List of Ontario Historic Colonization Roads
| The Bobcaygeon Road
|
| Location: |
Bobcaygeon–Dorset
|
| Length: |
89 km (55 mi) |
| Formed: |
1856–1863 |
| The Buckhorn Road
|
| Location: |
Buckhorn–Gooderham
|
| Length: |
48 km (30 mi) |
| Formed: |
1855–1865 |
| The Hastings Road
|
| Location: |
Madoc – Whitney
|
| Length: |
113 km (70 mi) |
| Formed: |
1854–1858 |
| The Mississippi Road
|
| Location: |
Plevna–Bancroft
|
| Length: |
98 km (61 mi) |
| Formed: |
1856–1866 |
The Colonization Roads were roads created during the 1840s and 1850s to open up or provide access to areas in Central and Eastern Ontario for settlement and agricultural development. The colonization roads were used by settlers, much like modern-day highways, to lead them towards areas for settlement.
During the early-1800s, the government of Upper Canada, a majority of which is now Ontario, appropriated settlers to various lots which had been surveyed along the lake shores of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. The townships established along these fronts contained generally fertile land composed of glacial till and clay-rich loam. As these townships filled up, business opportunities presented themselves for investors to purchase native lands and open them to settlement. The Canada Company was the most successful of these ventures, and attracted settlers to vast areas of land in Western Ontario by building routes such as the Huron Road and the Toronto–Sydenham Road during the 1830s and 1840s. As these areas too filled, the government came under pressure to open up the unforgiving terrain of the Canadian Shield to settlement, and sought to establish a network of east–west and north–south roads between the Ottawa Valley and Georgian Bay. This area was known as the Ottawa–Huron Tract.
In 1847, an exploration survey was carried out by Robert Bell to lay out the lines that would become the Opeongo Road, Hastings Road and Addington Road. The Public Lands Act, passed in 1853, permitted the granting of land to settlers who were at least 18. Those settlers who cleared at least 12 acres (49,000 m2) within four years, built a house within a year and resided on the grant for at least five years would receive the title to that land. The government subsequently built over 1,600 kilometres (1,000 mi) of roads over the following 20 years to provide access to these grants.
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