Presqu’ile Centenniel
A trip through the history of Presqu'ile Provincial Park's history, measured in decades, centuries and millennia.
EPISODE NOTES
TRANSCRIPT
Pres’quile Provincial Park is a spit of land jutting into lake Ontario just south of Brighton. It was originally designated a park in 1922, making it unofficially the 5th of Ontario’s now 340 provincial parks.
Presquile just means ‘penninsula’ in French. So that checks out. But it hasn’t actually been a peninsula for all that long, geologically speaking. Since 2022 is the hundredth anniversary of it becoming a park, I thought it might be fun to zip through some of its history. You can find clues to that history all over the park, in spans of decades, centuries and millennia.
To start, let’s go to the south shore, which is covered in these big slabs of limestone, and stratified cliffs. If you look close, you’ll see they’re full of fossils - 450-million-year-old fossils. They tell you all of this was once at the bottom of a massive inland sea which covered the region for 150 million years.
So how’d we get from the bottom of a sea to peninsula in a lake? Well Lake Ontario, originally lake Iroquois, only appeared in the last 12,000 years as the glaciers of the last ice age melted. And they also left four islands here - but still not a peninsula. So the second clue is the long sandbank on the west side of presquile. It’s a tombolo - great word. Water currents pushed more and more sand between the mainland and the islands until they were connected. And presto, Peninsula.
This has all given the park an eclectic ecology, from its rocky shores to sandy beaches to sprawling wetlands to meadows to forests.
While hiking around and trying to take it all in I saw a colony of terns on the sand spits, black-capped chikadees, painted turtles, literally the first monarch caterpillar I have ever seen in person… but maybe the best part was rounding a bend in the woods and seeing a family of deer staring back at me. And they could be one last clue to Presquille’s history - and a nice reminder of its centennial. When it was designated a park in 1922, it was under a commission of five locals. And among other things they planted 90,000 trees here and stocked the park with deer. So I like to think that these are the direct descendants of those first whitetail settlers a century ago.