Orillia, Canada Summary

photo by Angelasdolls

If you’re heading south from Severn Sound towards Toronto, you might consider a brief detour to ORILLIA, beside lakes Simcoe and Couchiching – and on Hwy 11, the road to Algonquin Provincial Park. The town lies just to the west of the narrow channel that connects the two lakes, a waterway that was once a centre of Huron settlement. When Samuel de Champlain arrived here in 1615, he promptly handed out muskets to his Huron allies, encouraging them to attack their Iroquois rivals in order to establish French control of the fur trade – an intervention that was to lead to the destruction of the Jesuit outpost at Sainte-Marie in 1649. Two hundred years later, a second wave of Europeans cleared the district’s forests, and today Orillia is a trim little town of 27,000 citizens – part lakeside resort, part farming centre.