Ontario historical timeline

Ontario’s history is one of Indigenous nations, imperial rivalry and then very rapid immigration.

Before contact

The land was home to Anishinaabe peoples across the Shield and Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat confederacies in the south, with agriculture, long-distance trade and sophisticated political structures — the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace is among the older functioning constitutions anywhere.

The fur trade

French traders and missionaries came up the Ottawa river from the early seventeenth century, and the competition between French and English interests, fought through Indigenous alliances, shaped the next 150 years. Britain took New France in 1763.

Loyalists and war

Some tens of thousands of Loyalists moved north after the American Revolution, and Upper Canada was created in 1791. The War of 1812 was fought largely on this ground — Queenston Heights, Lundy’s Lane — and the failure of the American invasion is a founding story here in a way it is not south of the border.

Rebellion and Confederation

An 1837 rebellion against oligarchic rule led to responsible government, and in 1867 Ontario became one of the four founding provinces of Canada.

The Underground Railroad

Slavery was abolished across the British Empire in 1834, and Upper Canada had begun restricting it as early as 1793, which made this the northern terminus of the routes out of the American South. Communities of freedom seekers settled around Amherstburg, Chatham and North Buxton in the southwest, and several of those settlements and their churches survive as historic sites.

Industry and immigration

Nickel at Sudbury, gold at Timmins, manufacturing in the south, and successive waves of arrivals — Irish, Italian, Portuguese, Caribbean, South Asian, Chinese, and more recently from every part of the world — which made the province what it is.