Dundas Street Crossing and Lambton Mills
You are now standing on the abutment of a former Dundas Street bridge. Dundas Street crossed the Humber River here before it was rerouted in 1928 over the bridge immediately to the north.
The government of Upper Canada (now Ontario) chose this natural point of crossing for Dundas Street, one of Ontario's earliest roads, and a vital link between the fledgling settlement of York (now Toronto) and settlements to the west. Dundas Street followed the easiest (not the straightest) route across the terrain, perhaps following an earlier Aboriginal trail.
This point on the river was an excellent location for water-powered mills, the first of which was opened here by William Cooper in 1807. Much like a major manufacturing plant today, the mills became magnets for other tradesmen, including tanners, blacksmiths, and coopers, whose services were necessary for the functioning of the mill. These businesses formed the nucleus of an early hamlet called Cooper's Mills.
In the 1840s, the Cooper mills were acquired by William P. Howland, and a larger, five-storey flour mill was constructed on the south side of the Dundas highway, just behind you. In 1851, Howland changed the name of the area to Lambton Mills to honour John George Lambton, a British reformer and former Governor General of Canada. By the mid-1850s, the village of Lambton Mills was a community of 500 - a milling centre, a travel stop on the Dundas highway, and a social centre for the local agricultural community.
By the 1860s, logging and agriculture had altered drainage patterns in the Humber River watershed. The resulting fluctuations in water levels made water-powered mills increasingly unreliable. Howland's flour mill was fitted with a steam engine in the 1880s, but nevertheless closed after 1900.
Lambton also lost its significance as a travel stop when modern expressways rendered the former Dundas highway into a local street. Today, only a few structures, including this bridge abutment and the 1847 Lambton House Hotel (at 4066 Old Dundas Street), remind us of the original Humber River community.
Plaque via Alan L. Brown's site Toronto Plaques. Full page here.