Interactive timeline · 500 to 2026
From Princess Point farmers to Steeltown: Hamilton in 37 moments.
37 moments5 eras61 sourcesAbout ↓
500 – 1783
Early farming peoples, then the Chonnonton (Neutral), Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas live around the Head of the Lake, where French travellers arrive in the 1600s.
Archaeologists named the Princess Point Complex after a site on a promontory in Cootes Paradise marsh in west Hamilton. Between about 500 and 1000 CE, people of this culture, living from the Grand River to the Niagara Peninsula, began growing maize alongside hunting, fishing and gathering. Radiocarbon dates from one Grand River site go back to about 540 CE, among the earliest evidence of corn farming in Ontario.
Before European colonization, the land around the western end of Lake Ontario was home to the Chonnonton, an Iroquoian-speaking people also called the Attiwandaron, whom the French called the Neutral. During the 17th century the Neutral were driven out by the Five Nations Haudenosaunee, and their villages disappeared from the region.
In 1615 the French interpreter Étienne Brûlé travelled with 12 Wendat warriors to the Susquehannock, and historians generally think the party went around the western end of Lake Ontario. The route is inferred rather than documented. A later visit by Brûlé to the Neutral country, around 1625, is also probable but unproven.
In 1669 the Sulpician missionaries François Dollier de Casson and René de Bréhant de Galinée, travelling with René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle, followed the south shore of Lake Ontario and reached the area of present-day Hamilton. La Salle, who was ill, left the party at the tip of the lake, and the missionaries went on to winter on the north shore of Lake Erie. At the time, Seneca people of the Haudenosaunee had villages in the area.
1784 – 1845
The Crown buys the land from the Mississaugas, Loyalists settle, a battle is fought at Stoney Creek and George Hamilton lays out a town.
After the American Revolution, the Crown obtained a large tract between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie from the Mississaugas of the Credit, partly to resettle Six Nations Loyalist refugees along the Grand River. The purchase was confirmed as Treaty 3 in 1792 and covers the land where Hamilton now stands. Loyalist families began farming at the Head of the Lake in the same period.
Peter Jones, whose Ojibwe name Kahkewaquonaby means sacred feathers, was born at Burlington Heights to surveyor Augustus Jones and Tuhbenahneequay, daughter of Mississauga chief Wahbanosay. He became a Methodist minister, author and translator, and in 1829 was elected one of the three chiefs of the Credit band. He died near Brantford in 1856.
In a night attack, about 700 British regulars of the 8th and 49th regiments led by Lieutenant-Colonel John Harvey struck an American army of roughly 3,400 camped at Stoney Creek. The Americans withdrew after both their generals, John Chandler and William Winder, were captured. The battlefield marks the farthest American advance on the Niagara frontier and is now a National Historic Site.
Shortly after the War of 1812, merchant George Hamilton bought farm land from James Durand and laid out a town site in 1815. In 1816 the new Gore District was created with Hamilton as its seat, and Prince's Square was laid out for a courthouse; the population was 668.
A provincial statute defined Hamilton's town limits on February 13, 1833, and incorporated it as a police village with an elected board. Its population was about 1,000.
Lawyer and politician Allan Napier MacNab bought the Burlington Heights property in November 1832 for £2,500 and built Dundurn Castle there, a 72-room house completed around 1835. In December 1837 he led loyalist forces against the rebels at Montgomery's Tavern near Toronto, and on his orders the American steamboat Caroline was destroyed on December 29, 1837. He later served as premier of the Province of Canada from 1854 and died at Hamilton in 1862.
1846 – 1909
Hamilton becomes a city, a railway hub and a centre of manufacturing, labour organizing and early telephone service.
An act of the Province of Canada made Hamilton a city on June 9, 1846, when its population was 6,832. The same year Robert Smiley started the Hamilton Spectator newspaper, and in 1847 Canada Life, the country's first life insurance company, was founded in the city.
The Great Western Railway, which Allan MacNab had served as president in the 1840s, began operating in 1854 and became Hamilton's first working railway. Railways helped turn Hamilton into an industrial city in the decades that followed.
At about 6:15 p.m., a Great Western Railway train carrying about 90 passengers broke through the bridge over the Desjardins Canal and fell about 18 metres onto the ice below. Fifty-nine people died, making it one of the worst railway accidents in Canadian history. Sources give the death toll as 57 or 59.
In 1872 Hamilton was a centre of the Nine Hour Movement, a campaign by workers to cut the working day from 10 hours or more to nine. Hamilton workers were among the movement's most active supporters.
The Hamilton Street Railway was founded on March 29, 1873, and its first horse-drawn streetcars ran in May 1874. Electric streetcars replaced the horses on June 29, 1892. Streetcar service ended on April 5, 1951, when buses took over.
Two years after Alexander Graham Bell's first long-distance telephone experiments nearby, Hamilton opened what local histories describe as the first telephone exchange in the British Empire in 1878. In 1879 the city also gained a paid fire department and an early commercial long-distance telephone line.
The first Women's Institute was founded in 1897 in Saltfleet Township, at Stoney Creek, now part of Hamilton. It was created to support the education of rural women.
Hamilton runner Billy Sherring won the marathon at the 1906 Intercalated Games in Athens. The city's Around the Bay Road Race had been running since 1894. The same year, transit workers of the Amalgamated Transit Union struck against the Hamilton Street Railway.
1910 – 2000
Stelco and Dofasco make Hamilton the heart of Canadian steelmaking, while its soldiers, athletes and university shape the city.
The Steel Company of Canada (Stelco) was created by a merger of several smaller firms on June 8, 1910, and the Dominion Steel Casting Company, later Dofasco, followed in 1912. Their mills on the bay made Hamilton the centre of the Canadian steel industry and earned it the nickname Steeltown. The city's population passed 100,000 by 1914.
At the end of the 1924–25 season, the Hamilton Tigers' players demanded $200 each for six extra games added to the schedule and refused to play in the playoffs without it. NHL president Frank Calder suspended and fined them and declared Montreal the league champion. The franchise was dissolved, and its players went to the new New York Americans.
McMaster University moved to Hamilton in 1930. The same year the city hosted the first British Empire Games, the event now known as the Commonwealth Games.
The Hamilton Birth Control League, led by Mary Elizabeth Hawkins, opened what is widely regarded as Canada's first birth control clinic on March 3, 1932. At the time the Criminal Code prohibited selling, advertising or distributing contraceptives unless it could be shown to serve the public good. Dr. Elizabeth Bagshaw became its medical director and held the post for more than 30 years.
The Royal Hamilton Light Infantry was one of the Canadian units in the Allied raid on Dieppe, France, in 1942. The regiment suffered such heavy losses that it was effectively wiped out as a fighting unit.
In 1946 Stelco workers went on strike. The strike was the founding struggle of Local 1005 of the United Steelworkers of America.
The Hamilton Tiger-Cats football club was established in 1950 and traces its roots to the Hamilton Foot Ball Club of 1869. The team has won the Grey Cup eight times as the Tiger-Cats.
John Christie Holland was named Hamilton's Citizen of the Year in 1953, the first African Canadian to receive the honour.
Ellen Fairclough, MP for Hamilton West since a 1950 by-election, was named Secretary of State by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, making her Canada's first female federal cabinet minister. As immigration minister she introduced regulations in 1962 that removed most racial discrimination from Canada's immigration rules.
Hamilton lawyer Lincoln Alexander won Hamilton West in the 1968 federal election, becoming the first Black member of the House of Commons. He served as federal Minister of Labour in 1979–80 and as Lieutenant Governor of Ontario from 1985 to 1991, and died in Hamilton in 2012.
2001 – today
A merged city of more than 500,000 people faces the end of integrated steelmaking at Stelco, environmental failures and new growth.
Under Ontario's Fewer Municipal Politicians Act, 1999, the Regional Municipality of Hamilton–Wentworth and its local municipalities were merged into a single City of Hamilton. Hamilton joined with Ancaster, Dundas, Flamborough, Glanbrook and Stoney Creek, more than doubling its population to about 490,000.
After decades of debate and extensive delays, the Red Hill Valley Parkway opened through the Red Hill Creek valley on November 17, 2007, linking the Lincoln Alexander Parkway on the Mountain with the QEW.
U.S. Steel bought Stelco in 2007, closing the deal on October 31. It idled the Hamilton mills in 2010 and permanently shut iron and steelmaking at Hamilton Works on December 31, 2013. Between 2003 and 2013, manufacturing's share of employment in Hamilton fell sharply.
It was revealed that as much as 24 billion litres of untreated wastewater had leaked into Chedoke Creek and the Cootes Paradise marsh since at least 2014.
Ontario had promised in 2015 to fund a $1-billion light-rail line across the lower city. On December 16, 2019, the provincial government cancelled the project, citing an estimate of $5.5 billion in total costs, after spending about $184 million, including buying about 60 properties along the route.
The 2021 Census counted 569,353 people in the City of Hamilton and 785,184 in the census metropolitan area, making it one of the largest cities in Ontario.
The federal and Ontario governments agreed to split the cost of a 14-kilometre, 17-stop light-rail line from McMaster University to Eastgate at Centennial Park, with total funding of about $3.4 billion. Utility work began in 2024, and on April 30, 2026, Ontario awarded the main civil works contract.
Hamilton hosted the 108th Grey Cup at Tim Hortons Field. The Tiger-Cats lost 33–25 in overtime to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.
After Stelco emerged from creditor protection and returned to the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2017, the American steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs announced in July 2024 that it would buy the company for about US$2.5 billion. The purchase was completed later that year.
About this timeline
Hamilton grew at the western tip of Lake Ontario, where some of Ontario's earliest corn farmers lived around 500 CE, in lands later home to the Chonnonton (Neutral) people and later used by the Haudenosaunee and the Mississaugas, from whom the Crown bought the area in the Between the Lakes Purchase. Laid out by George Hamilton after the War of 1812, it became a railway and manufacturing city and, for much of the 20th century, the centre of Canada's steel industry. Since amalgamation in 2001 it has been a city of more than half a million people adapting to the decline of heavy industry.
FAQ
George Hamilton laid out the town site in 1815, and Hamilton became a city on June 9, 1846. Indigenous peoples, including the Chonnonton (Neutral), Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas, lived in the area long before.
It is named after George Hamilton, the merchant and politician who bought land from James Durand after the War of 1812 and laid out the town.
Stelco (formed in 1910) and Dofasco (1912) built large steel mills on Hamilton Harbour, making the city the centre of Canada's steel industry for most of the 20th century.
Hamilton is within lands covered by the Between the Lakes Purchase (Treaty 3) with the Mississaugas of the Credit. The area was earlier home to the Chonnonton (Neutral) people and used by the Haudenosaunee.
On January 1, 2001, when Hamilton merged with Ancaster, Dundas, Flamborough, Glanbrook and Stoney Creek under provincial legislation.
Written from the sources linked on each moment: the Canadian Encyclopedia, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Parks Canada, Library and Archives Canada, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, provincial and city archives, and others. Where governments acted wrongly, we say so and note whether it has been officially acknowledged, is established by the record, or is disputed. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will fix it.
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