The first mention about tolling or turnpiking roads in Upper Canada came in 1805. Yonge Street, the Kingston Road and Dundas Street were some of the first roads extensively tolled in the 1830s, and dozens upon dozens of toll bridge and toll road companies appeared in one form or another over the next 50 years. However, most private toll roads had been absorbed into our municipal road systems by the early 1900s. The last toll road in Ontario quietly closed for business in 1926. Tolls were impossed on the Burlington Bay and Garden City Skyways on the Queen Elizabeth Way (in 1958 and 1963 respectively) but were removed in late 1973. The idea of 'user-pay' was revived with the building of Highway 407 in the mid-1990s.
Horses and wagons were ferried across the 750-foot wide mouth of the Trent River using the flat-bottomed scow moored at the wharf. Passengers were rowed across in the punt with the oars in the foreground. The hotel, left, and the ferry service were both owned by a Mrs. Bleecker. Note the passenger in the frock coat and top hat anxiously awaiting the boatman's return. Citizens of Trent Port (re-named Trenton in 1837) had to wait until 1834 for the first bridge across the river. Business, including the stage coach business on the Kingston Road boomed after the six-span covered bridge opened to traffic.
In the early days of Upper Canada, wood was the material of choice for building bridges with the primitive tools and limited expertise available. As time went on, Scottish and English stonemasons brought to Canada to build the Welland and Rideau Canals were also put to work building sturdy stone bridges from the 1830s onwards. Stone-piered bridges could better resist spring floods, had a longer life and were fire-proof, unlike wooden structures. The Brock Road Bridge was built about 1835, and served traffic for 133 years before it was replaced with a modern structure in 1968.
The Ottawa-Opeongo colonization road was one of a network of roads built by the government in the 1850s and 60s to open up the vast tracts of wilderness to new settlers beyond the then populated areas of Ontario West. When completed, the road ran from Arnprior, through Renfrew and on to Barry's Bay, a distance of some 66 miles. The road opened up the Upper Ottawa Valley to logging and mining as well as subsistence farming. Private companies chartered by the government advertised free homesteads and land attracting immigrants from the British Isles and Europe.
"It is doubtful if there is a mile of true Macadam road in Ontario outside of a few towns or cities. There are miles of road which are covered with dirty gravel or rough, broken stone, and are popularly supposed to be macadamised. Today the majority are little better than trails. From the middle of October to the end of May, a period of five months, by far the greatest part of the mileage of the province is mud, ruts and pitch holes. There are at least two months when the roads are practically impassable." (A.W. "Archie" Campbell, Ontario Instructor in Road-making -1898)
There were good reasons why early automobiles were designed with lots of road clearance and tall wheels with narrow tires. Like horses and buggies they were obliged to navigate through the mud created by spring and fall rains. With the exception of SUV's, most cars today would be hard put to travel roads like the one above. Even in high summer, when the earth-base township roads were at their best, a week of rain could turn them back into quagmires. The back concession roads were gradually improved over the years as provincial money became available, enabling municipalities to reconstruct them to higher standards.
The Rouge Hill in Pickering was the bane of stage coach drivers in the 19th century and drivers of horseless carriages in the 20th century. In the former instance, coach passengers were expected to get out and push. In the later case, the only way drivers could get their internal combustion flivers up the hill was to reverse and back up because the gravity-fed carburetors in many automobiles couldn't feed fuel to the engine going forward up a steep hill. This scene shows the Department of Public Highways project designed to reduce the steep hill and straighten the alignment.
This scene looks much different because of the spectacular urban growth along Highway 7. During 1929-30, the Department of Highways cut through the steep hill west of the Humber River. Then they built an underpass so traffic could drive under the CP rail line that travels northwesterly through Woodbridge. Today, however, eastbound drivers, must still take care in rainy or snowy weather when descending the hill towards the intersection at Islington Avenue. This section of Highway 7 became a Town of Vaughan regional road a few years ago.
Traffic circles were popular with European highway designers in the 1930s and planners of the Queen Elizabeth Way adapted the idea to our first super highway. But the concept of the freeway interchange became standard on the 400 series highways. Even so, the last one at Stoney Creek wasn't replaced with an interchange until 1978. In recent years traffic circles have been promoted as a traffic panacea for urban streets here in Canada and the U.S. However, the reality is that they function better in Britain where traffic travels on the left side of the roadway. The Brits (shudder the thought) have even set about building counter roundabouts, simultaneously carrying opposing traffic flows. To learn more about roundabouts click on the Driving in Britain banner at the top of the Road Scholar home page.
Email John Shragge for historical roads: shragge@pathcom.com
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