Exerpts from The Illustrated Natural History of Canada , The Great Lakes, by Robert Thomas Allen,  N.S.L. Natural Sciences of Canada Ltd.  c 1970

The Virgin Forests

There is a romantic notion that before Europeans arrived in North America, the forests existed in a state of natural perfection. They’re called “primeval forests” or “virgin forests”. But there never was a primeval forest in the sense of something in a condition of suspended animation. Trees dies of fire, disease and old age. They were cut down by beavers and their roots drowned by beaver ponds, ravaged by storms and uprooted by winds and floods. They were crowded out by stronger trees and attacked by insects. Ones struck by lightening exploded as if they’d been hit by bombs, and anybody who has ever tossed a pine knot into the fireplace knows how efficiently a blazing pine [coal] put the torch to the surrounding forest. There were burned up areas from the first time man set eyes on North America. A natural forest is not a state of perfection, but a struggle for survival and a constant process of succession.

Nevertheless, what man did to the forest s was far worse than any destruction accomplished by nature. He was the most lethal invader of all. To the pioneer of this land, the forest was the enemy. [They] looked on it about the same way as a used car dealer looks at a lot cars that he has to move to survive. Improved land was cleared of trees. The forests were used for making potash, laths, carriages, barrels, furniture, fence posts, telephone poles, railway ties, log houses. Fences were made from stumps of pines that grew eight to twelve feet in circumference and 170 feet high. There are people today who remember barns in southwestern Ontario floored with walnut.

Before the human invasion forests covered the shores of Lake Ontario. In 1851 W.H. Smith wrote, “The original forest (Etobicoke) was predominantly hardwood and covered the whole watershed. The trees were large and widely spaced and rose to a height of fifty feet or more without a limb. The interior of the woods was dim and cool, with hardly any underbrush, but with a deep covering of duff over the forest floor.

On the dry, level land, maple with its associate beech, and in some sections basswood was predominant. On the wetter sites, silver maple, white elm forests with their associates of swamp white oak and shag-bark hickory occurred, while on muck areas, cedar grew in swamps and on the wettest sites, tamarack were found. A few acres of oak occurred here and there, but nothing like the extensive oak plains which were present on the Humber watershed, notably in the western part of York township. White pine and hemlock grew on the well drained slopes and ridges along the stream valleys and occurred as scattered trees throughout the hardwood stands attaining their best growth in the maple beech woods”.

There are no untouched patches of forest left in the Great Lakes region.