Port Arthur, Ontario

Port Arthur was a city in Northern Ontario which amalgamated with Fort William and the townships of Neebing and McIntyre to form the city of Thunder Bay in January 1970. Port Arthur was the district seat of Thunder Bay District.

The government of the Province of Canada was determined in the late 1850s to begin the exploration and settlement of Western Canada. With Confederation in 1867, Simon James Dawson was employed by the Canadian Department of Public Works (DPW) to construct a road and route from Thunder Bay on Lake Superior to the Red River Colony. DPW's depot on the lake, where it landed and stored its supplies, acquired its first name in May 1870 when Colonel Garnet Wolseley named the tiny fire-ravaged settlement Prince Arthur's Landing in honor of Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn (1850–1942), son of Queen Victoria, who was then serving with his regiment in Montreal. In 1871 the Ontario government surveyed the Prince Arthur's Landing Town Plot, thereby officially confirming the name and opening the land for legal possession. The Prince did not "land" in the settlement until May 1890 when he and his entourage briefly stopped in the town. In May 1883 this unwieldy name was changed unilaterally by Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) officials in Winnipeg to Port Arthur.

The inhabitants of Prince Arthur's Landing were the driving force behind the creation of Thunder Bay District's first municipality, the Municipality of Shuniah in March 1873, an early form of regional government which stretched from Sibley Peninsula to the U. S. border. Landingites dominated Shuniah to the furor of the few residents of Fort William, Ontario until the people of Fort William successfully established their own Municipality of Neebing in 1881, and began a long and successful battle with Port Arthur to secure all the operations of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

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