1793 to now

The History of Toronto

How a fort on Lake Ontario became Canada's largest city — founding, war, railways, amalgamation, and the immigration waves that reshaped it.

The Toronto skyline seen across the water — Toronto skyline — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

Toronto is old enough to have burned down once and been renamed twice, and young enough that its current shape — one city, not six — dates to 1998, well within living memory. Here's the actual timeline, not the postcard version — starting from the 1793 founding of York. For what came before that, including where the name "Toronto" actually comes from, see our separate page on Toronto's Indigenous history.

From York to Toronto (1793–1834)

Toronto started as York, a garrison town founded in 1793 by John Graves Simcoe, Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, who made it the colonial capital. It was named for Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany. During the War of 1812, American forces captured and burned York in April 1813 — part of why, when the British later burned Washington, D.C., it was framed as retaliation. York was incorporated as the City of Toronto on March 6, 1834, with a population of roughly 9,000, taking a version of its Indigenous Mohawk/Wyandot-derived name back.

Rail, industry, and rapid growth (1850s–1900s)

Railways — the Grand Trunk and others — turned Toronto into central Canada's transport and financial hub through the second half of the 19th century, pulling in immigrants and industry fast enough that the city earned the nickname Hogtown, partly for its dominant meatpacking industry and partly as a political jab from smaller Ontario towns annoyed at Toronto's outsized influence in the provincial legislature.

Amalgamation: six cities become one (1998)

For most of the 20th century, "Toronto" was actually a cluster of separate municipalities — old Toronto, North York, Etobicoke, Scarborough, York, and East York — governed together loosely as Metropolitan Toronto starting in 1953. On January 1, 1998, the Ontario provincial government forced a full merger, creating the single "megacity" that exists today. It's the reason locals still identify strongly with their old municipality (ask anyone from Scarborough), and it's the direct origin of Toronto's most famous modern nickname — see The Six / The 6ix, which refers to exactly these six former cities.

The immigration waves that built modern Toronto

The amalgamation is the political story; the more consequential one is demographic. Waves of immigration — Caribbean and especially Jamaican through the 1960s–80s, Somali following the 1991 civil war, and continuous South Asian, East Asian, Filipino, Latin American and Eastern European immigration since — transformed Toronto's inner suburbs into some of the most ethnically dense neighbourhoods anywhere. That density is the direct cause of the vocabulary this whole site documents; read the full history of Toronto slang for that side of the story specifically, or how multicultural Toronto actually is for the numbers.

Sources

Related dictionary terms

Hogtown The Six T Dot