acceptance of such a land grant required that the pioneer keep his frontage clear, for the new settler, the road was his lifeline of transport, and to Governor Simcoe it ensured the viability of his road. Even though it remained as little more than a primitive path with mud holes that, as one early humorist wrote, “stretched from one spot to the next”, it ensured that settlement of Upper Canada would come.
© The Waterdown-East Flamborough Heritage Society 1992, 2022.
