Aurora Site, Wendat (Huron) Ancestral Village
Aurora/Old Fort Site (16th century Wendat Huron ancestral village), Kennedy Road, south of Vandorf Side Road, Whitchurch–Stouffville, ON, looking east.
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 Location within Ontario today
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| Location | Whitchurch–Stouffville, Regional Municipality of York, Ontario, Canada |
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| Region | Regional Municipality of York, Ontario |
| Coordinates | 44°0′28″N 79°20′16″W / 44.00778°N 79.33778°W |
| History | |
| Periods | Late Precontact Period, ca. 1550–1575 |
| Cultures | Huron (Wendat) |
The Aurora Site, also known as the "Old Fort," "Old Indian Fort," "Murphy Farm" or "Hill Fort" site, is a sixteenth-century Huron-Wendat ancestral village located on one of the headwater tributaries of the East Holland River on the north side of the Oak Ridges Moraine in present-day Whitchurch–Stouffville, approximately 30 kilometres north of Toronto. This Huron ancestral village was located on 3.4 hectares (8.4 acres) of land and the settlement was fortified with multiple rows of palisades. The community arrived ca. 1550, likely moving en masse from the so-called Mantle Site located nine kilometres to the south-east in what is today urban Stouffville. The Aurora/Old Fort site is located at the south-east corner of Kennedy Road and Vandorf Side Road, east of the hamlet of Vandorf in the town of Whitchurch–Stouffville. The Aurora site was occupied at the same time as the nearby Ratcliff site.
The Rouge River trail, used by the Huron and then later by the French to travel between Lake Ontario and Lake Simcoe / Georgian Bay, ran through the Aurora site.
"Perhaps the busiest and best documented of these routes was that which followed the Humber River valley northward ... although another trail of equal importance and antiquity and used earlier than the former by the French, extended from the mouth of the Rouge River northward to the headwaters of the Little Rouge and over the drainage divide to the East Branch of the Holland River at Holland Landing."
The Aurora/Old Fort site was indiscriminately looted by collectors throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. An 1885 report on Whitchurch Township notes that two thousand interments took place on the site, and that another smaller burial site was found two hundred yards from the site beside a large pond.
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Wikipedia