The Rouge River trail, used by the Huron and then later by the French to travel between Lake Ontario and Lake Simcoe / Georgian Bay, ran through the Aurora Site.
Perhaps the busiest and best documented of these routes was that which followed the Humber River valley northward ... although another trail of equal importance and antiquity and used earlier than the former by the French, extended from the mouth of the Rouge River northward to the headwaters of the Little Rouge and over the drainage divide to the East Branch of the Holland River at Holland Landing.
The Aurora Site was indiscriminately looted by collectors throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. An 1885 report on Whitchurch Township notes that two thousand interments took place on the site, and that another smaller burial site was found two hundred yards from the site beside a large pond.[5]
The self-trained archaeologist William Brodie wrote two archaeological reports on his findings at the Old Fort Site (1888; 1901) dating to his first visit in 1846. In reference to the Old Fort Site, Brodie wrote in 1901:
To say that a ton of archaeological material was collected from the County of York sites, is a moderate estimate. Some of it is in European museums, some in the States, and some of it in Laval University, some of it is still in the hands of amateur collectors, and a little of it has been secured for the Provincial Museum, but the greater part of it, once in the keeping of private collectors, is gone, being collected and lost, as private collections often are.[7]
A complete map of the site was produced in 1930 by the amateur archaeologist Peter Pringle.[8]
The Aurora Site was completely excavated in 1947 and 1957 by the University of Toronto. The 1947 dig was the first student excavation by the university, and it was led by John Norman Emerson.[9] Emerson's doctoral work was largely based on the excavations of the Aurora Site.
This excavation contributed to the conclusions of archeologists and anthropologists that the Wendat coalesced as a people in this area, rather than further east in the St. Lawrence River valley, as was thought at one time. Findings in the late twentieth century at the Ratcliff Site and in 2005 at the Mantle Site have provided more evidence of sixteenth-century settlements by ancestral Wendat in this region.The use of technological and analytic advances, such as radiocarbon dating and Bayesian analysis, has resulted in new conclusions about the occupancy of these varied sites. Some researchers now believe that the Mantle Site was occupied 1587 to 1623; this view is controversial, and other researchers have disputed these findings.
,The Ratcliff or Baker Hill Site is a 16th-century Huron-Wendat ancestral village located on one of the head water tributaries of the Rouge River on the south side of the Oak Ridges Moraine in present-day Whitchurch–Stouffville, approximately 25 kilometers north of Toronto. The Ratcliff Site is located on the east side of Highway 48, south of Bloomington Road in Whitchurch–Stouffville. The ravine on the village site was infilled during the early 1950s to allow for the expansion of a neighboring quarry
  Location within Ontario today | |
| Location | Whitchurch–Stouffville, Regional Municipality of York, Ontario, Canada |
|---|---|
| Region | Regional Municipality of York, Ontario |
| Coordinates | 43°59′48″N 79°17′6″W |
| History | |
| Periods | Late Precontact Period, ca. 1550–1615 |
| Cultures | Huron (Wendat) |
The village occupied approximately 2.8 hectares on the brow of a hill overlooking a steep ravine on the west side.
The artifacts found on the site in the mid-19th century included stone-axes, flint arrows and spear heads, broken crockery, many earthen and stone pipes, bears' teeth with holes bored through them, polished teeth of beaver, deer and moose for decorative use; bone needles, and fish-spears made of deer shoulder-blades, as well as millstones used by the women for crushing corn. A human skull was found "perforated with seven holes, and had evidently been held as a trophy, the holes being the score of enemies slaughtered in battle by the wearer."
The ceramics found on the site indicate that the local community must have had some contact with other Iroquoian groups living in present-day upstate New York and in the St. Lawrence Valley. The large quantity of both ground and chipped stone indicates that the Wendat Village was involved with the production and distribution of stone artifacts.The presence of some contact-period (European) artifacts, such as black glass and copper beads, suggest that the site was inhabited between the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
About 400 meters north of the Ratcliff Site on lot 10 in concession 8, a mass grave with "many hundreds" of Huron skeletons was discovered and removed in the late 1840s In ancient Huron tradition, the dead would be initially buried in a temporary grave. Every ten years the accumulated bones would be moved to a mass grave in an elaborate ceremony.
The inhabitants likely came here from the so-called Mantle Site, located five kilometers to the south-east in Stouffville, when the latter was abandoned in the early 17th century. The Ratcliff Site was occupied at the same time as the so-called Aurora Site, four kilometres north-west of Ratcliff, also within the boundaries of what is today Whitchurch–Stouffville.
Today the site is still occupied by a quarry. Farms surround the site itself.
Aurora got its start with the opening of Yonge Street in 1796 by Governor John Graves Simcoe. The first settlers were refugees from the new United States of America: Loyalists, who had sided with the British Crown, and Quakers, who had sided with no one. In both cases, the newcomers proved to be both industrious pioneers and exceedingly loyalto their adoptive homeland.
Aurora’s big boostcame when Richard Machell settled along the corners of Yonge and Wellington Street in 1804. He was soon joined by other settlers and soon, as was common in those days, a thriving hamlet sprung up around this busy crossroad. The community took the name, Machell’s Corners, in honour of its first settler.
In 1853, and to much excitement, the tracks of Ontario’s first railway arrived in the village. The railway provided a direct link to Toronto and encouraged growth in population and industry in Aurora. On the eve of the railway’s arrival, a mere 100 people lived in the village. By1878, that number had risen to 1500. Aurora had become an important industrial town, home to two farming implement factories, three sawmills, two cabinet factories, and other business enterprises.
In a very real sense, the arrival of the railway heralded the dawn of anew age for the community. Sensing that, postmaster, Charles Doan,decided to rename the village Aurora, after the Greek goddess of the dawn. The new name became official on January 1, 1854.
Unfortunately, by the end of the century modern industries were being driven away from small towns into larger cities. Aurora began to lose its role as a factory town and increasingly reverted to its agricultural roots. Slow growth continued, but it wasn’t until the rise of suburbia in the wake of the Second World War that Aurora was rejuvenated.
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