Bronte #080106

Waterfront Trail

This portion of the Trail features tree-lined streets, lovely homes, museums, two vibrant harbours, formal gardens and a system of river trails that run through wooded areas and meadows.

The Trail surface is a gravel path on the north side of Lakeshore Rd. from Burloak Dr. to Cudmore, and east of Belvedere to Fourth Line. The south side of Lakeshore Rd is for pedestrians. From Fourth Line the cyclists share the Trail with vehicles using Lakeshore Rd. for 3.4km. Off-road trail resumes just west of Chartwell Ave.

Bronte Harbour

The area that is presently Bronte was first settled by Europeans beginning in 1807, after the land was purchased from the Mississauga tribe and Trafalgar Township was surveyed.

By 1856, Bronte was a busy Lake Ontario port, exporting wheat, building ships, and developing a thriving commercial fishery and stonehooking industry. The town's population grew to 550. With the coming of the railroad, the harbour's business declined and the population went down to 220.

Bronte was incorporated as a village in 1952. Ten years later, the village and part of the Township of Trafalgar were amalgamated into the Town of Oakville.

Unlike neighbouring Oakville, where by the late 1820s William Chisholm had financed a harbour privately, development of port facilities in Bronte was delayed until the founding of the Bronte Harbour Company. Led by Samuel Bealey Harrison, a politician, lawyer, and judge, residents of Bronte petitioned the government of Upper Canada to incorporate a company to build a harbour at the mouth of Twelve Mile Creek. After a ten-year struggle to obtain support, the Bronte Harbour Company was founded in 1846. By 1856, construction of Bronte's newly dredged harbour with two piers and a lighthouse was complete. The village's waterfront was transformed from a shallow marshland, inaccessible from the water, to a harbour with sufficient depth to sustain itself as a thriving Lake Ontario port.

Bronte Pioneer Cemetery

Bronte Pioneer Cemetery is as much the victim of time and weather as the souls buried within in.

In 1830, Philip Sovereign deeded the east corner of his farm for a cemetery after several people had already been buried there. He specified that it be for people of “all orders, sects, nations and parties.”

Among the settlers some of the first black residents of Bronte are buried here. Almost a third of the headstones belong to children; others to mariners.

Sometimes, but not always, sailors survived the lake hazards. Lake Ontario claimed three young men who are buried here, near the west corner. Jimmy Baker was first mate on the schooner Magellan when she collied with the U.L. Hurd in 1877. Jummy’s was the only body found. The Dorland brothers were fishermen lost east of Bronte in the great gale and snowstorm of December 1886. Both left young families.

The Lake Ontario gales that took the lives of Bronte mariners also claimed the bones of some of the survivors and their families. Over the years about 70 feet of cemetery and 100 feet of road allowance have gone into the lake, taking a few graves with it.