How old are Canadian cities? Initial settlement and the foundation of urbanism

[Symz]

Windsor is the oldest continually inhabited European-founded settlement in Canada west of Montreal. A French settlement was established in 1749.

[LakeLocker]

Originally Posted by Spocket

Not even close. I can think of at least one from my home province that didn't even exist until the late fifties at the earliest.

There are others in Canada and hundreds around the world. I'd grant that by comparison, these newer cities are a definite minority but 80+ years ago is a long time even in terms of city establishment. Hell, half of Asia is building "new" cities right now and Africa is bound to be following suit sooner rather than later. And we're not even talking about cities that sprang out of nothing. If we include cities that existed as some form of settlement prior to their incorporation, we're getting in to the thousands of geographic points.

Probably about 50 percent of Canada's suburbs were just truck or wagon stops at best no more than 70 years ago.

This is why I find this conversation more or less pointless, people are implying Canada was urban before it was rural. The reality is the biggest of cities 200 year plus ago were tiny tiny little towns. At that point you have to consider if native settles were not way more relevant.

[vid]

Originally Posted by SignalHillHiker

I like how they managed to match the font for hundreds of years and then the 1990s happened and they're like "fuck it".

[Dominion301]

Originally Posted by Symz

Windsor is the oldest continually inhabited European-founded settlement in Canada west of Montreal. A French settlement was established in 1749.

I think Kingston has Windsor beat by several decades with Fort Cataraqui.

The thing is all of these pale in comparison to our Indigenous settlements and gathering places.

[urbandreamer]

Sault Ste Marie is 400 years old.

[swimmer_spe]

Originally Posted by Symz

Windsor is the oldest continually inhabited European-founded settlement in Canada west of Montreal. A French settlement was established in 1749.

Originally Posted by Dominion301

I think Kingston has Windsor beat by several decades with Fort Cataraqui.

The thing is all of these pale in comparison to our Indigenous settlements and gathering places.

Originally Posted by urbandreamer

Sault Ste Marie is 400 years old.

Windsor 1749
SSM 1668
Kingston 1673

Now here is a curve ball - Moose Factory on the Hudson Bay, 1673

I always thought that it was the oldest, now I come to learn that SSM has it beat by about 5 years.

[craneSpotter]

Victoria, BC (&Region)

- 1790: The Spanish ship Princesa Real entered Esquimalt Harbour under the command of Lt. Don Manuel Quimper, who named the harbour Puerto de Cordova

- 1835: Captain McNeill explored Victoria, Esquimalt, Sooke for the Hudson's Bay Company by ship; recommended the area for a working harbour

- 1843: Fort Victoria was founded by the Hudson's Bay Company on March 14, at the location the Lekwungen People called "Camosack" meaning "Rush of Water."

- 1845: First ship from England arrives in Victoria harbour, bringing settlers.

- 1848: 1st British Man-of-war (Constance) enters Esquimalt Harbour with 250 sailers and marines - establishing a base for the Royal Navy.

- 1849: the Crown Colony of Vancouver Island is established, with Victoria as capital.

- 1854: First Victoria census taken

- 1856: Governor James Douglas convened the first Legislative Assembly of Vancouver Island @ Victoria.

- 1858 : The Gold Rush brought thousands of people to the Victoria area - mainly Americans and Chinese staging. Resident population goes from 500 to 2,000.

- 1862: Victoria (Western Canada's second oldest city) is incorporated on August 2. Library established and gas street lights are installed.

- 1865: The Royal Navy establishes their Esquimalt base as headquarters for the Pacific

- 1871: British Columbia became the sixth province of the Dominion of Canada and Victoria was proclaimed the Capital City. Victoria had a city population of 3,270 and a regional population of 4,000 to 5,000.

[casper]

Metro Vancouver has a weird history.

BC was originally part of the Oregon County that was claimed by Great Britain, Spain, France, and Russia. Eventually it would be split into parts and the northern part would become British Columbia and the southern part would become Washington State and Oregon. Today there are still strong tries throughout the Cascadia region.

1827 - Fort Langley established as a trading post.

1858 - New Westminster

1867 - Gastown (now Downtown Vancouver)

The decision to use Gastown as the terminus for the Canadian Pacific Railway was probably historically the one most significant single decision that shaped the Metro Vancouver area.

[J.OT13]

1800- Wrightsville (now Hull part of Gatineau) founded by American Philemon Wright
1826 - ByTowne founded by Colonel John By as base camp for the construction of the Rideau Canal
1855 - ByTown renamed City of Ottawa
1857 - Ottawa chosen by Queen Victoria as capital of the Province of Canada
1866 - first sitting of Parliament in new capital
1867 - Ottawa becomes capital of the Dominion of Canada

[Martin Mtl]

Originally Posted by urbandreamer

Sault Ste Marie is 400 years old.

SSM is 50 years older than Montreal ?

[CityTech]

Ottawa's story is interesting because many of Ottawa's inner urban neighbourhoods were actually once independent villages that were founded separately from Ottawa in the 19th century and were annexed to it in the 20th.

Only the innermost core of city (downtown, Sandy Hill, Lowertown, Centretown, Centretown West, Lebreton Flats) grew as expansions of the original Bytown settlement. All other urban neighbourhoods (the Glebe, Hintonburg, Mechanicsville, Westboro, Old Ottawa South, Old Ottawa East, New Edinburgh...) were founded as separate villages and then annexed to Ottawa later. Hintonburg, for example, was founded around 1870, incorporated as a village in 1893, and then annexed to Ottawa in 1907. Westboro was founded in the 1890s and wasn't annexed to Ottawa until 1950. (Fun fact: telephone numbers and mailing addresses in Westboro were officially listed as "Westboro, Ontario" until around 1975).

You can see the legacy of this in development patterns. If you take a long walk down the Richmond/Wellington West/Somerset corridor, you'll notice that there's these awkward sort of gaps of non-mainstreet development separating out the neighbourhoods of Westboro, Hintonburg, and Centretown West. Westboro's mainstreet sort of ends at Tweedsmuir, and it's not until Western Avenue (a good 5-10 minute walk to the east) that Hintonburg's streetwall starts, and in turn, this sort of ends around Spadina Avenue and doesn't pick up again until almost Preston Street. This is because Hintonburg and Westboro developed separately from Ottawa and at the time they were annexed, there were rural gaps separating them from the "city". In the case of the Westboro-Hintonburg gap, it's extremely jarring because the rural gap wasn't developed until the 1950s, so it's filled with suburban style development (a couple used car lots, a couple strip malls, a big box grocery store--which is a really huge contrast to the charming mainstreets on either side of it. In recent years that suburban development is being replaced with condo towers, but they're doing a really bad job integrating those condo towers into the street, so it still has this sterile feel and is not helping to bridge the gap at all, unfortunately.

[Chadillaccc]

Fort Brisebois - 1874
Fort Calgary - 1876
Town of Calgary - 1884
City of Calgary - 1894

Calgary is the oldest place in Alberta with a town or city charter by about 10 years. Though the first “settled” place was Fort Augustus, established in 1794 in the area what is now Fort Saskatchewan, in the Edmonton Capital Region.