Somewhat related to my previous post, Pottery Road has a little-known connection to another Toronto street: Davenport Road. The East York Library monograph Fascinating Facts About East York (and some of them really are, at least to east-end geeks like me) says that Pottery Road:
may have been a part of an old Indian trail that crossed the city along what is now Davenport Road and entered the Don Valley through the Rosedale Valley ravine. There are records of the Mississauga Indians having encamped on the Don near Pottery Road as late as 1831.
I always find it interesting that so much of our modern infrastructure follows old trails, watercourses, and terrain, even decades or centuries after after the old features have ceased to exist on any meaningful level. Technology may have brought us huge bridges across the valley and personal motorized transportation, yet there’s Pottery Road, tracing an old footpath in the Don and still used by thousands of people a day. Some things never change.
Dundas Street follows a military trail between Toronto and London.
Here in Windsor, Huron Church Road, the road that leads you to the Ambassador Bridge and the US, follows an old indian trail (at one time called Huron Line, until a church was built, changing the name to Church Road, eventually combined into the current name)
Why change something that works 😉