The construction of Colonization Roads in eastern Canada during the 1800s began, very broadly, from a slow but deliberate push for a liberal mode of governmentality in support of social and political engineering (i.e. the creation of ‘responsible political subjects’ 1 ) and in opposition to American influence in terms of military threat and outmigration, primarily in Quebec. This photographic study is of a section of Monck Road, one of a constellation of routes planned and built in the 1860s and 1870s in central and eastern Ontario to encourage new settlement. This network of roads speaks to an ‘infrastructural colonisation’; tnew ways to demarcate, categorise, and disperse the population, to create a population of 'good citizen' participants — the roads supported this social process and are a reflection of it, in their materiality. These roads gave access to Crown Land, dividing it for settlement, completing another step towards the ultimate dissolution of common Indigenous lands. Over time, Colonization Roads of Ontario continued to demonstrate, and to be an active field for, the ongoing processes of colonization through reworked and shifting needs relocating, some disappearing into the bush, and many losing their intended infrastructural value. As one of the oldest roads north of Toronto, Monck Road, named after the first Governor General of Canada, Sir Charles Stanley Monck, was a military route between the Ottawa Valley and the Upper Great Lakes, a route never actually used for military purposes. Surveyed in the mid-1860s and finished by 1873, it originally ran between Bancroft, where it connected with the Hastings and Mississippi Roads, and Lake Couchiching near Orillia. Most of the land Monck Road opened up to new settlement was not suitable for farming, something that applies to the vast majority of the colonisation roads in this particular network, instead settlers fished, hunted and trapped. Later, the road’s primary function as a connection between towns and regions was supplanted by roads that supported faster travel with motor vehicles. What is there now? A loose inventory of the stretch of road photographed for this project reveals a landscape defined by a few old homesteads, drives that veer and dissolve into the bush, the odd small lake, some well-kempt properties assuredly carved from the topography, and trees that rise to hug the meandering road. It is missing many of the obvious landscape symbols of the area, boat-able lakes dotted with cottages, recreational trails and the service-oriented topographical fabric of the cross-roads of Bancroft. While the Monck Road is undoubtedly part of a network of dispossession, its history and presence, its thereness , is superseded by the marks of commonplace function, typical of rural routes found almost anywhere. there locating Monck Road christian stewart
Colonisation roads of the backwoods of Ontario 2 , noting the location of the Monck Road, on a Google Earth aerial
The section of the Monck Road on that was photographed for this study. The highlight shows the meandering unchanged alignment of the road connecting Bancroft with Cardiff
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on site review 41 :: infrastructure
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