Menu
Search results
37 plaques found that match your criteria
-
Jack Miner 1865-1944
A noted naturalist, John Thomas Miner was born in Dover Centre, Ohio, and in 1878 settled on this property. In 1904, he established this world-famous bird sanctuary primarily for the conservation for migrating Canada Geese and ducks. Five years later, he began banding waterfowl to determine their subsequent movements. During his life, Miner lectured extensively throughout North America on wildlife conservation. To perpetuate his work, the Jack Miner Migratory Bird Foundation was incorporated in the... -
Grand Bend
Grand Bend derived its name from a hairpin turn in the Ausable (Aux Sables) River a short distance inland from Lake Huron where sand dunes blocked the river's outlet to the lake. Frequent flooding hampered farming in the region; nevertheless, a small milling community developed at the "Grand Bend" in the 1830s. In response to a local petition, the township cut a new riverbed directly to the lake along an old portage route in 1892... -
Sudbury Structure, The
Sudbury Structure" is a collective name for the unique geological feature that encompasses this city. Its central component is the Sudbury Basin, a shallow elliptical depression 60 kilometres long, situated northwest of here. It also includes the Sudbury Igneous Complex, a ring of hills rimmed by ore that surround the Basin, and the Sudbury Breccia, fragmented rocks extending 80 kilometres from the Complex. Scientists continue to seek an explanation of the Structure's origin. Some think... -
Niagara Parks Commission, The
In 1885, the Province of Ontario established The Niagara Parks Commission as part of an international effort to preserve the natural scenery around Niagara Falls. Originally, the Commission included Colonel Casimir Gzowski, Chairman, John W. Langmuir and J. Grant Macdonald, and was responsible for making the park self-financing while keeping admission free to the public. The Commissioners acquired parkland along the river to create Queen Victoria Niagara Falls Park, which opened on May 24, 1888... -
Gibraltar Point
Because of its large and easily defended harbour Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe decided to make Toronto the naval and military centre of Upper Canada. This site, guarding the harbour, was named Gibraltar Point. Fortification was begun here in 1794 and by 1800 two defensible storehouses and a guard house had been erected. These buildings were destroyed by the Americans during the second raid on York (Toronto) in 1813. By the following May a small blockhouse mounting one... -
Great Fire of 1916, The
On July 29, 1916, fires which had been burning for some weeks around settlers' clearings along the Temiskaming & Northern Ontario Railway were united by strong winds into one huge conflagration. Burning easterly along a 40-mile front, it largely or completely destroyed the settlements of Porquis Junction, Iroquois Falls, Kelso, Nushka, Matheson, and Ramore. It also partially razed the hamlets of Homer and Monteith, while a smaller fire caused widespread damage in and around Cochrane... -
Brent Crater, The
First recognized in 1951 from aerial photographs, the crater is a circular depression about two miles in diameter formed in Precambrian crystalline rocks. Geophysical and diamond drilling investigations show that the crater has a present depth of about 1,400 feet but is partly filled by sedimentary rocks with a thickness of 900 feet. The rocks beneath the crater floor are thoroughly fragmented over a depth of 2,000 feet. Like the similar New Quebec (Chubb) crater... -
Grey Owl 1888-1938
As a youth in England, Archibald Belaney was fascinated with wildlife and tales of North American Indians. At seventeen he came to Canada and soon began living among the Ojibwa on Bear Island. He adopted native dress and customs, and worked as a woodsman, fire ranger and trapper in northeastern Ontario. In the 1920s, Belaney became concerned that the lumber industry and sportsmen were plundering the northern wilderness and threatening the survival of native culture... -
Lake Nipissing
About 9000 B.C., when the glacial ice began to retreat from this area for the last time, the Nipissing basin formed an easterly extension of an ancestral Georgian Bay. The weight of ice had depressed the land, thus providing an outlet to the Ottawa Valley for the waters of the prehistoric Upper Great Lakes basin. Owing to the gradual uplift of the land following the retreat of the ice, the eastward flow ceased about 2000 B.C. Thereafter Lake Nipissing drained westward, forming the French River, which later became a link in the historic canoe route to the West. -
Quetico-Superior
A wilderness area of unequalled scenic beauty, Quetico-Superior has long been a focal point for recreationists and conservationists. At the turn of the century, public concern about outdoor recreation and wilderness protection in the Rainy Lake watershed led to the designation in 1909 of the Superior National Forest, the Minnesota Game Reserve and the Quetico Forest Reserve. Four years later, Quetico became a provincial park. Since that time, the governments of the United States, Minnesota... -
Red Rock
One of Ontario's most striking geological formations, this cuesta has at its base granite rocks formed deep in the Earth some 2,500,000,000 years ago and exposed after millions of years of erosion. Subsequently, a thick deposit of sediment accumulated, possibly in the waters of an inland sea that once covered this region. The sediment was converted by pressure into layers of shale, impure limestone and sandstone, red in colour owing to the presence of iron-bearing... -
Silver Islet 1868
Off this shore lies Silver Islet, once a barren rock, measuring about eighty feet in diameter, where silver was discovered in 1868 by Thomas Macfarlane. The claim was purchased in 1870 by a company headed by A.H. Sibley, and one of the partners, W.B. Frue, was appointed mine captain. Frue waged a constant battle against the lake, which undermined extensive crib work used to bolster the restricted working spaces. Despite this problem and the difficulty... -
Glacial Terraces, The
About 20,000 years ago Ontario was covered by a great glacier, the fourth glaciation in this region within the past million years. The melt waters from these giant ice-sheets filled the Lake Superior basin and progressively developed new drainage patterns which gradually lowered the level of the lake. As the waters receded from old shorelines more recent lake deposits were exposed and new shorelines established. This process produced a succession of terraces, separated from one... -
Arctic Watershed, The
North of this watershed all flowing water eventually reaches Hudson Bay, while south of it all watercourses form part of the Great Lakes drainage system. The height of land follows an erratic course of some 2250 km across Ontario, ranging from 32 to 280 km north of Lakes Huron and Superior. This watershed was declared the inland boundary of the tract surrendered to the Crown by Ojibwa Indians in the Robinson Superior Treaties of 1850... -
Arctic Watershed
The height of land known as the Arctic Watershed crosses Highway 11 at this point. North of here, water drains into Hudson Bay; rivers, lakes and streams to the south flow into the Great Lakes. As the northern wilderness came under development, the erratic line of the watershed defined territorial boundaries. It marked the southern limit of Rupert's Land, the vast territory granted to the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670. Two centuries later, it formed the northern boundary of lands ceded to the Crown by the First Nation Ojibwa in the Robinson-Superior Treaties of 1850. -
Carlsbad Springs
In the 1860s, local innkeeper Daniel Eastman offered water from the natural mineral springs in this area for drinking and bathing. His inn was followed by larger hotels where guests were invited to "take the waters" for ailments such as rheumatism, nervousness and digestive disorders. Eastman's Springs was soon a fashionable meeting place for Ottawa society. Also known as Cathartic, it became Carlsbad Springs by the early twentieth century when the Boyd family, owners of... -
Grey Owl 1888-1938
As a youth in England, Archibald Belaney was fascinated with wildlife and tales of North American Indians. At seventeen he came to Canada and soon began living among the Ojibwa on Bear Island. He adopted native dress and customs, and worked as a woodsman, fire ranger and trapper in northeastern Ontario. In the 1920s, Belaney became concerned that the lumber industry and sportsmen were plundering the northern wilderness and threatening the survival of native culture... -
Holleford Crater, The
A meteorite travelling 55,000 kilometres per hour smashed into the earth here eons ago, blasting a hole 244 metres deep and 2.5 kilometres wide. Aerial photographs revealed the crater in 1955, and since then scientists have pieced together much of its geological history. Analyses of drill samples suggest that the meteorite struck in the late Precambrian or early Cambrian period (between 450 and 650 million years ago). At first the depression filled with water, becoming... -
Fool's Paradise
This property sits on the ecologically sensitive, geologically significant Scarborough Bluffs that display sediments left by glaciers over 70,000 years during the last phase of the Pleistocene epoch. Aboriginal peoples may have inhabited this site as early as 8,000 B.C. Scottish immigrant James McCowan settled this land for farming in 1833, calling it "Springbank" because of the springs running from the ancient shoreline of Lake Iroquois (predecessor of Lake Ontario) to the north. In 1939... -
Mount Pleasant Cemetery
In 1874 the Trustees of the Toronto General Burying Grounds hired H.A. Engelhardt, who was in the forefront of landscape gardening in Canada, to plan the transformation of ravine and plateau farmland into Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Prominent in this naturalistic setting with its curving drives are E.J. Lennox's Massey Mausoleum, private mausoleums in classical temple style, the public Mount Pleasant Mausoleum designed by Darling & Pearson, and a wide variety of granite monuments. Rare trees... -
Development of Pelee Island, The
The largest in a string of islands in the western end of Lake Erie, Pelee Island forms, together with nearby Middle Island, the southernmost portion of Canada. In 1788, it was leased to Thomas McKee, the son of an influential Indian Department official, by the Ojibwa and Ottawa nations. The island, whose name is derived from the French "pelée," meaning bare, remained largely undeveloped, however, until William McCormick purchased it in 1823. In 1868, it... -
Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, 1894-1992
Louise Flach was born in Sweden and grew up on the scenic Baltic coast where she developed an interest in nature. Flach became a Red Cross nurse, serving during the First World War in Denmark, and then with her first husband Greb de Kiriline who died in revolutionary Russia. She immigrated to Canada in 1927, settled near Bonfield, Ontario and was head nurse for the Dionne Quintuplets. In 1935, she retired from nursing to study... -
Porcupine Fire, The
In the summer of 1911, when the Porcupine gold rush was at its height, the weather was hot and dry. On July 11, gale-force winds from the southwest whipped individual bush fires into a 16-km sea of flames that swiftly engulfed the drought-parched forest. The fire-storm swept through mining camps, razed the towns of South Porcupine and Pottsville, and partially destroyed Golden City (Porcupine) and Porquis Junction. Many people fled into Porcupine Lake to escape... -
R. Thomas Orr 1870-1957
A life-long member of the Stratford Parks Board, R. Thomas Orr was the driving force behind the Stratford parks system. Orr led the fight to save the riverfront and millpond from railway development and oversaw the transformation of the former industrial area into parkland. In 1936, Orr's plans to link Stratford with the birthplace of the English playwright William Shakespeare led to the creation of the Shakespearean Gardens. These parklands provided an inspirational setting in... -
Rapids of the Upper Ottawa, The
For over two centuries, the Ottawa River was part of the main canoe route to the West. Some of the river's most spectacular and dangerous rapids were located immediately downriver from here: the Rapide de la Veillée, the Trou and the Rapide des Deux Rivières. Further on lay the legendary Rapide de la Roche Capitain. In 1800, the explorer Daniel Harmon counted fourteen crosses commemorating voyageurs who had drowned in its swirling waters. By 1950, with the construction of the Des Joachims generating station, these rapids and their portages had been submerged in the dam's headpond, Holden Lake.