Celebrate Heritage Week
In honour of Heritage Week, we revisit the historic roots of the Coves.
The Coves area is part of the traditional territories inhabited by First Nations (Iroquois and Chippewa) peoples. A large Chippewa agricultural area was once found on the north bank of the Thames River just to the east of the Coves Railway Bridge. That cultivated area once covered an estimated 12 - 16 hectares (30 - 40 acres). Those fields were still in use in the early 1900's - though by whom in the later years is not clear. Excavated sites in the Coves area have revealed First Nations artifacts from that long ago era, such as the clay smoking pipe and projectile tip seen in the photo below.
European contact was first made by John Graves Simcoe (Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada) in his excursion up the Thames River which reached the forks on March 2, 1793.
The first written description of the Coves was made on that day in the diary of Major Littlehale, a member of his party:
We struck the Thames at one end of a low flat island enveloped with shrubs and trees; the rapidity and strength of the current were such as to have formed a channel through the mainland, being a peninsula, and to have formed the island. We walked over a rich meadow, and at its extremity came to the forks of the river. The Governor wished to examine this situation and its environs; and we have therefore remained here all day. He judged it to be a situation eminently calculated for the metropolis of all Canada.
The following sketch from a few years later illustrates the formation of the Coves. During a period of strong flow, the river forged a straighter path, abandoning the former meander it had followed. The meander was then slowly cut-off or "avulsed" as sediment built up becoming an oxbow channel and later an oxbow lake. The formation of oxbow lakes through the process of avulsion is seen similarly along other river systems. It is estimated that the meander of the Thames River avulsed in the late 1780s. The oxbow has evolved over the past 225 years into the three Coves ponds present today.
