09/05/2026
If you have ever driven Highway 12 into Orillia, you have driven over the thing Toronto is named after.
Toronto comes from tkaronto, a Mohawk word meaning roughly where there are trees standing in the water. People assume it is about a forest. It is not. It was describing wooden stakes driven into a lakebed, standing up through the surface.
Those stakes are at the Narrows between Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching. Mnjikaning, the place of the fish fence. Cedar, maple and birch, driven into the lake bottom and angled into a gap, so that fish moving between the two lakes were funnelled into one opening. The fish come through twice a year, deep water in winter, shallow water to spawn.
The oldest stakes carbon date past 5,000 years. Silt and cold water preserved them. It is the largest and best preserved wooden weir site known in eastern North America.
The Anishinaabek, the Wendat and the Haudenosaunee all fished there, and the Dish With One Spoon is the agreement that made sharing one fishery possible. The Chippewas of Rama are its stewards today.
The name travelled south down the carrying trail over the years until it landed on a place that never had the weirs at all. The weirs are still where they always were. The fish still run.
If you grew up around the Narrows, we would like to hear what you were told about it.
Photo: Art Duval
