Les Frost grew up in Orillia, represented neighbouring Victoria County in the Legislature 1937 to 1961, and was Ontario’s long-serving most constructive premier ever, from 1949 to 1961. An early 1950s motor tour through American Civil War states profoundly impressed him by the bronze markers on the battlefields. Frost vowed Ontario would respect and transmit our history the same way, genesis of today’s familiar blue-and-gold historic markers dotting some 1,300 sites across the province’s landscape.
The inaugural plaque at Port Carling’s locks reads: “The first white settlers on the site of this town, then known as Indian Village, arrived about 1865. In 1869 it was named after the Honourable John Carling, Ontario’s first Minister of Public Works and Agriculture. Water transportation, so vital to the early farmers and lumbermen, was greatly aided by the construction of these locks, 1869-71, by the provincial government. The village was incorporated in 1896.”
Today that heritage marker at Obajewanung, the prior Ojibwe settlement (“Indian Village”) on the same site, would record how Indigenous people lived in some twenty homes, year round, hunted and fished, made their clothing and canoes, traded, kept dogs, gathered medicinal plants and berries, and planted and harvested crops – until forced to Georgian Bay’s Parry Island Wasauksing Reserve to make way for those “first white settlers.”
The Ontario Heritage Trust acknowledges many plaques erected over the past 60 years are exclusionary in interpretation and use “outdated terminology” regarding culture, race and gender. Our culture is steadily becoming more inclusive, open, and respectful of diversity. Existing plaques aren’t being removed, but supplemented by virtual on-line plaques with contemporary takes on local heritage.
One tells of a water-based people, the Anishinaabeg, at Lake of Bays. “The original people of this region were a hunter-gatherer society that often travelled here to the narrows at Trading Bay (Lake of Bays). The area that is now Dorset was a special, spiritual place abundant in natural resources. For thousands of years the Anishinaabeg set up small camps here harvesting maple syrup and birch bark, fishing and trading in the spring and summer, and hunting and trapping during the fall and winter. Eventually, the Anishinaabeg realized that their hunting and harvesting rights and territory had been lost through a series of treaties. They continued to travel to the region to work as fishing and hunting guides and trading with seasonal tourists and cottagers. The descendants of the Anishinaabeg are members of the seven First Nations of the Williams Treaties (1923), the nearest of which is the Chippewas of Rama First Nation. The legacy of the original inhabitants lives on through the many landmarks, rivers, lakes, and islands that bear Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) place names.”
Among those names is “Muskoka” District itself, our full-size historic site memorializing Chief Musquakie.
