Toronto is a Canadian city located on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. 'Toronto' means 'place where trees stand in the water'. Toronto is an Iroquois name in reference to what is now Lake Simcoe (then Lake Toronto), to the north, where Hurons installed tree saplings to corral fish. The portage between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron that went this route was called the 'Toronto Portage', or 'Passage'. The first European presence was established by French traders at Fort Rouillé in 1750. The first large influx of Europeans was by United Empire Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution in the mid- to late-1780s. Toronto grew slowly in the initial years and was used by the British primarily as a naval base. When Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe moved the capital of Upper Canada from Newark to Toronto in 1793 he renamed the town York. By 1800 the town was still very small, smaller than Kingston, and consisted of probably not more than fifty families. York was captured, its surrender negotiated by John Strachan, and its major buildings burned by U.S. soldiers in 1813 (during the War of 1812). After the war, the city grew more rapidly throughout the remainder of the Nineteenth Century by becoming one of the main destinations of immigrants to Canada. On March 6, 1834, the Township of York reverted to its original name of Toronto. A bustling steamboat entry port burgeoned in the 1840s and the city's development was aided by the addition of gaslit streetlights and sewers. The city grew even more rapidly after it was linked by rail to the upper Great Lakes in 1854. By the 1870s, industrialization reached a feverish pace and helped to ensure Toronto's place as a major centre of urban growth in the new Canadian Confederation.(wikipedia)

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