Lake Simcoe

Lake Simcoe lies south of Georgian Bay, connected to Lake Couchiching by a narrow channel. For centuries, Indigenous fishers drove wooden stakes into the shallows there to form weirs, guiding fish into traps. The Wendat cared for these structures before the dispersal of their people in the mid-seventeenth century; Champlain saw the weirs in 1615. The French called the lake Lac aux Claies, after the fishing fences. In 1793 Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe gave it its present name in memory of his father.