Canadian Shield traces the geologic evolution of the Shield, its first tentative exploration by humans starting 11,000 years ago as the last great ice sheets withdrew, its changing economic fortunes as Europeans penetrated its remote rocky vastnesses for furs and metals, and its transformation in the twentieth century into a national icon to Canadians.
Regarded as 'barren' and of no value, much of the Shield was given away in 1670 to a single London-based fur trading company, the Hudson Bay Company, who jealously guarded its northern domain until 1867. This two hundred year long monopoly created a virtual government over a huge piece of North America. Without the HBC, much of it would have passed into American hands and there would have been no 'Canadian' Shield or country called Canada. As a nation, we are indebted to hard rock.
The Sudbury Basin is a complex geological structure dating back millions of years, and where much of Greater Sudbury resides. Thirty-seven miles long and 17 miles wide, it produces most of the world's ores and precious metals. The floor of the basin contains some of the best agricultural land in Ontario. A plaque in Bell Park explains the significance of this geological site, and its role in the province's mining history.
Sudbury and its municipalities carry a history of boom and bust and most of it has to do with the supply and demand of nickel and precious metals mining. Mining practice carry a stigma of pollution and eco-catastrophes, but over the years Greater Sudbury has incorporated world-renouned environmental reclamation policies that has turned the region into a remarkable green space.
The marker says it all. The nickel discovery site in the now-flooded and defunct Murray Mine is where Sudbury's remarkable mining history begins. When the mine finally closed in 1924, more than half a million tons of ore had been shipped from its depths. The marker sits on a large, paved pull-out along regional highway 35, about five kilometers outside Sudbury city centre.
Onaping Falls is a township in Greater Sudbury, and the amalgamation of three smaller towns: Dowling, Onaping, and Levack . A part of the regions historic lumber and mining past, the town sits where the Canadian Shield meets the Sudbury Nickel Irruptive - a massive meteor impact over a billion years old. Here you will find the 46 meter High Falls, plenty of hiking, and incredible rock formations to discovery.
A part of the Niagara Escarpment, the Bruce Peninsula lies between Georgian Bay and the Lake Huron Basin. There are 2 National Parks, 8 Ontario Parks and 4 Federation of Ontario Naturalists Parks located within the Bruce Peninsula. Visitors can find camping, nature hikes, miles of beach, lighthouses, and amazing geological formations. The peninsula is also home to 44 species of wild orchids.
Located on a part of the Niagara Escarpment, Bruce Peninsula National Park is one of the largest protected areas in Southern Ontario. Featuring sculptured cliffs, thousand-year-old cedar trees, hiking, and wildlife, the area brings visitors to part of Ontario's untamed beauty, and an opportunity to see firsthand ancient rock formations and beautiful coast lines.
Saugeen Shores is a town formed by the restructuring of Port Elgin, Southampton, and the township of Saugeen. The area has strong historical ties to fisheries, agriculture, and forestry. Situated next to the Bruce Peninsula, Saugeen Shores offers beautiful beaches on Lake Huron and plenty of outdoor tourist attractions.
Port Carling is an unincorporated community that also acts as the seat for the Township of Muskoka Lakes. Located on the Indian River, it was originally settled by the Ojibwe people in the 1850's before white settlers moved in. In 1869 a post office was established and the area became known as Port Carling, after John Carling the then minister of public works who was a big proponent of the locks connecting the surrounding lakes.
A small community at the northern tip of the Bruce Peninsula, Tobermory is considered the freshwater SCUBA diving capital of the world due to its numerous shipwrecks - especially around Five Fathoms National Marine Park. Known for its biodiversity, Tobermory has at least one species of flower not found in any other part of the world and hosts an annual orchid festival. The area boasts freshwater ecosystems not found anywhere else.
Port Elgin is a community in the greater municipality of Saugeen Shores. Known for its beaches along Lake Huron, and for its proximity to the Bruce Peninsula, Port Elgin began as a distiribution centre for agricultural products. It has always been a recreational stop for tourists.
Forming much of the eastern portion of Toronto's waterfront, Scarborough Bluffs are a geological attraction where 12,000 years of sedimentary rock meet natural erosion from Lake Ontario. At their highest (the area known as Cathedral Bluffs), they rise 90 meters above the lake. The Bluffs have become a community meeting place for people of all ages.
Tours that might be of interest.
Greater Sudbury's history begins as a small outpost for the Canadian Pacific Railway. In 1883, as the transcontinential railway was nearing completion, blasting in an area now known as the Sudbury Basin revealed high concentrations of nickel deposits. Much like the well-documented American gold rushes, this nickel discovery brought in a flood of European settlers, who wanted to reap the rewards of mining.
There's a reason Lake Huron and Huron County are dubbed "Ontario's West Coast". With its thirty thousand islands, Huron has the longest shoreline of any of the Great Lakes, and its northern parks offer plant and wildlife rarely found elsewhere. It is said that in the Bruce Peninsula, there are orchid species not found anywhere else in the world. Plus, being a part of the Niagara Escarpment biosphere, it also boasts unique geological formations.
Ontario rocks! In fact, it rocks so much there's a book with the same title. Of course, the book refers to the wondrous formations found throughout the province - but we like to think a little literary metaphor goes a long way.
This particular tour of Toronto's Waterfront takes you to Scarborough Bluffs and the surrounding area. A spectacular geologial wonder of 12,000 years of sedimentary layers, these bluffs almost seem out of place along Lake Ontario's shores, where they break off at the water's edge.
Headframes dominate the landscape of mining communities in Northeastern Ontario and Northwestern Quebec. Distinctive structures built to house the apparatus at the head of the mine shaft, headframes tower above their surroundings, reminding every resident that without the mine, there would be no reason for their settlement to exist.
John R. Hardy's vivid account of life on a family farm from one hundred years ago to the final auction sale. Generously illustrated with images from family albums that take readers through the seasons: seeding and blossoms, haying and harvest, autumn colour and winter sparkle. His grandparents' farm was often visited by legendary photographer Reuben R. Sallows, who used the Hardys' operation to represent Ontario agriculture.
There are many great Canadians who deserve recognition for what they have done for the nation and its people. This book profiles ten of these individuals who rose above with their courage and compassion, protecting the things that we as a community and as a nation hold close to our hearts. These heroes are men, women and even children throughout four hundred years of this nation's history who deserve our attention and our admiration.
The many Native nations that lived in the eastern Great Lakes region in the seventeenth century are outlined within this educational children's book. The informative descriptions are accompanied by beautiful images that depict the happenings within the lives of these peoples. Children can experience the ways that these Native nations lived as well as the changes that occured with European contact.
A dead body is found on the side of Highway 17 outside Sudbury. Naked, throat slashed, no identification. It disappears from the back of a police van and begins a strange odyssey, making its way, over the course of one early winter day, all around the northern Ontario town and through the lives of eleven very different people.
Along the Shore examines the Toronto waterfront, past and present, through the lens of four lakefront communities and districts — the Scarborough shore (including the Bluffs), the Beach, the Island, and the Lakeshore (New Toronto, Mimico, Humber Bay, and Long Branch). Each retains a direct and immediate connection with Lake Ontario and the natural world.
Despite the "green" benefits of rail travel, Canada has lost much of its railway heritage. Across the country stations have been bulldozed and rails ripped up. Once the heart of communities large and small, stations and tracks have left little more than a gaping hole in Canada's landscapes. This book revisits the times when railways were the country's economic lifeline, and the station the social centre.
Compiled by Anne Duke Judd from the Muskoka Roots Collection, Indian River Tales is a scrapbook history of Port Carling's real main street, the Indian River.
Rusty Rails documents 35 years in the history of rural transportation. With more than 200 original photographs by the author, this book coveys a personal approach to the rail lines that once crisscrossed the Ontario map.http://www.brucedalepress.ca/html/History.htm
Canadian Shield traces the geologic evolution of the Shield, its first tentative exploration by humans starting 11,000 years ago as the last great ice sheets withdrew, its changing economic fortunes as Europeans penetrated its remote rocky vastnesses for furs and metals, and its transformation in the twentieth century into a national icon to Canadians.
Drained by a half-dozen major watersheds, cut by a network of deep ravines and fronting on a Great Lake, Toronto is a city dominated by water. Recently, the trend of fettering Toronto’s water and putting it underground has been countered by persistent citizen-led efforts to recall and restore the city’s surface water.
Mirrors of Stone delves into the many ethnic cultures that thrived in the mining areas of Northern Ontario from the 1920s to the 1960s. The stormy history of hardrock mining camps has never fit into the comfortable cliches by which Canada “tells its story.” Angus unearths the dark sides of this history—“the wild tales of bootleggers, mobsters, and prostitution rings” and in so doing opens up new ways of seeing Ontario’s history and culture.
On December 22, 2022 as eastern Canadians were getting ready for the holidays, a bizarre weather system brought crippling freezing rain to central and eastern Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick. Over 300,000 people lost power in Toronto alone and 70,000 were still without it on Christmas morning. Officials estimate that 40% of power lines in the GTA were affected and more than 20% of Toronto’s tree canopy was destroyed.
Ontario's rich geologic history is illustrated here by short descriptions of more than 200 field sites ranging from Timmins in the north to Windsor in the south. These include the Sleeping Giant near Thunder Bay; Agawa Canyon; the Sudbury meteorite crater; Niagara Escarpment; the Falls and Gorge; numerous caves, the mineral-rich Bancroft area; and the high lakeshore cliffs at Scarborough Bluffs. Some sites are sacred to First Nations and are associated with spectacular rock art.
Launched in a barn where you are as likely to hear classical music as the cooing of pigeons or the lowing of cows, a book celebrating traditional timber-frame structures is one of the most popular publications of the Brucedale Press.
Where else can that well-known phrase be better applied than to a study of the Finns in Sudbury? “Rock” defines the physical reality of the Sudbury setting: rugged hills, mines, farms and forests set in the Precambrian Shield. “Hard” defines the human setting: Finnish immigrants having to contend with the problems and stresses of relocating to a new culture, with livelihoods that required great endurance as well as a tolerance for hazardous conditions.
Helen Humphreys’ younger brother was gone before she could come to terms with the fact that he had terminal cancer. Diagnosed with stage 4B pancreatic cancer at the age of forty-five, he died four months later, leaving behind a grieving family. Martin was an extraordinary pianist who debuted at the Royal Festival Hall in London at the age of twenty, later becoming a piano teacher and senior examiner at the Royal Conservatory of Music. The two siblings, though often living far apart, were bonded on many levels.
Approaching a scholar and critic as legendary as Northrop Frye is a daunting task — but not for Mel Montrose. Armed with a prestigious academic award and a nothing-to-lose attitude, she convinces Frye to supervise her ambitious thesis exploring E.J. Pratt’s epic poem about Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf. To embark on her study, Mel takes a job at the newly reconstructed historical site at Sainte-Marie among the Hurons, where de Brébeuf and seven other missionaries met their tragic ends.
In Margaret Avison’s new poems, little pleasures are bound up with larger ones. Her slightest subjects – beloved Toronto parks with their population of oaks, firs, squirrels, dogs, kids, even ants, and the minutest sighs of her contemporary urban soundscape – all have their being within an immense composition that calls and hauls us to a largeness, a category-breaking “always unthinkable” beyond.
In this memoir Penny Petrone tells what it was like growing up in Northern Ontario as the daughter of parents who moved to Canada from the class-bound feudal society of Southern Italy during the first quarter of the century when America was the dream of millions of Europeans.
The Frances Smith was not only the first steamboat to be built in Owen Sound, but also the largest vessel on Georgian Bay at that time. By far the most luxurious vessel to sail the Upper Great Lakes from a Canadian port, she was known as a "palace steamer." In the mid-to-late-19th century, the Frances Smith set the standard for speed, spacious accommodation and quality service on Georgian Bay and Lake Superior.
From 1937 until the mid 1960s, RESTLESS and RESTLESS TOO carried passengers along the coast of Lake Huron between Port Elgin and Southampton, Ontario. John G. Mackay rode aboard from babyhood while his father, George Mackay, operated the vessel. Later, John crewed for both his father and partner Addie Cairns. To present the story of the building and sailing of the boats, John has spent several years researching old newspapers, family documents, and interviewing those who recall the harbours as they once were.
Based on in-depth oral interviews with local residents, and rich archival sources,We Lived A Life and Then Some relates the common person’s struggle to overcome harsh working conditions and government neglect. The unique culture of the hardrock mining town of Cobalt is exposed through the eyes of retired miners, young welfare mothers, and grade-school children. Angus and Griffin reveal why, in spite of great adversity, Cobalt remains a distinctive and cohesive working-class community.
From Meteorite Impact to Constellation City is a historical geography of the City of Greater Sudbury. The story that began billions of years ago encompasses dramatic physical and human events.
Reading Julie Berry’s poetry means entering a new poetic space, crossing thresholds of pain and delight at once raw and refined. “like marie d’oignies who buried bloody/ mouthfuls of herself/ in the garden/ i need my poems to be like this,” Berry writes in “Touching Ground.” “Like this” is finely-turned and constantly surprising, haunting as plainsong, throaty as the blues.
Ontario Boys explores the preoccupation with boyhood in Ontario during the immediate postwar period, 1945–1960. It argues that a traditional version of boyhood was being rejuvenated in response to a population fraught with uncertainty, and suffering from insecurity, instability, and gender anxiety brought on by depression-era and wartime disruptions in marital, familial, and labour relations, as well as mass migration, rapid postwar economic changes, the emergence of the Cold War, and the looming threat of atomic annihilation.
Ontario Rocks tells this fascinating 3 billion year long story of Ontario's geological evolution, from its beginnings as part of an early landmass called Arctica, its incorporation into enormous supercontinents, through to the repeated ice ages and abrupt climatic changes of the last few thousand years. Merging Canadian geology with global evolution, this highly illustrated survey also touches on the development of Ontario's mining and oil industries, and the commercial use of rocks as building material.
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