The Toronto Carrying Place was a portage route that joined Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe and, through water links beyond it, to Georgian Bay and the upper Great Lakes. The main trail climbed the Humber River valley, and a lesser branch followed the Rouge River to the east. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the shortcut saved hundreds of kilometers compared with the longer route to the upper lakes, and it stayed in heavy use until Yonge Street was built in the 1790s.
The route matters to Toronto’s history for three reasons: Indigenous nations used it for thousands of years, French traders placed their first posts near its southern end, and the name Toronto traveled south along it. Several details remain disputed, and this page marks them.
The route from the lake to Lake Simcoe
From the mouth of the Humber River on Lake Ontario, the trail ran north through the river valley. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes the main route as going up the Humber, across to the Holland River, into Lake Simcoe, and then by water to Georgian Bay. It calls the walk along the swampy, wooded banks of the Humber arduous, which is why the word “carrying” fits: canoes and goods were hauled overland between navigable stretches.
A second arm began at the Rouge River, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of the Humber according to the text summarized from a roadside plaque on the Read the Plaque site. That plaque text describes the Rouge branch as the lesser of the two passages. A paper by archaeologist David Robertson, published through ASI Heritage, makes the same comparison from the archaeological side: the western (Humber) branch came to be used more heavily than the eastern arm.
Indigenous use of the Humber corridor
The Canadian Heritage Rivers System, which designated the Humber a Canadian Heritage River in 1999, states that archaeological evidence shows human settlement along the river for almost 10,000 years. It adds that the watershed has 473 registered archaeological sites. The plaque summary cited above gives a longer figure of at least 12,000 years, so the two sources differ on how far back the oldest use goes.
The Canadian Encyclopedia says that ancestors of the Huron-Wendat, the Six Nations of the Grand River, and the Mississauga of the New Credit First Nation (now the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation) successively established communities along the Humber path. Each nation’s own account of its history is the better guide to when and why, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation publishes its own history on its website. A summary of that history is on the page about the Mississaugas of the Credit.
Wendat and Haudenosaunee accounts
The Huron-Wendat Nation’s Council states in Resolution 6598 (June 15, 2015) that its ancestral lands in Ontario, which it calls Huronia, hold village, longhouse, and ossuary sites, and that 711 Huron-Wendat archaeological sites have been identified in southern Ontario. Ronald Williamson’s 2014 overview in Ontario Archaeology shows what that means along the trail. Between A.D. 1300 and 1600, ancestral Wendat communities lay along the north-shore rivers from the Credit to Prince Edward County. In the middle Humber and Black Creek area he describes a fifteenth-century sequence of villages that ends in the large palisaded Parsons village of the mid-fifteenth century, about 3.2 hectares (8 acres) in size, where a service corridor 18 meters (59 feet) wide excavated in 1988 to 1990 exposed eight house structures. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes the same site as having 10 longhouses in the 1989 to 1990 trench, so the two sources count the houses differently. In the Humber headwaters Williamson places villages from the mid-fifteenth to the late sixteenth century, and he notes that the Don valley was largely abandoned near the turn of the sixteenth century. He ties the mid-seventeenth-century dispersal of the Ontario Wendat to conflict with the Haudenosaunee, sharpened by European interests. He is an archaeologist and does not speak for the Nation, and a Wendat account of why the trail went quiet after 1600 was not found. The plaque summary cited above says only that use of the trail became occasional after 1600 because of threats from the Five Nations Iroquois.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy Chiefs Council describes the Confederacy as five nations, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, joined under the Great Law of Peace, and the Six Nations of the Grand River describes a community of six nations that includes the Tuscarora. Neither site, in the pages read, mentions the Carrying Place, Teiaiagon, or Toronto. The Haudenosaunee link to the trail is therefore documented here through Parks Canada, which designates Bead Hill on the Rouge as the only known remaining and intact seventeenth-century Seneca site in Canada, and through a City of Toronto report of November 15, 2024, which records Six Nations support for a heritage district at Baby Point.
Teiaiagon at Baby Point
The best-known settlement on the trail was Teiaiagon, a village on the Humber near the upstream limit of canoe travel. Robertson’s paper places it in what is now the Baby Point neighborhood and says it existed for less than a generation, from the early 1670s to the late 1680s. The paper identifies it as a Haudenosaunee village and suggests it may have been the most important Haudenosaunee village on the north shore of Lake Ontario during those years. Other published accounts describe the people there as Seneca, or as Seneca and Mohawk together, so the exact makeup of the community is shown here as unsettled. The City of Toronto’s 2024 Baby Point report calls it a Seneca village once home to 500 to 800 people, and the City’s 2018 study timeline dates the Seneca departure to 1688 and a Mississauga village across the Humber to 1702. Parks Canada dates the Seneca village at Bead Hill, on the Rouge branch of the trail, to about 1665 to 1687. Housing development at Baby Point was highly destructive, according to the paper, but it did not erase every trace of the seventeenth-century village.
French traders and the 1615 question
The French used the route for the fur trade. The Canadian Encyclopedia dates the first French trading post at the mouth of the Humber to 1720. It also reports that the Iroquois used the trail in 1649 on their way to attack Huronia, a date that the plaque summary repeats.
The story that Étienne Brûlé was the first European on the trail in 1615 is repeated in both of those sources. A reference article on the trail notes that this view is now doubted and that Brûlé more likely traveled farther west, toward Lake Erie. That article is secondary and cites a City of Toronto page that this project could not retrieve, so the question stays open here: probably, per the Canadian Encyclopedia, or doubtful, per later research.
From trail to Yonge Street
The Canadian Encyclopedia states that the route contributed to the decision to found the settlement of York in 1793, and that after Yonge Street was built in 1796 the Humber declined as a major inland route. The new road gave a direct line north from the harbor to Lake Simcoe. The founding of York is covered in the pages on John Graves Simcoe and Yonge Street.
The name Toronto reached the city through this corridor. One reference summary traces it to the narrows between Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching, where the Mohawk word tkaronto described trees standing in the water, and says the name was carried south as the portage became known as the Toronto Passage. The page on the origin of the name Toronto sets out the competing explanations.
Timeline of the Carrying Place
| Date | Event | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Almost 10,000 years ago or earlier | Human settlement along the Humber begins (sources differ: about 10,000 or at least 12,000 years) | Canadian Heritage Rivers System; plaque summary |
| A.D. 1300 to 1600 | Ancestral Wendat villages on the Humber, Don, and Rouge, including Parsons in the mid-1400s | Williamson (2014) |
| c. 1615 | Étienne Brûlé travels the trail, in the traditional account (doubted) | Canadian Encyclopedia |
| 1649 | Iroquois use the trail to attack Huronia | Canadian Encyclopedia |
| Early 1670s to late 1680s | Teiaiagon village on the Humber | ASI Heritage (Robertson) |
| 1720 | First French trading post at the Humber mouth | Canadian Encyclopedia |
| 1793 | Settlement of York founded; the route is one factor | Canadian Encyclopedia |
| 1796 | Yonge Street built; the Humber route declines | Canadian Encyclopedia |
| 1999 | Humber designated a Canadian Heritage River | Canadian Heritage Rivers System |
Where the trail can be traced today
The trail itself is not a single surviving path. Parts follow the Humber valley parks and trails, and the Humber is described by the Canadian Heritage Rivers System as the only Canadian Heritage River with a subway stop. Markers and plaques about the portage exist, but some are not official provincial plaques: the Read the Plaque entry credits its text to a volunteer plaque site, not to the Ontario Heritage Trust, so wording should be checked against the plaque itself.
Is the Toronto Carrying Place the same as the Humber Portage?
Mostly yes. The name Humber Portage is used for the western branch, while Toronto Carrying Place and Toronto Passage can also include the Rouge branch to the east.
Who built the Toronto Carrying Place?
No one built it as a road. Indigenous peoples developed it along the river corridor, according to the Canadian Heritage Rivers System, and later travelers adopted the same line.
How long was the portage?
The Canadian Encyclopedia gives no measured distance. It says only that the route cut hundreds of kilometers off the longer way to the upper Great Lakes.
Did the Carrying Place lead to the Toronto Purchase?
Not directly. The text of the 1805 deed published by Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada describes a tract that begins at the south outlet of the Etobicoke River, and the text read does not name the Humber. The Carrying Place it names is the one at the head of the Bay of Quinté, where an agreement of September 23, 1787, was made. The sources and disputes are laid out on the page about the Toronto Purchase.
Related reading
- An overview of Toronto’s history
- Toronto’s Indigenous history
- Toronto’s lost rivers and ravines
- Etobicoke: history of the former municipality
- Yonge Street: history of the street
Last verified: October 2026
Sources
- James H. Marsh, “Toronto Feature: Carrying Place Trail, Humber River,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, Historica Canada, 2013, edited 2015: thecanadianencyclopedia.ca
- Canadian Heritage Rivers System: Humber River, designation and history: chrs.ca
- David Robertson, “Teiaiagon on the Humber: Controlling the Western Branch of the Toronto Carrying Place,” Ontario Archaeological Society Symposium paper, 2019, published by ASI Heritage: asiheritage.ca
- Ronald F. Williamson, “The Archaeological History of the Wendat to A.D. 1651: An Overview,” Ontario Archaeology 94, 2014: asiheritage.ca
- Conseil de la Nation huronne-wendat, Resolution 6598, Position of the Huron-Wendat Nation regarding the archaeological and cultural heritage of the ancestral lands located in Ontario, June 15, 2015 (copy hosted by the County of Prince Edward): thecounty.ca
- Dennis Smith, “Toronto Feature: Huron-Wendat Village,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2013, edited 2015: thecanadianencyclopedia.ca
- Haudenosaunee Confederacy Chiefs Council, The Confederacy’s Creation: haudenosauneeconfederacy.com
- Six Nations of the Grand River, Who We Are: sixnations.ca
- Parks Canada, Directory of Federal Heritage Designations, Bead Hill National Historic Site of Canada: pc.gc.ca
- City of Toronto, Report for Action, Designation of the Teiaiagon-Baby Point Heritage Conservation District, November 15, 2024: toronto.ca; Baby Point HCD Study, Historic Timeline display boards, 2018: https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/987d-Baby-Point-HCD-Study_CCM2_Historical-Timeline-Display-Boards.pdf
- Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, Treaty Texts, Upper Canada Land Surrenders (Toronto Purchase, No. 13, 1805): rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca
- Read the Plaque: “The Toronto Carrying Place” (plaque text summary, entry submitted 2016)
- Reference article “Toronto Carrying-Place Trail” (Wikipedia), used only to note the doubt over the 1615 account and the Rouge branch, not for dated facts
Cite this page
APA: History of Toronto. (2026, October 23). The Toronto Carrying Place: the Humber Portage Route. http://localhost:8210/blog/toronto-carrying-place
MLA: “The Toronto Carrying Place: the Humber Portage Route.” History of Toronto, 23 Oct. 2026, http://localhost:8210/blog/toronto-carrying-place. Accessed .
Chicago: History of Toronto. “The Toronto Carrying Place: the Humber Portage Route.” Last modified October 23, 2026. http://localhost:8210/blog/toronto-carrying-place.
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