West Oak Trails

Oakville's First People (9000 BC to AD 1847)
The first people to enter North America probably migrated across the Bering Land Bridge during the Ice Age, when sea levels were much lower than today.  Hunting woolly mammoths and other big game, they eventually spread throughout North America, arriving in southern Ontario 11,000 years ago.

The first inhabitants of southern Ontario were migratory people who subsisted through hunting, gathering and fishing.  Over the millennia the climate warmed and plant and animal resources increased.  These changes made widespread travel and a nomadic lifestyle less necessary.

Around 500 AD, agriculture was introduced into southern Ontario and Iroquoian-speaking people began to settle in villages of longhouses.  Further north, Algonquin-speaking people maintained the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, living in wigwams and moving with the seasons.  They displaced the Iroquois in the 17th century and eventually left the area in 1847.

Oakville and Trafalgar - 1806-1870
The area that is present-day Oakville was first settled by Europeans in 1806, after land was purchased from the Mississauga tribe and Trafalgar Township was surveyed.

Twenty-one years later, in 1827, William Chisholm bought 960 acres at the mouth of Sixteen Mile Creek, developed a harbour, and laid out the village of Oakville.  As the village prospered and grew, roads and ships were built to connect it with the rest of Upper Canada.

The arrival of the railroad in 1855 took business east and west by land rather than just north and south along Trafalgar Road to Lake Ontario.  As rail traffic replaced shipping Oakville's harbour declined.  By 1871, the town's population had fallen by half, to 1000 people.