Cedar Valley Conservation Area

Cedar Valley Conservation Area is a 41-hectare urban park located in southern Oshawa and is managed by the City of Oshawa. The park is located on a lowland area that was the former shoreline and beach of glacial Lake Iroquois, through which the Oshawa Creek flows. The park features several picnic areas, 1.7 km of accessible gravel trails, and several side trails suitable for hiking and biking

Cedar Valley Conservation area was formerly agricultural land, and currently supports a mosaic of secondary growth forest types and meadows. The upland areas, which are located above the Oshawa Creek floodplain, support mixed forests consisting of trembling aspen and eastern white cedar, with buckthorn, green ash, alternate leaved dogwood, Manitoba maple, and Tartarian honeysuckle in the sub-canopy layer. Because these mixed forests are not dense, the ground cover consists of a mix of forest species, such as poison ivy, self-heal and sweet cicely, as well as open field species such as goldenrods, cinquefoils, bedstraw, sweet lotus, St. John’s Wort and tufted vetch.

The forests along the slopes of the Oshawa Creek floodplain are dominated by eastern white cedar, with associated species including ironwood, sugar maple, trembling aspen, and yellow birch. The ground vegetation in these lowland forests is rich, and include American hog peanut, Jack-in-the-pulpit, pepper root/two-leaved toothwort, jewelweed, sensitive fern, and false Solomon’s seal.

Finally, pockets of white pine and Scots pine plantations are interspersed throughout the park. These plantations can be differentiated by their neat rows of trees and understories that are dominated by dog-strangling vine.

Cedar Valley sits on the western branch of the Scugog Carrying Place, an historic overland footpath that was created and used by Indigenous peoples for centuries. The trail, which spans 29 kilometers, connects Lake Ontario to Lake Scugog. Starting at the north shore of Lake Ontario in present day Oshawa, the trail runs north along two branches. The western branch follows the route of Oshawa Creek, and ends at Port Perry, while the eastern branch follows the route of Harmony Creek, and ends at Caesarea.

Indigenous peoples have lived in and traversed the Oshawa and Harmony Creek watersheds for thousands of years. Just within a 2 kilometer radius of Cedar Valley Conservation Area alone, archaeologists have uncovered numerous artifacts dated to the Paleoindian (before 8500 BCE) and archaic eras (8000-1000 BCE), including projectile points and stone tools. During the 1350s, Huron-Wendat people moved eastward from the Duffins Creek Watershed and built large, permanent villages along the Scugog Carrying Place. One of these villages was what archaeologists now call the Grandview site, which was located along the eastern arm of the Scugog, approximately 1 km east of Cedar Valley. They lived in the Grandview village from 1350 to 1450; from what archaeologists can discern, this village did not have a palisade and included 12 longhouses. After 1450, the inhabitants of the Grandview village moved approximately 2 km southwest and built a village that archaeologists now refer to as the MacLeod site, on the Western arm of the Scugog Carrying Place. The MacLeod village was composed of 5 longhouses and was surrounded by a wooden palisade. Food systems of these villagers included three sisters intercropped agriculture, as well as harvesting and selection of forest “farmed” wild plants, and hunting and fishing for small game, such as deer, wild salmon and other fish species. Additionally, the Huron-Wyandot residents of these villages invented a unique style of pottery glazing, that rendered pots less porous to water.

The Scugog Carrying Place itself was used extensively by the Huron-Wyandot to traverse hunting grounds and move between villages. Early European merchants and fur traders also relied on the carrying place for transportation. However, the trail fell into a brief period of disuse in the late 1600s, after the Wyandotte left southern Ontario due to infectious diseases and the Beaver Wars to settle in their current location of Wendake, in Québec. At the turn of the 18th Century, the ancestors of the Mississauga of Scugog Island First Nations moved into Southern Ontario from their homeland north of Lake Huron. Mississaugas, who were active in the fur trade throughout the 1700s and early 1800s, revived the use of the carrying place.

The city of Oshawa began to be settled by Europeans in 1794. In 1787, Mississaugas signed the Gunshot Treaty with representatives of the British Crown, agreeing to share a large tract of land north of Lake Ontario, from the Etobicoke Creek to the Bay of Quinte, with the English loyalist refugees who fled to southern Ontario after the American War of Independence/Revolutionary War. The Gunshot Treaty lands included the Scugog Carrying Place. This treaty enabled Europeans to intensify settlement in the area, which increasingly displaced the Mississauga peoples who migrated north. The Scugog Carrying Place ceased to be used past 1841; however, what is now Simcoe Street follows the route of the original trail.

A Carrying Place: Oshawa's Indigenous Story | Local History Spotlight: A Carrying Place: Oshawa's Indigenous Story | Local History Spotlight - YouTube

“The Scugog Carrying Place,” First Nations – Oshawa Museum Blog (wordpress.com)