The act of becoming involved in local heritage preservation usually means that one must balance care, community, and change which can be a daunting task. The greatest biggest challenge we face is to keep what matters from our past while ensuring that a place still works for the community today.
We must accept that available funding is often limited so repairs, maintenance, and documentation can often get delayed or shelved. Our preservation choices can often be contested when others disagree about what is worth saving or whose history deserves to be preserved.
Urban development and modernization can place historic buildings and neighborhoods at risk of demolition or insensitive alteration. Strong preservation only works best when our local communities are involved, but public, government and business engagement is often uneven.
An effective preservation project does much more than just protect an old building or an historical site. It also asks the question: Who does this place matter to, how should its story be told, and how can it serve the community without losing its character? It is essential to preserve the site because it protects both the physical place and the community’s memory tied to it.
Community-led preservation is one of the most effective approaches because residents bring local knowledge, stories, and long-term commitment. Participatory planning, volunteer groups, documentation, and adaptive reuse can all make preservation more practical and inclusive.
The community includes the government, business and residential interests. No one element is more important: all are partners in the project! What is important is that none of the partners assumes a position of obstruction or disinterest.
An historic district is often designated to help protect community identity and local businesses. A heritage survey can intentionally identify sites that were ignored in earlier preservation efforts, especially those connected to excluded groups. Preservation can also support social justice when it prevents demolition, displacement, or neglect of places that hold meaning for a community.
The very question of why we should seek to preserve our heritage is currently front and center, as we shall see as we examine a current contentious heritage project in Holland Landing, the 31 Sand Road project. The very nature of the issue is how do we preserve the past, our past, while allowing the future to unfold.
For me, the issue of heritage preservation is very straight forward. We preserve history because it provides us continuity, identity, and a way to understand how we got here. It also helps communities pass knowledge, values, and hard-earned lessons on to future generations.
Heritage is much more than old objects or buildings; it is a record of human choices, successes, mistakes, and resilience. When we keep it alive, we preserve evidence of where we lived, worked, struggled, and built communities, which helps us make some sense of the present and provides direction for the future.
We preserve history the way we keep family photos, letters, and stories: not because the past is frozen, but because it helps us remember who we are. Without it, each generation must start from scratch instead of learning from what came before.
The story of 31 Sand Road, in Holland Landing contains many of the elements that plague our attempts at heritage preservation. Issues such as the preservation of our Indigenous, immigrant, and other, currently underrecognized historic places so that their histories are not erased.
Let us look at the saga of the 31 Sand Road heritage preservation project currently unfolding in Holland Landing. Many of these insights shared in this article are credited to Geoff Brown and Andrew Lenkov, whose extensive research provided the foundation for these details. Their work, encompassing hundreds of hours of study alongside archaeologists, historians and Ontario Archives research, was further enriched by the dedicated efforts of the residents in their community, who provided invaluable on-the-ground support.
Let us begin with the question – why is the area around 31 Sand Road perhaps one of Ontario’s most significant historic landscapes. The area would appear to incorporate our local history across a series of epochs from the ancient indigenous camps with burial evidence, primaeval canoe routes connected to the fur trade, and our early military supply infrastructure. It would appear to have been central to the establishment of Yonge Street, and an old log structure still stands as a remnant from our past.
The reality is that we are often left with mere fragments where our local history stubbornly survives, perhaps in an exposed foundation stone, a map reference or a mention on a plaque.
Historical locations like 31 Sand Road, identified in historical and archaeological records as Lot 111W, 7Yk13, BaGu-3 and the Orpel site in Holland Landing, are vital resources because the history appears to have survive in dense, continuous, consequential layers reading like an ancient local archive.
Its importance rest not on a single old building or one isolated archaeological but on the fact that it reflects an unusually complete cross-section of Ontario’s story: Indigenous travel, settlement and burial, early colonial surveying, the opening of Yonge Street, the inland fur-trade movement, wartime transport, along with the remains of an early log structure still embedded in the site today. This was a place our ancestors knew, long before the surveyors and city planners arrived.
Historical records describe the Upper Landing at Lot 111W as an “ancient canoe-landing,” a point where Indigenous war parties and hunting parties embarked and disembarked on the East Holland River. Other records describe Holland Landing as a convergence point for the Humber, Don and Rouge carrying-place routes, linking Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe and onward to Georgian Bay. The area represented a travel corridor, a meeting point, and a place our Indigenous peoples would call home for thousands of years. The archaeological records suggest that people were using this landscape thousands of years before Upper Canada even existed.
Here is a preponderance of evidence pointing to this vibrant parcel of land and its potential historical importance. Over the years, the Orpel site has produced projectile points, retouched flakes, lithic debris and other stone material associated with a Middle Archaic occupation dating roughly 7,500 to 5,000 years. The broader record point to repeated use of the area across multiple cultural periods, likely including both Archaic and Woodland-period occupations, indicating continuity of use. The same river edge that later drew fur traders, surveyors and soldiers, our ancestors, had already drawn indigenous people for millennia.
A question we frequently find ourselves posing as ‘local history hounds’ is just what would life would have looked like in those earliest eras? We can turn for answers to the numerous culture histories of southern Ontario that exist.
We know that these Archaic peoples lived as mobile hunter-gatherers, moving with the seasons, gathering near waterways and dispersing into smaller groups to hunt and collect wild foods inland.
In the Woodland period, pottery began to appear, mortuary customs would become more elaborate, and they developed a more structured social life. We can envision a location like 31 Sand Road, as being the scene of seasonal encampments, perched on sandy ground above the river, with fires blazing, toolmaking, fishing, hunting, food preparation. Essentially this was their home, offering them access, resources and memory.
Gordon Dibb’s field notes state that cremated bone were recovered at the Orpel site and that a human burial was reportedly found near the boat-landing area in either 1970 or 1971 while a tree stump was being removed. A separate note records that a human skull from the site had been passed through local hands before later disappearing from traceable custody. Those records point to not merely an ordinary historical property but to a place where people lived, travelled and buried their dead. That fact alone should demand that we treat the site with seriousness, caution and respect.
By the late 18th century, this same geologically blessed area would serve our ancestors with their various colonial ambitions.
Records tied to Governor John Graves Simcoe’s 1793 expedition place his party in this river system, and later survey records identify the presence of Augustus Jones would open Yonge Street north to Pine Fort Landing at Lot 111W. One excerpt from the Jones diary describes the area as the intended northern end of one of Upper Canada’s defining roads. This raises its status from some obscure backwater to a major historical hub.
Everyone loves to hear the many stories of the local fur trade. It must be pointed out that the same strategic value identified by our indigenous peoples was recognized by the fur trade.
I have written accounts describing the Upper Landing as a place where the Indigenous traders and merchants would meet, where large numbers of wigwams could gather during the trading seasons, and where Newmarket traders competed to secure the plethora of furs arriving from the north. Records of the Northwest Company’s 1810 memorial show the company seeking lots at Gwillimbury along the route through York, Holland Landing and Kempenfelt. This raises the area’s importance from a minor historical footnote to that of documentary evidence of the importance in which the great commercial powers of early Canada held this landing – a critical inland transportation point.
The Pine Fort, also to be known as Red Pine Fort or Fort Gwillimbury became an historical beacon for historians. The historical record strongly supports the existence of the fort at or very near Lot 111W. Reproduced maps place Pine Tree Landing and the fort in this vicinity, and later local researchers have argued that perhaps the surviving log structure on the property may preserve material from that earlier fortified site, or stand close to where it once stood.
While such claims remain unsubstantiated and we must tread carefully, I do believe that we can infer that the Lot 111W area was associated with a fort, a landing and a colonial outpost of strategic significance.
The Crown’s plans for the site were expansive in nature. Government survey plans, for the Town of Gwillimbury, dated from 1800, 1802 and 1811 envision a formal government town with a courthouse reserve, a church square, a market reserve, a school, hospital, cemetery and a grid of lots around the landing.
The town never realized its potential as I pointed out in my article on Holland Landing from a few years ago, however, there is a story to be gleaned by studying the planned landscapes proposed. Officials saw the area’s potential, the kind of place where government, commerce and settlement could take root and expand.
As a student I learned about the importance that the area played in the War of 1812, which deepened the area’s importance. While the main military depot stood nearby at Soldiers’ Bay on Lot 116W, Holland’s Landing became the first depot north of York on a vital route connecting Yonge Street, the East Holland River, Lake Simcoe, Kempenfelt Bay, the Nine Mile Portage, the Nottawasaga and Penetanguishene.
Records place Joseph Johnson, a local men involved in moving goods and people through this wartime corridor on of Lot 111W. That suggests that the 31 Sand Road area did not merely witness early Ontario history, it was part of it.
Joseph Johnson’s presence provides the historian with a vital human perspective of the fledgling community. Sources state that he moved to Lot 111W in 1807, built a house and an inn, and was instrumental in the establishment of what was then known as Johnson’s Landing. Amongst the later recollections are a description of the hotel and nearby warehouses, while Bonnycastle’s 1841 account still referred to the “little inn” at Lot 111W while distinguishing it from the former military depot at Soldiers’ Bay.
In the study of our history, it is vital that we acknowledge the fact that places may take on historical importance not only for their connection to governmental planning, but for their relevance to everyday life. This was a destination, a trading center, a launch point and an occupied settlement.
Finally, this brings us to the log cabin, hidden within the property that Geoff and Andrew identified and for which they are advocating.
Historical summaries describe the cabin as an early 19th-century log building, representing a rare surviving remnant of the site’s settler era. The suggestion that it may rank among the oldest surviving log structures in the corridor remains a historical argument, requiring more study and documentation.
Even so, the very existence of an early log structure on a site already tied to Indigenous occupation, the fur trade, historic road building and military history surely makes this property more than notable. It makes it unusually fragile and unusually valuable at the same time and surely worth an extensive evaluation.
It would seem logical that 31 Sand Road should not be treated merely as an ordinary development parcel but as a vital signpost to a larger historical story.
This piece of land would appear to hold a multitude of stories and each one building upon the next, only strengthening its importance. At the very least, it presents as a place of Indigenous travel and probable seasonal camp life, a place of burial evidence.
It is a site tied to Simcoe and the historic opening of Yonge Street, linked to the Northwest Company and the inland fur trade, and the military logistics of the War of 1812.
It serves as a place where a planned government town once existed, if only on paper. It serves as a site where an historic inn, a landing and an early log structure have survived into the modern era.
We do not often get the chance to preserve an entire sequence of history in one landscape. A site like 31 Sand Road affords us a unique opportunity to do so and to further our understanding of our past. Alas, it should not be remembered later as merely another missed opportunity to safeguard our heritage.
While it still exists, it must be preserved now for what remains: a rare place where thousands of years of human presence can still be read in the ground, in the records and, perhaps, in the timbers themselves. The case for its protection is not based upon sentimentality, but on heritage.
If we locally want places where our students can encounter the area’s history, where it all unfolded, then this goal must remain within our reach.
If you are interested in learning more about the efforts being undertaken to preserve this historical site or want to know more about this heritage gem I urge you check out the group’s information site at: East Gwillimbury: People Over Politics Facebook Group, as they have posted several archaeological and historical references relative to the prope
I am most grateful for the information contained in the documentation of the group in the writing of this article and I have been fortunate to be involved in some small way in providing the group with copies of my various treatise, produced over the years.
Related Articles:
When Newmarket Was Known As A ‘Nice Little Village’ Near Holland Landing
Histories Of Newmarket And Holland Landing Have Long Been Intertwined
Once Mighty Holland River Played A Key Role In Newmarket’s Growth, Prosperity!
Augustus Jones Helped Pave Way To Today’s Communities
Prospect Of Bypass Drives Quest To Find Lost Fort
Area Indigenous Peoples Ceded Their Territory In Later Disputed Toronto Purchase
Indigenous Trails Were ‘Highways’ For Newmarket Area’s First Settlers
Re-Purposing Heritage Buildings Builds A Bridge Between The Old And The New
