40 Fun Facts About Lake Ontario

Which baseball legend hit his first professional home run in 1914 at an island ballpark on Lake Ontario?

Babe Ruth was a young pitcher for the visiting Providence Grays when he cleared the wall at Hanlan's Point in Toronto. It was the only home run he ever hit as a minor leaguer.

The Toronto Islands in Lake Ontario hold North America's largest urban community living without which everyday thing?

Cars are kept off the islands, which sit just offshore from downtown Toronto and are reached by ferry. The chain's 15 islands also shelter the city's harbour.

Which landmark near the Lake Ontario shore in Toronto was the world's tallest free-standing structure from 1975 to 2007?

The CN Tower held the record for 32 years, until Dubai's Burj Khalifa passed it. The letters stand for Canadian National, the railway company that built it as a broadcasting mast.

Which American state has shoreline on four of the five Great Lakes, missing only Lake Ontario?

Michigan's four-lake border gives it the longest freshwater coastline of any US state, about 3,288 miles. Lake Ontario lies too far east to touch it.

Lake Ontario has the smallest surface of the five Great Lakes, but it beats larger Lake Erie on which measure?

Water volume is where Lake Ontario wins: it holds about 1,640 cubic kilometres against Lake Erie's 480, more than three times as much in a smaller footprint.

US troops crossed Lake Ontario to burn York's legislature in 1813; which American home did Britain torch a year later?

The White House burned in August 1814, partly in retaliation for the looting of York, the town now called Toronto. A violent thunderstorm put out the flames the next day.

Vineyards on the Niagara Peninsula beside Lake Ontario are famous for a sweet wine pressed from grapes in which state?

Frozen grapes give up their sugar while their water stays behind as ice, so the juice is intensely sweet. Ontario makes over 90% of Canada's ice wine, and Canada makes more than any other country.

Which Toronto schoolgirl, aged 16, became the first person to swim across Lake Ontario in September 1954?

Marilyn Bell swam for almost 21 hours through high waves while lamprey eels attacked her arms and legs. The American star Florence Chadwick, offered $10,000 to make the crossing, gave up partway.

Seneca legend says a giant serpent called Gaasyendietha lives in Lake Ontario; what is the creature said to spew?

Fire is both weapon and transport for Gaasyendietha, which is said to cross the sky on a blazing trail. That is why the serpent is often likened to the dragons of European legend.

Lake-effect snow blowing off Lake Ontario often makes which New York city the snowiest large city in the United States?

Syracuse sits about 40 miles inland, yet winter winds crossing the warmer lake pick up moisture and drop it as snow that far away. Nearby Tug Hill gets more snow than anywhere else in the eastern US.

Which river is Lake Ontario's outlet, carrying the water of all five Great Lakes toward the Atlantic Ocean?

The St. Lawrence River runs about 500 km from the lake before widening into its estuary. Because Lake Ontario is last in the chain, water from every other Great Lake passes through it.

The Toronto Islands in Lake Ontario were a peninsula joined to the mainland until 1858, when what cut them off?

A storm in April 1858 tore a channel 150 metres wide through the sandbar, and it never closed again. The opening is still there today and is known as the Eastern Gap.

Elizabeth Simcoe named the tall cliffs on Lake Ontario in east Toronto in 1793 after which English seaside town?

Scarborough in North Yorkshire came to mind because the pale bluffs looked to her like chalk cliffs, and she talked of building a summer house there. The name later spread to the whole township.

Which city at Lake Ontario's eastern end became the first capital of the united Province of Canada in 1841?

Kingston kept the title for only three years, from 1841 to 1844. The city grew up around a fort founded in 1673, which makes it one of the oldest settlements on the Great Lakes.

Which canal lifts ships up the Niagara Escarpment between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, bypassing Niagara Falls?

The Welland Canal uses eight locks to carry ships the 99.5 metres between the two lakes. It first opened in 1829 and has been rebuilt several times to take larger vessels.

What nickname is given to the densely populated region wrapped around Lake Ontario's western end, home to Toronto?

The Golden Horseshoe takes the first half of its name from the region's wealth and the second from the curve of the shoreline. More than a fifth of Canada's people live there.

Which city at Lake Ontario's western tip is known as the Steel Capital of Canada for the mills on its harbour?

Hamilton's two big steelmakers, Stelco and Dofasco, were founded in 1910 and 1912 and went on to make sixty percent of the country's steel.

The Darlington plant on Lake Ontario's north shore supplies about a fifth of Ontario's electricity from which source?

Nuclear reactors at Darlington, four of them, produce enough electricity for a city of two million people. An older plant at Pickering, also on the lakeshore, is among the oldest in the world.

Lake Ontario has iced over completely only five times on record; which feature of the lake usually keeps it open?

Its depth, 244 metres at the lowest point, keeps the lake as a whole from icing over, so ice usually forms only along the shores and in bays. The last complete freeze was in 1934.

The national marine sanctuary created in Lake Ontario's New York waters in 2024 was set up mainly to protect what?

Shipwrecks and other maritime history are what the sanctuary protects, along with places sacred to the Haudenosaunee. It was the third national marine sanctuary on the Great Lakes and the first in New York waters.

Which island, named after the British general killed winning Quebec in 1759, is the largest in Lake Ontario?

Wolfe Island is also the largest of the Thousand Islands, sitting right where the lake pours into its outlet river. It was called Grand Island until 1792.

A fast catamaran ferry built in Australia ran across Lake Ontario from 2004, linking Toronto with which American city?

Rochester's fast ferry, marketed as The Breeze, soon failed and the ship was sold in 2007. It later carried passengers between Spain and Morocco across the Strait of Gibraltar.

A rocket-launched test model of which cancelled Canadian jet fighter was found on the floor of Lake Ontario in 2017?

Avro Arrow test models were launched on rocket boosters from Point Petre in the 1950s to try out the design. The fighter itself was cancelled in 1959 and the finished airframes were ordered destroyed.

Which European power built Old Fort Niagara in the 1720s to control the mouth of the Niagara River on Lake Ontario?

France put up a fortified house there in 1726 and enlarged the fort in 1755 as war with Britain loomed. The post later passed to the British and then to the United States.

Ned Hanlan, raised on the Toronto Islands in Lake Ontario, was world champion from 1880 to 1884 in which sport?

Rowing made Ned Hanlan, a single sculler, what Rowing Canada calls the country's first individual sporting hero. Hanlan's Point on the islands took its name from his father's hotel.

The airport on the Toronto Islands in Lake Ontario is named after which Canadian flying ace of the First World War?

Billy Bishop was credited with 72 victories, the most of any Canadian or British Empire pilot of the war, and won the Victoria Cross. Travellers reach the island airport through a pedestrian tunnel.

American eels, once a major catch in Lake Ontario, leave fresh water to spawn far out in which part of the Atlantic?

The Sargasso Sea is where every American eel hatches and where adults return to breed after 10 to 25 years in fresh water. In some years eels made up almost half the value of Lake Ontario's commercial catch.

Which UNESCO-listed canal links Lake Ontario with Ottawa, where part of it becomes a huge skating rink each winter?

The Rideau Canal runs 202 km and is the oldest continuously operated canal system in North America. It opened in 1832 and today carries pleasure boats.

HMS Ontario, a British warship found largely intact on Lake Ontario's floor in 2008, sank during which conflict?

The Revolutionary War vessel went down in a gale in 1780, only five months after her launch and without ever seeing battle. She was the largest British warship on the Great Lakes at the time.

The Gibraltar Point Lighthouse on Lake Ontario, the oldest standing on the Great Lakes, is said to be haunted by whom?

Its first keeper, John Paul Radelmüller, was murdered in 1815; local lore says soldiers had come looking for his beer. Two soldiers were charged and acquitted, and the ghost story has endured ever since.

Which explorer, namesake of a Colorado mountain, died leading the 1813 American attack across Lake Ontario on York?

Zebulon Pike was killed when the retreating British blew up their gunpowder magazine as his troops closed in. By then he was a brigadier general, a few years on from the 1806 expedition that sighted Pikes Peak.

During the Second World War, Fort Ontario at Oswego on Lake Ontario held the only American camp for which group?

Holocaust refugees, 982 people from Nazi-occupied Europe and most of them Jewish, arrived at the fort in August 1944. It was the first and only refugee centre the United States set up during the war.

Old maps once labelled Lake Ontario after which colonial governor, whose name a famous Quebec City hotel bears?

Frontenac, a count who twice served as governor general between 1672 and 1698, had the lake named for him on a 1712 map. Samuel de Champlain had earlier called it Lake St. Louis; the name Ontario outlasted both.

By which name do geologists know the larger glacial lake that filled Lake Ontario's basin about 13,000 years ago?

Lake Iroquois stood about 30 metres higher than today because ice blocked the usual outlet, so it drained through the Mohawk and Hudson valleys instead. Its old beach survives as a ridge through Toronto.

Which interpreter for Samuel de Champlain is believed to be the first European to reach Lake Ontario, in 1615?

Étienne Brûlé went to live among Indigenous nations as a youth to learn their languages, then scouted ahead for Champlain. He is thought to have reached the Great Lakes before his employer did.

Which agreement after the War of 1812 limited the United States and Britain to one small warship each on Lake Ontario?

The Rush–Bagot Treaty capped each side at one vessel of no more than 100 tons carrying a single cannon. It laid the basis for a demilitarized border between the two countries.

Which New York village on Lake Ontario was the US Navy's Great Lakes headquarters and shipyard during the War of 1812?

Sackets Harbor soon had more than 3,000 men at work in its shipyard, and the village twice drove off British attacks. Its fleet spent the war in a building race with a rival British yard across the lake.

Charity Shoal, a circular rim of rock hidden beneath the northeast end of Lake Ontario, is hypothesized to be what?

An impact crater about 460 million years old is the leading explanation for the circular basin, which is more than a kilometre across. A steamship ran aground on its rocks in an 1897 gale.

Stonehookers once raked flat slabs of which rock from the shallows of Lake Ontario to build the growing city of Toronto?

Shale lifted from the lakebed around Port Credit and Bronte went into the growing city's buildings. The scows that carried the slabs were known as stone hookers.

The Trent–Severn Waterway carries pleasure boats from Lake Ontario through Lake Simcoe to which arm of Lake Huron?

Georgian Bay lies 386 km from the lake by this route, whose final link opened only in 1920. Samuel de Champlain travelled the same chain of inland waters with the Hurons in 1615.